From Sea to Shining Sea

Four months ago we were swimming with the turtles and dolphins of the Bay Islands, in the improbably warm, luminescent turquoise waters of the Caribbean, trying with little success to escape the scorching heat and stifling humidity of Honduras. A month later it was cold and rain that we wanted to escape, with even less success, as we watched the thunderous surf of the Pacific Ocean crashing into the Western coast of Vancouver Island. In Cape Cod we'd found a pleasant balance in the elements, dipping our feet in the chilly waters of the Atlantic and soaking up the moderate warmth of a New England Summer. It made a fine place for the climax of our Great Escape, putting us perfectly in tune with the national anthem of this nation, which we've now explored from sea to shining sea.

The road trip itself started 88 days ago, in a rainy, dreary, but ever so cool Seattle. Since that day in May we've travelled a little over 10,000 miles, or 181 km per day, crossing mountain ranges and deep canyons, deserts and swamps, forests and praries. At the moment I'm left reflecting on the great contradiction of time - that it flies when you are having fun, so the more you do, the shorter the time seems to get. On the one hand, waking up in the snow in Jasper seems like a distant memory, so entirely removed from the groan of a humid New York City as to feel like another life. On the other hand I can barely believe that a trip that was even longer in the planning than the execution is already over. But over it is - continuing the theme of writing in travel time, I'm writing this one from a rather cramped and turbulent plane over the Atlantic ocean, en route to a reunion with my parents and wider family, and to a life in Paris that allows me to draw on more than the contents of a single backpack. For the final map of our journey click here

It is a much recited, though I suspect not entirely accurate, statistic that only five percent of Americans own a passport; something invariably voiced as a criticism. I would be the first person to extol the delights and virtues of international travel, but I find it easy to understand why Americans don't travel the world in the same numbers that Australians, Brits or Germans do - there is just so much to see in this country. In the aforementioned 10,000 miles we've covered only 27 of 50 states (plus two Canadian provinces). Even with the luxury of a three month trip we have had to bypass huge swathes of land and some very famous attractions - there is surely no other country where, after a three month journey, a visitor can still look forward to places like the Californian coast, Florida, Alaska and Colorado for future visits. There is so much to visit in this country, if you are American, why fly to Europe or Australia when for the cost of a flight you can hire a camper van that is a palace on wheels and explore your own backyard.

Despite the vast territory that we haven't reached, I think we've come to understand Americans a little better than when we started - to the extent that it is even possible to 'understand' a country and its people. I mentioned in a recent post how walking around New York feels familiar even to a first timer because of its dominant position in pop culture. The same, in fact, can be said of the entire country. There are so many prejudices and stereotypes associated with America that we inevitably, and almost involuntarily, spent a significant amount of our time looking to either confirm of dispel our own preconceived images of the 'Land of the Free.'

There are too many of these images to mention them all, but I've been meaning to record at least of few of those that have surprised me the most, either by the confirmation or the evidence of their errors. I'll start with an easy one - American's have crap beer. It tastes like water, it's weak, it's all mass produced by Budweiser, Miller and Coors. Interestingly, this one seems to be true for just a few parts of the country - and not those parts I would have expected. If you limit a trip to the USA to New York, Chicago and other big North Eastern cities, then you will indeed find that American beer is pretty poor - you get the choice between the big brands, and the world's standard import beers - Heineken, Corona, Stella etc. But get outside these cities, and the picture changes dramatically, as each region, and even individual towns, proudly serve their own local brews. From Seattle to Mississippi, I rarely ordered a particular type of beer. In every restaurant I would simply ask for a local beer, and the response would almost always be the same. After asking for i.d. (which they never fail to do here) the waiter would ask whether you prefer light or dark beers, and then promise to bring you his or her favorite. And it was almost always very good. In Utah, home of the teetotaling Mormons, every town and every national park had a different drop to offer.

So the beer is not as bad as we thought, but what about the food? Well, if you had a mind to, you certainly could travel through the whole country and subsist on fast food, not only from McDonalds and Burger King, but from quite a few local competitors, such as Arby's, Sonic, A&W Burger and IHOP. They all have their own variations on the theme, but fries, burgers and buns made more of sugar than flour are de riguer at all - even IHOP, which stands for International House of Pancakes - which I love for the irony of the fact that no other country in the world actually thinks of pancakes as a meal. But that would be pointless, and probably deadly. Behind the junk food each region offers its own food, and some of it is really very good. From Texas all the way to Ohio BBQ is the name of the game, with each state offering its own variations on cooking style, sauce and even the kind of meats to be used, from ribs and beef briquet in Texas to pulled pork loin in Memphis. The South does indeed enjoy a good serving of fried chicken, but we ate escargot and drank fine wine in a restaurant owned by Morgan Freeman in rural Mississippi. In Chicago the hotdog may be heart attack inducing, but it has been refined to an art form. Not to be forgotten is that classic American dish - warm apple pie, which, when made by sleepy road side diners in rural Utah or Texas, is one of the best things you'll ever eat. And this is all before you get to New York, where you could eat well for a month and never eat the same cuisine, let alone at the same restaurant. The serving sizes are indeed very generous, and the evidence of the obesity problem is very much there to see. I'll be happy not to see a french fry for a while, but overall we ate pretty well - and we capped it off in Cape Cod with some amazing New England lobster.

Given that the beer and the food are ok, why are they a bunch of gun toting, angry, religious nuts? This is the one where the public image of Americans diverges furthest from my experience of them. Unfortunately, I think the rest of the world sees a great deal of Fox News, and judges America accordingly. But outside of the idiots that pass for conservatives on that channel, and the well funded interest groups that pay for billboards deriding Darwinism on the highways, very few Americans seem to actually stay up at night worrying that their guns might be taken away from them, or that homosexuals might be allowed to marry in a state on the other side of the country. Not one person we met could have been put in that bracket, and we spent quite a lot of time talking to strangers. Most of them are far more concerned to hear your thoughts on America, and share their own stories of friends and family that have visited Australia (just about everyone seems to have a niece or daughter studying in Australia).

Having said that, American's are vastly patriotic, or at least great fans of the outward signs of patriotism. The American flag is everywhere. It is not unusual for a small town to have adorned every lamp post on main street with a flag, while any house with a front lawn generally flies the flag with pride. Car dealers in particular seem to compete to hoist the largest possible flag in their yards, and retailers are not far behind - it seems the flag is thought to help get people to open their wallets in tough times. One reason I suspect the World Cup is not as popular here as in Europe is that in Europe the success of the national side kicks off a patriotic fervor - in America that fervor is a state of being.

When we first arrived in the USA, the only thing that actually did seemed to concern Americans was the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. For the first half or so of our trip oil was gushing into the Gulf, and it seemed that no news bulletin could start with anything else. I was actually impressed to see a country's national attention span focused on one thing for so long, given that very little was actually happening. Once the oil was stopped though, America was free to turn to lighter entertainment - the greatest sporting story of the past five years. There may have been a bunch of socialists kicking a ball around in South Africa, but the real story in America was LeBron's decision day. For those who don't know, LeBron James is generally considered the best basketballer on the planet; he is one of those sports stars that is so famous over here he only needs a first name, like Tiger or Venus and Serena (though apparently he does need two capital letters). Last season his contract with Cleveland expired, leaving him free to choose a new team. Like most American sports, basketball parades itself as a team sport when in fact one outstanding individual can deliver entire championships - so fans everywhere thought LeBron would be the answer to their prayers. A national bidding war ensued as every city in the country chased LeBron. Cleveland begged him to stay, talk show hosts implored him to pick their town and just about everywhere we stayed, the local news would run an analysis of that city's chances of landing LeBron. The farce culminated in an hour long, live ESPN event, billed Decision Day, where LeBron announced he was going to Miami, for the princely sum of $130 million over 5 years. I'm not sure to what the other 59 minutes of the broadcast were devoted.

The other ever present in the USA right now is the recession. To the traveler the signs are everywhere. In small towns boarded up shop fronts are a regular sight. There are stories in the news of towns switching off their street lights because they cannot pay the electricity bills, or cutting the school week to 4 days because they can't pay the teachers. In many cases its obvious that road maintenance and simple tasks like clearing stormwater drains have been abandoned, as short rain showers leave knee deep puddles beside even deeper pot holes. Where federal money is available the opposite is the case, with many of the interstates and major highways being currently or recently resurfaced, adorned with signs advertising the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act" which is the name for Obama's controversial stimulus package. There are signs in mid sized cities offering off the plan three bedroom apartments for 80 or 90 thousand dollars, while last minute hotel websites allowed us to stay in business oriented 4 star hotels for as little as a third of their frontline price. Unquestionably, the recession is causing a national sense of gloom - mainly because, despite the hoarse screaming of both sides of politics, its pretty clear that nobody really knows what to do next. Everyone knows the deficit is out of control and needs to be cut, but they don't dare cut spending or raise taxes until the economy recovers, which it flatly refuses to do, in part because everyone is so worried about the deficit that consumer spending won't rebound. There are elections coming up in November, and, while the Democrats look like they are in for a bad day, the general feeling seems to be that any incumbent, regardless of party, is in danger of losing his/her seat in Congress - it's a reflection of the level of anger that currently pervades the American mood.

Much as I might try, I can't record everything we saw and did (in fact, only a small proportion of it), and while I'm agonizing over the appropriate way to finish this blog, it seems it might just be time to let it go and move on. I have to save a few stories to tell at the pub too, after all. So to the next steps. We are in Germany now (I couldn't finish on the plane) and in a few days Kate and I will go our separate ways (for now). I'll be off to INSEAD, just outside Paris, while Kate heads to Oxford to do her MBA as well - after a pleasant week of sailing around Croatia, of course. I suspect the adventures of an MBA student might be of slightly less interest to a lot of people than our holiday was, but I will try to keep this blog going once I get to INSEAD. INSEAD have also asked me to keep an official blog (chosen out of a huge pool of applicants, no doubt!), so if you really want to keep up with what I'm doing, or you prefer to read the sanitized, official version of my year, you can always check out www.insead.edu.

In the meantime, I am interested to know who has been reading the blog. I know some people have because I spam their email with it, but beyond that I don't really know - and if only for the sake of avoiding repeating too many of my stories when I get home, I'm interested. So if you have been reading and enjoying this blog, please, leave a comment below or drop me an email. Also - check out the latest and final photos of our trip on facebook.

Boston

Wifi on a bus is a wonderful invention. It allows me to be completing what will be one of my last blog entries of the Great Escape, Part II, Road Trip, from the bus that it taking us from Boston back to New York. A bus? I hear you say. Not only is that unamerican, but don't you have a car?

It has in fact reached that point in our journey where the car had to be sold. Our original plan was always to buy the car in Seattle and sell it on the East Coast, and hopefully in the process beat the prohibitively expensive system of one way fees that are charged on rental cars. For the plan to work out, we needed to get a decent price for the car on resale, and so we found ourselves driving around the outer suburbs of Boston, trekking from car dealer to car dealer to compare offers.

It would have been a long day anyway, but it was made longer by the fact that, after not losing anything for the entire trip, which those of you who know me will realise is an impressive effort, I had a difficult couple of days as far as keeping track of my personal possessions goes. In the space of two days I managed to leave my iphone in New York, then leave my wallet at the first car dealer, and then leave my bag containing my laptop in the car we had just sold. The wallet and the laptop have been recovered, but the phone seems to be a lost cause (on that note, if you receive any bizarre or offensive emails from me in the next few weeks, please assume they came from the person who now has unfettered access to my hotmail and facebook accounts, courtesy of my phone)

Back to the car. The first dealer we went to offered us $2000 for the car, which was less than we had hoped. The second dealer offered us $2500, then took the car for a quick drive. He returned to tell us the transmission was gone, and that he could only offer us $1500. At that point we hurried the car back to the first dealer and took the $2000. With the disappointing resale price, I'm not sure whether we beat the expense of renting a car, especially once you take into account the $900 spent fixing the radiator. But we joined the great American dream of owning a big, inefficient sedan, and had the convenience of having our own car, that could go wherever we wanted it to. Despite his poor resale value, I was pretty sad to see Yes Man go - without him, after all, the great adventure would never have been possible. For nostalgia's sake, we kept the number plates (as it was being registered in a new state, it needed new plates anyway).

Having sold the car, we had the opportunity to turn our attention to Boston itself. It is the first time in America that I have been surprised by how small something is. Given its status as the home of the world's best universities, and one of America's original and most famous cities, I was expecting a big place. Not so. The population of Boston is around 600,000, and you can easily walk the city's most famous sites, and its central business district, in under an hour.

After Philadelphia and Washington, Boston is the final stop for someone who wants to take a history of the American Revolution tour of North East America. It is a city dripping in history, as the place where the 'patriots' as they are universally called, first refused to pay British taxes, and where the first battles of the war of independence broke out. The names of the founding fathers, Sam Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, are everywhere, including on the city's most famous beer.

My final point on the American revolution: Taking the 'Freedom Trail' around Boston, which goes from one significant site of the revolution to another over a two mile loop, you get a good sense of what sparked the whole conflict, amongst other things by participating in a town meeting that re enacts events of 1775. Really, it seems it all started because a few wealthy merchants, such as John Hancock and Benjamin Franklin, didn't want to pay taxes levied on them by the British. In the aftermath there was a great deal of talk about liberty and equality of all, the pursuit of happiness and all that, but that, while it might have been a good rallying call to get people more involved, doesn't seem to have been what really kickstarted the revolution. And to judge by the state of the US deficit today, the anti-taxation principles of the revolution seem to have been amongst its most enduring.

Aside from the revolutionary stuff, Boston's other great historic claim is that it is a city of firsts. First public park in America, first subway station (though not first subway system, because by the time the second station was built New York's system was up and running), first university (Harvard), first primary school etc. This is all very impressive, but after a while it becomes obvious that, really, its all the same trick. It was one of the first cities, so much of what it built happened to be the first such thing in America. I would probably offend a few people in Boston if I pointed out that all these things were old news in Europe.

We managed to catch up with some more friends from back home, both working in the Boston office of LEK. We even crashed on the couch of one of them for the full 5 nights, thereby defraying at least some of the cost of our vehicles failed resale. If you are reading this Neil, thanks again.

A chat with Neil and Jono certainly did nothing to make me regret leaving work. Fortunately they both managed to get out of the office on Saturday night, and we went to a concert starring none other than the Bare Naked Ladies. Now, I have to admit, it has been more than one week since I looked at, or heard of, the Bare Naked Ladies, but I have to give them credit. For a quartet of clearly fast ageing rockers, they still put on a pretty good show. Someone near the front even through some underwear at them.

My final observation about Boston has to be the accent. Accents in America have changed with the regions, but never so clearly as in Boston, where they have a striking way of saying any word with an 'ar' sound in it, dropping the r and dragging out the a with a twang that somewhere between 'eh' and 'aw'. It's a little like a New Zealand accent in that it can sound normal for a couple of sentences, but then a give away word like car comes up and the secret is out. They are very proud of their accents in Boston, and their favourite saying is that a Bostonian will 'Pahk the cah in Hahved yahd'. Although a tour guide informed me that no one actually does this anymore, because you get a ticket.

We also visited Cape Cod before coming back to New York - that will get covered off in what will probably be the final post of this this trip. Once again, check back soon.

I heart NY

"New York New York it's a helluva town". So goes the song, and its hard to argue with something so catchy. We spent five days in the Big Apple and didn't even get close to seeing the whole town. In fact, this was my second visit, and even adding the sights of the seven days I spent there last time, I still don't feel I can say I've ticked that box.

One of the most entertaining things about walking around New York is that, even though you've never been in this particular neighbourhood before, its all so familiar. We are all so used to seeing New York on television and in movies that walking around it feels like walking around a town you've lived in for years. There are the obvious sights, like Times Square, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, and then the less obvious, but in some ways equally famous sights. A few blocks from our hotel was a diner called Tom's restaurant - familiar to anyone who has seen an episode of Seinfeld. Continuing the Seinfeld theme I also managed to get a bowl of soup from the stand that inspired the famous Soup Nazi episode. It was excellent soup, and there is indeed a sign above the counter demanding that patrons have their money and order ready before they get to the counter, and immediately move the the extreme (which is underlined and in capitals) left after placing their order. There are even footprints painted on the pavement to show you where to go.

Then there is also just the familiar feel of the buildings and streets. Rows and rows of terrace houses with steps up to the front door, the green stairs and railing leading down to the subway stations, and of course, the iconic yellow taxis. Arriving in New York is the opposite of culture shock - instead of being overwhelmed by how different the place is, it all feels shockingly familiar - like traveller's deja vu.

There is one facet of New York life that I wasn't quite familiar with - lining up. The inevitable result of a city that is both a major tourist attraction and immensely densely populated is that just about any activity will be preceded by a long wait. Want to see the Statue of Liberty - join the 60 minute queue to get through security. Want to get tickets to a show, any show at all - there is a nice line on Times Square that stretches a few blocks that might act as an excellent curtain raiser. Want to have dinner on the lower east side - that table will be ready for you at at 11pm, sir, so perhaps you'd like to have a 2 hour drink first.

One thing I will say about New York is that, due to the scale and diversity of the place, it really helps to have someone local to show you around. Luckily we were able to tap into a network of friends from home that have succumbed to the lure of the city in recent years. Rico, who's been in New York studying law at Columbia for the past year, showed us some great bars and restaurants, and even took us over to Brooklyn for some drinks. Tessa, who's working in the New York office of our former employer, took us to a restaurant on the Lower East Side that served only variations on meatballs. It took a two hour wait to get a table, but was well worth it.

Getting shown around by the locals was great, but we did have to play the part of tourists too. There are actually families that come to New York and dress the whole clan in those "I love NY" t-shirts, and that just seemed like an excellent idea. So we started our trip to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island by purchasing some high quality $5 t-shirts. Kate wasn't willing to wear them all day, so in the end we just put them on for the photos, but even that got us some disdainful looks from the locals (and other tourists for that matter).

While Manhattan was great, one of the more memorable experiences of the trip came from a trip to the Bronx. Back in Sydney Rico and I both like to play a bit of golf, and we couldn't pass up the chance to renew a long standing rivalry on a new continent - and as it turns out you can get to an affordable golf course in the Bronx with a $30 taxi ride from the Upper West Side.

I noticed that my sister-in-law was recently on Facebook wondering why all the taxi drivers in Sydney are crazy. I have no answer to this question, but I can report that New York cab drivers are no different. When we jumped in the taxi he seemed to indicate that he knew where we were going. As it turned out however his knowledge went only as far as knowing how to get to the Bronx. From there the plan was apparently to drive around in circles until the golf course magically appeared. When it became apparent that this plan was not working, he decided to simply pull over the taxi and ask people. That would be ok, except for the fact that, whatever language he did speak, it was not English, and his real plan was to pull over, yell at someone, and then indicate to me that a I should ask the person for directions.

Now, I have to admit that I don't like asking for directions at the best of times, but leaning out of the window of a taxi, in my best Tommy Hilfiger polo shirt, and asking a black guy with no teeth, who is dragging a garbage bag full of empty bottles behind him, where I might find the local country club does was a new level of uncomfortable. Unsurprisingly, this tactic did not yield instant success. Apparently not many of the people sitting idly by the street in the Bronx at 11 am on a Tuesday are avid users of the Split Rock Golf Club.

A regular New Yorker might have spotted a flaw in this story by now. You see, NY taxis are in fact equipped with a GPS system in the back seat (I was in the front - Rico and Pete, another friend from Australia, were in the back). Despite having been in New York for a year, this fact apparently escaped Rico until we'd stooped to stopping other taxis to ask them for directions. For that reason alone I think his subsequent victory on the golf course is tainted.

On the return we had a very different, but similarly memorable taxi driver - but I think one story about cab drivers per blog entry is enough.

I did eventually make it back to Manhattan, and from there, a few days later, on to Boston. Our trip is winding down fast now, so I'll try and get Boston posted ASAP - check back soon.

History Lessons and chicken

There has been a lot happening in the last week or so here - and, inevitably, the blog has suffered as a result. It is like an (un)virtuous circle - the more you do, the less time you have to blog, but the more you have to write about, and so the further you fall behind.

Washington and Philadelphia are but distant memories now, but I need to cover them off; if only for my own piece of mind. The thought of missing cities out entirely keeps me up at night. As a reader though, you might benefit from my slacking, because the number of irrelevant details that I can remember shrinks with each passing day, hopefully making for a more concise, but still entertaining blog.

We couldn't do the USA without visiting the nation's Capital, Washington, D.C., a city that seems to be almost entirely composed of monuments, museums and municipal buildings. We had two days in Washington, and divided them up in what I would guess to be the same way as almost every other tourist that visits this city. One day for the Smithsonians, one day for the monuments and famous buildings.

Before we had even started the tourist itinerary we realized that we were being joined in Washington by some sort of national boy scout gathering. Everywhere we looked were groups of 10 year old boys wearing khaki uniforms with badges and designations like 'Wisconsin 5th division', all being followed around by exhausted looking parents.

The Smithsonian is not one museum but rather a whole suburb of them. You can choose between modern and classical art, air and space, natural history, American history, sculpture and more. Kate's tastes in museums - planes, spaceships and dinosaurs - coincides just about with that of every 10 year old boy, so we shared our visit to these museums with what seemed to be half the prepubescent population of the United States. The other half apparently weren't allowed to choose their museum, and were waiting for us in the American History Museum.

There are some great exhibitions - the Wright Brothers plane is a favourite, while the space exhibit kept me entertained with mind boggling questions about the age of the universe, and the inevitable question of what there was before that. American History has an entire floor devoted to America's wars, which can't help but give the impression that they really don't mind a scrap over here, but don't spend an excessive amount of time contemplating the rights and wrongs of their decisions in retrospect - a great deal more floor space was devoted to the repressive English of the 1770s than the unfortunate South East Asians of the 1970s. The exhibitions on slavery and civil rights were much better, with a great mix of information and remembrance.

To see the monuments the next day we took a bike tour - a wise decision, because, as quickly become clear, there is an astonishing amount of space in Washington devoted to monuments and memorials. The centrepiece is the Washington Monument, the giant obelisk we've all seen on TV a thousand times. The National Mall stretches for out for a mile either side of the Washington, with the Capitol at one end and the Lincoln Memorial at the other. Forming a cross with these points are the White House and the Jefferson Memorial, which was placed so that it is precisely in view from the White House, so that the President may look out of his window and draw inspiration from the third President, and the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence. Franklin Roosevelt has also qualified for a monument, sitting just off the National Mall, in view of Lincoln.

Then there are the War Memorials - one for each foreign war the USA has been involved in. The Korean War memorial contains 19 larger than life steel soldiers, prowling through scrubs and bushes. When reflected in the adjoining wall there are 38 figures, representing the 38th parallel, where the border was eventually drawn. Vietnam takes a subtler approach, with the names of all 58 000 soldiers killed in the war inscribed in reflective granite blocks; reflective so that you can see yourself amongst the casualties. An interesting sight here is the people who come with a pencil and a piece of paper and take a rubbing image of a name they find on the memorial.

The other interesting fact we learned about the Vietnam memorial was that it was designed by a 21 year old architecture student, who won a national contest. The conditions of the contest said that the design could not make any political statement about the war. It is a simple wall, with the dead listed in chronological order, starting in the middle, going out to the right, then continuing on the far left of the wall back to the middle, so the last casualty is just before the first one. It was only after it was built that someone noticed that it looked suspiciously like there were 58 000 names on the board leading you right back to where you started.

In case we hadn't had enough history (can you ever have enough history? Kate certainly thinks so), we headed to Philadelphia next, where quite a lot of important stuff happened in the 1770s. Philadelphia was briefly the capital of the United States, and it was here that the Declaration of Independence was written and proclaimed, and the constitution was framed. The old part of the city, where the founding fathers met and worked, makes up the Independence National Park, which was worth a visit too.

Philadelphia was, in a sense, where it all went wrong for the British back then, and, 220 years later, it wasn't all good for a couple of antipodeans either. The sightseeing was great, but a few hours after eating in what seemed like a cute old tavern, the buffalo wings we had shared returned with their very own quest for freedom from the oppressive yoke of our stomachs, and apparently unwilling to follow the usual peaceful path to such liberty.

Things were complicated the next day by the fact that we had a hotel reservation in New York to get to, so we tried to brave it out in the car. This was not an excellent time to hit the first serious traffic of our journey. From Philadelphia through New Jersey to Manhattan is basically one urban megapolis, and the highways look just as you would expect - crawling at a snail's pace. There were pros and cons about this. A pro was that, when you pull over to throw up, you barely lose your spot in the queue. A con was that, as the traffic is not moving, instead of hundreds of motorists catching a fleeting glance of someone hunched over by the road, a select group of five or six cars gets the opportunity to carry out an in-depth analysis of your last couple of meals.

Reprising this memory is making me feel queasy all over again, so I will leave it there for now. We've only a week or so left, and I have plenty that I still wanted to get into this blog, so I'll try and post a couple of pieces in the next few days.