From a Trans-Atlantic Nomad

After the huge success of the Minor League baseball event Drew took me to his church youth group’s pool party. This was on Saturday 23rd August (quite a wee while ago). It was fun, we had pizza and played pool games etc. Then we took it easy back at Drew’s had a couple of drams and we watched the whole first series of the Office American style.

On Sunday Drew was preaching in an alternative service at his church and I got involved playing some guitar which was all fine and dandy-o. Drew dropped me in Richmond and I jumped on board my willing travel companion Mr Greyhound to head to Philladelphia.

I wasn’t actually staying in Philadelphia but just outside it with the lovely Rosenau family, Ron Ida and Josh. Once again the kind hospitality I received was fantastic and greatly appreciated.On my first day there Ron (the pappa of the clan) did a big ol’ tour of Phillie which included Phillie cheesesteaks and me taking shameless photos on the Rocky steps. The most controversial part of the day was liberty bell and independence hall.

First was the mildly exaggerated claim that the Liberty bell is the “world’s symbol of liberty” (photo link at the bottom). I think there is sometimes a notion here that what is really important here must be important to the rest of the world. I mean I always thought Braveheart was the worlds symbol for liberty.

After the liberty bell Ron and I went on the tour of independance hall after which Ron proclaimed, “that was embarrasing”. It was really bad because of the guide. His name was Ed Welch and he was an ex-military man which was obvious before he mentioned it. He started the tour by kicking out a mother and her toddler because the child was making too much noise so that he couldn’t think. The child wasn’t even crying or anything just being a toddler. Ed’s way of interacting with the tour was to pick one person out and fire a question at them.

Mostly they were historical, like what year did… but my two favourites where when he asked one kid who the most important man in the world was. The kid looked terrified and didn’t answer and when good ol’ Ed said George Washington I giggled to myself a little bit.

My other favourite of Ed’s questions was when he asked another kid what state he was from, again the kid looked terrified (we were in a large group of about maybe 60 pepole). When the kid’s friend replied he’s from France I laughed out loud.

The final and most gauling of Major Welch’s statements was when he asked who the Americans were fighting in the Revolutionary war. As a prompt he said come on folks it’s an island….. England. It was quite the tour.

The following day Josh (ron and ida’s son) and I went to visit the church that Ron is the pastor of and headed into Philladelphia. We went to the southside which was pretty neat. We went to this really cool house and garden which has been entirely decorated in Mosaic. Then we went off for some lunch at this really big market place and ended up having a couple of beers with some old school Phillie men in an Irish pub. They were extraordinarily opinionated know it alls which I found thoroughly entertaining. I think Josh might have been mildly appalled, I probably should have been too.

That night we went to see a great brass band in Camden New Jersey which was a lot of fun. We almost wound up at a Cheap trick concert by accident which would have been majorly different.

All in all I had some good clean fun in Phillie and although some Americans, and even Philadelphians give it a bad press I kinda liked it.

I next moved on to visit a fellow that a few of you Iona Community types should remember called Drew Willson. Drew has recently become the associate pastor in the Highland United Methodist Church in Colonial Heights and it’s no surprise to find out that he is very well liked there.

Drew collected me from the station in Petersburg and we went off for some lunch when this huge motorcade pulled out in front of us. Every turn we took it took the same one before us and when we got to the place we were going it was surrounded by secret service agents. It turned out that Barack Obama was going for lunch there and we had to wait. I started to think that maybe he was following me and was considering me as his VP (he opted for Joe Biden instead). Obama finished his lunch, a cheeseburger I believe, and did the whole waving and smiling thing whilst the secret service guys were eyeballing everyone from behind shaded eyes primed and ready to take a bullet should the situation arise.  Our agent (by that I mean the agent dealing with our section of what was now a thronging crowd) was firm but efficient and once Obama had left I shook his hand and told him he did a good job. In fact he was more relaxed than most of the park rangers I have met here, I think the uniform makes em get all jumped up about their self-importance. Anyway, Drew and I ate lunch after the entourage left and went back to his appartment.

That evening we played some guitar together, Drew played and sang harmonies to my tunes whilst I sat and listened to his. He is an extraordinarily talented musician and it is a pleasure to play with him. I was reminded of us busking in Glasgow in the rain for a few hours and making a measly amount but having fun nonetheless.

The following evening we indulged in a true American past-time, minor league baseball. The Norfolk Tides played in a marginally less than scintillating game and lost 5-4. We did however get great seats behind homeplate for a bargainous $1.50 each and there is much more to get excited about at the baseball than just the game.

As we were going for the all-American experience we drank budweiser from a plastic cup, and ate peanuts and crackerjacks. Crackerjacks I found out are just toffee coated peanuts and popcorn. I bought my peanuts and crackerjacks purely because there is a song that everyone sings at every baseball game during the seventh inning stretch which heralds the delight of these things. I was very excited about this song and practiced the words before going, Drew and I sang boldly and courageously which gained us much respect (I think) from those in the seats next to us.

The most exciting part of the game was eating a corn dog. For those of you that don’t know what a corn dog is I shall explain henceforth. I liken eating corn dog to visiting Las Vegas. You’ve got to do it once, you know it’s not good for you and you should never, ever do it again. A corn dog consists of a standard plain old hot dog, surrounded by sweet conrbread and then deep fried. You get it on a stick and it tastes of a bizarre sweet and salty greasiness that I have never before encountered. Whilst eating it I was struck by this new sensation of being both disgusted and delighted all at the same time.

After the game we encountered that other American sporting ritual commonly known as waiting for ages to get out of the parking lot.

I have to dash but there shall be more frolics from the south coming soon.

On 19th of August I went to visit a friend in Raleigh called Allison. We were both on the Youth Festival on Iona in 2002 and it was really great to see her again. She is from upstate New York but has just started a doctorate there in Virginia in Industrial Organisational Psychology. A very clever girl.

Anyhoo in Raleigh we met up with some of her friends and went to a bar/grill and to my delight they had Belhaven Best and I nursed a pint of it and reminisced of glens and rain and all other things Scottish. The following day I, left to my own devices, found my way onto a Segway tour of Raleigh. For those of you that don’t know a Segway is one of those funny two-wheeled space-age things that George Bush fell off. I was very excited. I didn’t really take in all that much of the tour as I was trying to make the thing go as fast as it could without getting in trouble with the tour guide. I got it up to a whopping 9.6mph and managed to avoid the wrath of Toby the tour guide. A double success I think.

Whilst on the tour a section of downtown Raleigh was closed off and it turned out it was because Barack Obama was in town to speak at a town hall. Despite not having ticket’s Allison and I  tried to see if we could wing it and get in. We got there and I put on my finest, ‘dear sir… all the way from Scotland… ever so pleased if we could get in… would make this the most fantastic trip ever, sort of spiel. He was buying it when the nasty Fire Marshall came out and shut the door because the room was at capacity.

Anyway they brought out a loudspeaker and we listened intently and I got very excited everytime a secret service agent came into view.

The following day I went to the North Carolina state history museum in which they had a huge collection of duck decoy’s. The display had the rather hammy title, Art Ducko. Apparently shooting bird’s there is a big deal, and it would seem crap patter is too. It was a spot on the bizzare side I have to admit.

Then I went onto the North Carolina at War display which I found all a bit distressing by the end. I noticed that the US has been in a war pretty much every 30 years since it’s inception. Next up there was a piece on the bombardier Thomas Ferebee who, along with his team dropped the first atomic weaponon Hiroshima. Interestingly a friend of mine spoke of the military alternative, a land invasion of Japan using a million allied troops, and how the projected fatalities and casualties was estimated to be higher than using the a-bomb.

All this military talk makes me think of how as a 17 year old I applied to join the Royal Navy. I was accepted but they offered me a contract amounting to 29 years with two earlier exit options. Thankfully I baulked at the length of the contract and turned down the offer. My life would have been drastically, almost unimaginably different had I joined.

Moving on from all that on my last night in Raleigh I played at an open mic which was mainly a blues jam sort of evening. I played some completely unbluesy songs of mine and no one really appeared to listen much.

I left Memphis and to be honest I was ready to leave, I was getting a bit sick of hostelling and so was looking forward to staying in a family home. I stayed in Decatur Georgia with an Iona Community associate called Horace Holden. He and his family were extraordinarily hospitable. I arrived late on the 12th of August and Horace kindly collected me from the Greyhound station to begin a week packed with a variety of events.

I stayed in his family home just one night as Horace had arranged for me to spend a couple of days volunteering at a place called the open door communtiy. The open door community is based in a big old house in Atlanta that is home to a community of volunteers and staff who work locally with disadvantaged people.  A snippet from their website reads, “we seek to dismantle racism, sexism and heterosexism, abolish the death penalty, and create the Beloved Community on Earth through a loving relationship with some of the most neglected and outcast of God’s children: the homeless and our sisters and brothers who are in prison.” http://www.opendoorcommunity.org/

On my first night there was a medical and foot clinic for local homeless people. Some medical students from the nearby Emory University volunteered and I think maybe a fully qualified doctor was present too. I was put to task in the foot clinic. My role was to sterilise all of the utensils, and to clean and refill the foot-spa tubs ready for the next person. The young volunteers working on our friends feet did a great job and there were lots of banter flying around the room. Unsurprisingly everyone using the foot clinic was in high spirits. After a couple of hours of scrubbing and honestly feeling slightly relieved that I wasn’t let loose on some poor fellows I zonked out for the night.

The following day I attended a Greek class at Columbia Seminary with a couple of students who volunteered at the open door and in the evening I helped prepare the evening meal which basically involved a lot of chopping.  After seeing such a great deal of poverty and homelessness here in the U.S. I was really grateful to have the opportunity to contribute at the open door even if it was only for a short time.

Horace took me to Emory to see the University there and it turns out he is a bit of a legend there. Each of the sports coaches we walked past knew him, I found out that he is in the sports hall of fame there, a fact he only admitted after I cajoled him a wee bit. After that Horace took me up to his farm in the Wesser area of North Carolina near the Smoky Mountains. Horace, his wife Jody and I drove up and we met some of their friends Bill, and his two children Nolan (18) and Caitlin (20), and also Bill’s partner Mary and her friend.

On Saturday 16th August we went paddling on the Nantahala river in a variety of different vessels where there is a good bit of whitewater. The outdoor centre there was actually founded by Horace in the early 1970’s and so he is a bit of a legend round there as well (he even has a bridge named after him which I thought was pretty cool). After the paddling we off to a nearby wee town, the name of which escapes me, had a wonderfull family style soouther meal and watched some fantastic bluegrass musicians led by a fellow called Wayne Henderson. The fellow Mr Henderson was a fantastic guitarist and a great story teller, he told lots of funny stories about mountain life which I shant attempt to retell here but he had the knack. He makes guitars and was letting people have a look during the interval and I got chatting to him, he mentioned me in a wee story about kilts that he told which was kinda fun.

On Sunday Horace and I drove up to Asheville to meet a lovely couple called Mason and Prue Wilson whom are also Iona Communty associates. We had a spot of lunch together and then I was kindly hosted by Mason and Prue which was very kind of them. Horace left to head beack to Wesser and I was sad to see him go. He is one the kindest, most generous people I have met and I am grateful for the time I got to spend with him, his friends and family. The following morning I headed for my trusty bastion of budget travel, the old Greyhound, to move on to Raleigh.

I completely forgot to talk about the Civil Rights museum in Memphis.  The museum is located in what used to be the Lorraine motel, the place where Martin Luther King was assassinated. The museum was really well presented with lots of interactive stuff like sitting on an old bus and being asked to move by the driver. It was especially moving at the point when you get to see the room Martin Luther King was using the night he was shot, which his been basically left unchanged since that night. They also have a museum across the road showing the sniper’s nest from where James Earl Ray fired. There are tons of conspiracy theories of course.

After the museum outside I noticed an african-american woman protesting against the museum. I went and chatted to her and her problem was that the Memphis state government owned the museum, have turned it purely into a tourist attraction and make money out of it. She thinks that the museum should be used to ‘further the dream’. I think she has a point. After that I was pleased to read that in Birmingham Alabama, and in Atlanta Georgia the venue’s important to Dr King were owned by the King family. I heard that the King family are in a great deal of conflict over who gets what with regard to the Dr King’s estate. It really is a sad state of affairs.

The thing I find most perplexing is that the 60’s civil rights movement is hailed as a wonderful time of change and progress. Civil rights leaders and prominent figures are now celebrated. There are statues, museums, awards for all these people. It is spoken of like they won the battle against racism and segregation. Most neighbourhoods I have been in have one racial majority, the vast majority of homeless people I’ve met or seen have been african-american, the american army has platoons divided on the basis of race, the amount of young african-american men in jail is disproportionately higher than those of other races. Even the election news, who’s got the white vote, the black vote, the hispanic vote. My impressions are of a hugely divided culture here, formal equality there may be but social equality there certainly is not.

I was very much looking forward to Memphis and it turned out to be a bit disappointing. It was still quite fun but very frustrating.

I got there on August 9th for Elvis week which is the annual commemoration of the death of Elvis. Well after 31 years of it it seems to have gotten a bit flat. I went to the opening night party on Beale street with a guy from the hostel called Justin and the place was completely empty. We’d already paid $20 for our tickets so we hung around and got chatting to a couple of very pleasant southern belle’s. They were regulars and managed to convince the barman to give us a free drink because of the ticket price. Then when the head chef came over and started chatting to us he felt bad and gave us a big plate of food each as the kitchen was super quiet. The restaurant there was quite and the food was excellent. The pork was worth the $20 alone so we left happy.

Aside from that the buses in Memphis were awful. From the hostel there was one bus an hour during the day and they stopped at about 6.30pm. This meant I had to spend quite a fair old chunk on taxi’s during my stay there.

I played a song-writers open mic in a coffee shop there which was fun, the owner asked if I would be around next weekend to play a longer set. It was nice to be asked but again disappointing to miss out on.

I went the annual music and movies night on the lawn at Graceland on my final night there. That was good. The band playing Elvis covers were excellent and we watched jailhouse rock afterwards. Apparently that is one of the better Elvis movies, I liked it but it makes me wonder what the less good ones are like. He was no actor! It is pretty cool though that the first time I saw an Elvis movie was on the lawn at Graceland.

As final note from Memphis the taxi driver that was dropping me at the Greyhound station was a really loud woman. She barked down her cell phone for most of the drive then she asked me where I was from. When I replied Scotland I thought that she didn’t seem too certain about where or what Scotland was. My fears were confirmed when she asked me if I was getting the Greyhound to Scotland.

The Hurricane and Greyhound stories are interwoven so I’ll start with them.

The Greyhound from Austin to New Orleans was going swimmingly. I had Fred the nicest bus driver ever (and I told him so at the end of the Austin-Houston leg) who’s bus had tv’s and we all rode merrily along watching Kung-Fu Hustle 2. Then a hurricane warning left me stranded in Houston at 1am. I decided to find a room and ended up in a rather damp smelly motel room for the night. That was fine as one of my wants for this trip was to spend the night in a dingy roadside motel for the evening.

The Hurricane turned out to be only a tropical storm so the following morning the bus just drove on through it. It was kinda cool, the traffic lights were all swinging on the wires like it happens on the news.

So got to New Orleans on Tueaday 5th August and it was great with tons of live music. I watched a local 12 piece brass band playing jazz/dixie/funk on the first night and they were amazing. I bought a couple of their cd’s they were that good. I watched a lot of good music in my four days in New Orleans and on the last day I was in this really cool record store called Peaches records buying a cd of the brass band. I had been playing my guitar in a park in the french quarter so I had it on my back when I was in the store and after a while of chatting to the owner she asked me if I would come and play in the store. This was at 6pm on Friday the and I was booked on the bus to get me to Memphis at 8.15am the following morning. I was pretty disappointed but never mind.

In the middle of all this music I hit the Honey Island Swamp for some alligator spotting. It was great. I got tons of photo’s so I’ll let them do the talking but there was one really amazing fact the guide told us. He said that the sex of alligator hatchlings is determined by the temperature of the eggs in the first 21 days of incubation, below 86 degrees F will produce all females, above 93 degrees F will produce all males. He also said that the hurricane wiped out about 30% of the population of alligators in the Honey Island swamp and that since then all of the hatchlings have been female. This is because the more females that mature the quicker the population can recover as one male can impregnate many females in season. How clever!

Check out the photos

http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2202458&l=e3021&id=61006708

First of all apologies for not writing in a while. The last couple of hostels I’ve stayed in have had really poor internet facilities.

I ended up not going to San Antonio and just staying in Santa Fe for a couple of days extra. It was a good choice. Bruce took Sophie, a girl we met at the hostel, and I to Taos Indian reserve which was fine and we then went to the Rio Grande gorge and took photo’s from the bridge. As I’m not too keen on heights I didn’t stay on the bridge for too long. When we drove back the three of us went for a dip in the Rio Grande and it was amazing. It was early evening, the sun was setting, the scenery was astouonding and the company was good. It really was one of my favourite times on the trip thus far.

After leaving Santa Fe I had a mammoth greyhound bus journey to Austin, it was meant to take about 15 hours but it took about 22 hours in the end. I arrived on Saturday 3rd August. Despite being knackered a few others from the Hostel, including Sophie who it turned out also visited Austin and New Orleans, went to check out some music on 6th street in town. Austin is a big music town so we did the same again the following night and saw a couple of really good bands.

On the Sunday I got invited to go tubing on the river just south of Austin in a wee place called San Marcos. Tubing is basically sitting in a rubber ring and floating on down the river for a couple of hours. It was fun but one of the guys who drove us down was really quite aggressive and his behaviour quickly became irritating. I just bit my tongue and tried to enjoy the sunshine.

On the Monday Sophie and I went to check out the Bob Bullock Texas History Museum. We were both leaving that night and we didn’t really set aside enough time to do it properly. It did include an imax cinema show Called the Lone Star of Destiny which was pretty much a propagated movie centered around the famous ‘texas spirit’. It was entertaining nonetheless.

As a bit of a footnote I’ll write a spot about Greyhound. A huge part of my trip thus far has centred around the Greyhound buses, it has been an intriguing experience. They are extraordinarily disorganised. None of the stations I’ve been in have a departure board which means that when you are getting a connection you have to queue to ask when and where it will be leaving from. Of course everyone else with the same connection queues to get the same answer.

There is a great deal of visible poverty on the buses and surrounding most of the stations. There are lots of poor and homeless people begging, or panhandling as it is called here. Greyhound is like the default travel system for those who cannot afford to fly or get the train.

The worst part though is the, ‘restroom onboard for your convenience’, as the bus drivers say. It is basically just a big ol’ tank at the back of the bus with a toilet seat on top and a hand sanitizer. I managed to avoid using it entirely until my Santa Fe-Austin experience. Let’s just say it was not fun and that I’m glad I can stand up and use the loo.

I can think of two positives about Greyhound off the top of my head. The first is that I’m nearing the East Coast and the cities I’m planning on visiting are much closer together. The second is that watching the landscape has been incredible. The difference between the brown hills of California, the barren Nevada desert, the red mountains of New Mexico, the flat plains of Texas and the wetlands of the Louisiana delta is quite extraordinary. I can look at a map of the U.S. and think that it’s kinda cool that so many thousands of miles have passed under my seat on a Greyhound bus. I just checked the distance online and I’m at about the 4000 mile mark.

Still got a couple of thousand more to go.

Just found out via wikipedia that Greyhound was bought in September 07 by Aberdeen’s very own First Group. Who’d have thunkit.

I arrived in Santa Fe on Saturday after a 13hr overnight bus trip on which the air conditioning made it super cold and hard to sleep. Santa Fe is a great little town. It’s law here that all the buildings must be built in the Spanish adobe style which makes all the houses look great and things like petrol stations and cinemas look mildly ridiculous.

On Saturday I went into town with a couple of guys from the hostel, Bruce and Davis, and we went to see a live band at a bar called cowgirls. It was a good night, really friendly and busy and the band were really good. They were kind enough to let me sing and play during one of their breaks which was great. I got chatting to Stephen, a New York born guy of Irish descent whom invited to play a round of golf on the Sunday, having never played golf I decided against it but we had some good banter nonetheless. I’ve found some guys here to be patriotic in a tunnel visioned kind of way and it can be hard to get beyond this. He was much more open though and we chatted a lot about the U.S. and UK.

Sunday was a pretty chilled out day. There was a Spanish market in town with lots of art, cuisine and music. It was pleasant to walk about in town and then I just hung out at the hostel that evening.

On Monday I went to catch a movie with Bruce and we grabbed a spot of lunch. Here in Santa Fe there are lots of galleries, the opera and every summer they have a Chamber music festival. Bruce and I went to see a performance of some Mozart, Brahms and a contemporary composer from Puerto Rico called Roberto Sierra. It was in a converted church building in town and I thought it was great, particularly Brahms Piano quartet No 2 in A. It really was a beautiful piece.

On Tuesday Davis and I went on a road trip round round the Jemez Mountain Scenic byway. We drove a 200 mile round trip consisting of some utterly beautiful scenery (I’ve got a few pictures you can check from the link below). We went to Tent Rocks which is this rock formation created by harder rocks protecting the softer rock they are stuck in from wind and water erosion. This leads to these tipi shaped points with harder rocks sitting precariously on top. Reading back I realise that my description is somewhat sketchy but you’ll get the jist from the photo’s.

We went on into the Jemez Pueblo reserve to see the imaginatively named red rocks. These were basically big cliff and rock formations that were filled with iron and were thus red.

Later that day we went swimming in a natural rock pool called Soda Dam. It was a great way to cool off during what was a very hot drive. We went on after that to catch a beautiful sunset over a former ranch called the Valles Caldera National Preserve. I’ve got photo’s of all this, I hope they do the scenery justice.

It really has been a quite relaxed time here, I’ve been playing my guitar quite a bit out the back of the hostel and trying to finish off a song or two. I’m enjoying reading Steinbeck’s the Grapes of Wrath as well.

I’m off to San Antonio Texas next where I expect it shall be hot hot hot again, I’m getting much more aclimatised to the heat so hopefully it shouldn’t be too bad.

Check out the Photos at

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2198260&l=50df6&id=61006708

In San Diego I did some pretty touristy stuff, went to see the USS Midway which is a decomissioned aircraft carrier you can tour. It was all very American, lots of talk of honour and military prestige by the guide who were all ex-sailors. It was interesting to see what life is like on board a navy vessel.

I went for a surfing lesson which proved to be super difficult. The waves here are huge and during four hours of trying I managed to stand up on the board once for approximately 1 second. Due to my lack of an olympian-esque physique I was aching a lot the following day, bruises, sore arms and torso. Despite the war wounds it was great fun.

I stayed at for a couple of days at the hostel which was awful, the rooms were tiny and we were crammed in. The staff were grumpy and there were tons of rules, it’s only redeeming feature was that it was close to the beach which was great. Luckily Luke and Heather, two of the students I met in San Anselmo, were visiting for a couple of days and I was kindly invited to stay at Luke’s Uncle’s house in a wee place just outside San Diego called Lemon Grove. Uncle Dale’s house had barely been altered since the sixties and it was amazing, it was like living on the set of Happy Days.

Heather, Luke and I had a great time in San Diego we went to the beach the Zoo and had a night painting the town red. The beach was great, the zoo was average and painting the town red was mildly debaucherous. We went to the beach with Erin a friend of Luke and Heather’s. On the night out I wore my kilt and got some interesting remarks. A few San Diegan boys made some unsavoury comments relating to my “nice skirt” but the girls had nicer things to say which redressed the balance a bit.

Las Vegas was ridiculous. As soon as I arrived I was waiting for my bag next to the side of the bus I felt an incredible heat which I assumed was from standing too close to the bus. Once I got out front of the terminal I realised that it wasn’t the bus at all, it was 7.30pm and it was 41 degrees Centigrade. I thought I was going to melt. It turns out to be a good thing for business though as you have to stay indoors during the hours of sunlight, and you can’t have any fun indoors in Vegas unless you’re spending money.

I spent a bit too much I think. The geeky kid in me convinced me to go to the Star Trek Experience in the Las Vegas Hilton despite it costing a small fortune. It was really good fun though like most things in Vegas, fun if you’re willing to pay for it. I gambled a little in the New York New York casino and it turns out that my Black Jack skills are up there with my surfing skills. I found it all a bit nerve wracking, I only managed to relax during the shuffle breaks. I got told off by the dealer for touching my bet after the deal but I managed to avoid getting taken outside by security though so that was a success, it wound up being the only success as managed to rapidly lose $100.

That evening the hostel had organised a night in a club called the Tryst and again it was glamorous, fun and exorbitantly expensive. It had a deck out back with a huge artificial waterfall. A drink was $12 plus tip so it wound up being a quiet time in the Tryst.

After my first full day of hedonistic fun in Vegas I decided that I should leave the following day as my wallet and my body temperature could hack it no more. I’m currently in Santa Fe which is the perfect post-Vegas tonic, its cooler, cheaper and really laid back. I’ll write some about my time here in the next post.

Check out the photos by copying the links below and pasting them into your internet browser.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2194628&l=41f56&id=61006708

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2197568&l=74597&id=61006708