Tea-tour 2009

We saw a lot of interesting RVs at Zion National Park – a teardrop (which is basically a tiny bed-mobile with an outdoor kitchen on the back), late 1990s Airstream, a ladder-accessible tent on a luggage trailer, vehicles emblazoned with the New Zealand and Swiss flags…and a Teapot Van!
This last vehicle was a van that had been fashioned into a teapot, complete with a spout, handle and lid. Yes, really.
So we had to meet those guys.

Nicole Gruter, a Madison, Wisconsin-based musician and performance artist whose current project, ‘Tea Tour 2009’, seeks to get members of the public to take time out of their insanely busy lives to sit down and have a cup of tea with her at vacation destinations across the USA.
Here’s her website:

http://teatour2009.wordpress.com

The idea is to discover what stresses people out – whether it’s the outside world or everyone just making themselves crazy by trying to meet unreachable expectations – and whether they are willing to change their lives. Do people really want to have more time for leisure, friends, family, relaxation, etc?

The inspiration for the tour was a tea set inherited from her Dutch grandmother. In the midst of ridding herself of as many possessions as possible, Nicole came across the teaset – she couldn’t bear to throw it away but didn’t have any use for it…until it became the centerpiece of her current project.

Nicole is traveling with her friend Shane, who is himself a performance artist known as ‘Shane Shane’ on the road promoting his work, mainly musical. He’s taking some photos, helping with driving and providing additional fun. He gave us a promotional t-shirt and CD – we listened to it in the car, and our favorite track was ‘Boomedley’.

http://music.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=music.singleplaylist&friendid=444990456

We missed Nicole and Shane’s official Zion tea party, but they were kind enough to throw us our own individual teatime, the morning we left the park for Nevada.
Shane kindly played tag, jump-in-the-tent and who knows what else with Sophia, while Daniel, Lulu and I chatted with Nicole.

Her themes are certainly pertinent for me – it took a new baby to unglue me from a Blackberry and ridiculous working hours. The main idea behind our trip is to enjoy our lovely daughters, and each other. Maybe that could be done without upping sticks, buying two vehicles and risking our careers…but maybe it’s actually all for the best.

Anyway, it’s fantastic that people like Nicole and Shane are out there to help the rest of us stop and think for a moment.

Best of luck on your tour!!

America, according to Sophia

I want to write a story about our trip on the computer.
I like being on this trip with Daddy, Mommy and Lulu.
So far, my favorite thing on our trip was our time at Grandma Sara and Grandaddy Stephen’s house in New York.
I’ve also liked swimming: in the really huge Lake Michigan with Donovan, in the paddling pool with my American cousins Patrick and Keira, and in the hot pools in Thermopolis, Wyoming.

While we’re driving in the car, I like to play on my Winnie the Pooh computer - spelling words, doing math and singing songs. I also like to play with the paper dolls Grandma Sara gave me and the princess song book. Of course, I also like to play with my little sister Lulu. I hold her hand, check the sun is not shining on her, share my baby doll with her, show her the computer and make sure she has toys to play with.

We also listen to tapes and CDs in the car – Chris sent me a tape with some of my favorite songs and stories. I also like to listen to the Winnie the Pooh stories, songs called playtime and some others called Dream Time.

My new bike is blue, violet, red and white. It’s a bit too big, but I love it. I ride it at campsites.

I think that our Airstream is really cool because it’s shiny and it’s our little house. In it, I help Mommy and Daddy with jobs like sweeping, filling the car with gas, turning the dinette into a bed, hitching up the trailer and making sure Lulu’s OK.

This is some of my favorite food in America: peanuts, hotdogs, lemonade and string cheese.

I’ve learned a lot on this trip – using scissors, how to play the Candy Land board game and how to count on my fingers.

At some of the national parks, I’ve done the Junior Ranger program – answering questions about things I learn and then getting a special badge.

Here I am holding a bearded lizard at Zion National Park.

24 hours in Salt Lake City

We thought we’d stop by Salt Lake City, the capital of both Utah and the Mormon Church, on our way from Wyoming to the Bonneville Flats World Finals racing event.
http://www.bonnevilleracing.com/
I’d spent a day in the city once before, when I was about eight, and had left feeling claustrophobic. So, what was it like 25 years later?
Well, negotiating the municipality’s street and numbering system confounded us, despite debuting our fancy GPS and managing to piggyback onto someone or other’s WiFi.
It was thanks to the Airstream that we got directions that made sense. A Salt Lake City resident, and fellow Airstream owner, stopped to admire the Caravel. Politely, he tried to explain how the grid worked – it all radiates out from the Mormon Temple, but that was as far as we got – until, seeing our lack of understanding, he very kindly drew a simple map.
That got us to the downtown KOA, a nationwide chain of campgrounds (well, Kampgrounds and Kabins, as they say).
Having arrived and set up shop, we took advantage of the free downtown shuttle service offered by the Mormon Church. A very sweet older couple, trainee in tow, picked us up at 4:10pm from the campsite and dropped us off at Temple Square, finding plenty of time along the short drive to enquire about our providence, admire our children and offer local tourism advice – all revolving around Church facilities.

When we arrived at the square, they handed us over to a group of Mormon Sisters hailing from all nations. Our guides were two converts: a former Jew from Canada and a former Muslim from Pakistan, both of whom had been selected to serve an 18-month stint at Salt Lake City.

The Church seems to have had a complete PR overhaul since my last visit, now embracing all things multimedia and multicultural.

The girls guided us through the Tabernacle and Visitors Center, explaining to us what was in the Temple (closed to non-Mormons, and pictured here thanks to an image plagiarized from www.affirmation2009.com...our camera's battery ran out) and politely and rather academically answering questions of all sorts about Church doctrine as well as their own beliefs and backgrounds.

Daniel, Sophia and I all found the whole thing kind of seductive. Lulu contentedly slept through the whole thing.

We learned that polygamy has been outlawed among mainstream Mormons since the 1890s, and that one of the central tenets of the religion is that marriage is eternal – so there’s no “to death do us part”. The same goes for family, meaning that you will meet your immediate family, as well as ancient ancestors, in the hereafter.

Another interesting aspect of the religion – which sees its Book of Mormon as the third tome naturally progressing from the Old and New Testaments – is that it is uniquely American. According to this doctrine, Jesus Christ visited an unspecified place in the Americas following his resurrection. Hundreds of years later, the group’s original prophet, Joseph Smith, was guided to a set of golden tablets upon which the Book was based when praying to God to figure out which branch of Christianity to join. After Smith was killed by a mob – the reason the Mormons moved West was to escape unrelenting persecution – the next prophet, Brigham Young, selected the virgin land of Salt Lake City as the religion’s headquarters.

The progression of rooms was all pleasantly scented, and volunteer after volunteer approached us sincerely and smilingly, enquiring about our providence and children. Daniel and I were impressed with how genuinely nice everyone was, while Sophia loved all the buttons they encouraged her to press, activating skits and ads that made Mormonism very enticing indeed. Daniel and I were only scared once, upon hearing a recorded excerpt from one of the current Prophet’s sermons, in which he basically says that our earthly sins will not be forgotten when we meet our day of reckoning,
Uh-oh.

Daniel noticed that a representational style of painting depicting nature and key people seemed to be everywhere. This was rather than photographs. Indeed, the Mormons appear to be very interested in art and architecture, and their ability to reflect their beliefs.

We spent hours being passed seamlessly among volunteers, shown around the Convention Center, which is massive, has loads of Mormon artwork, glass features and even a pine forest, prairie and stream on its rooftop, and then the Genealogy Museum. Because we will all meet our ancestors in heaven, the Mormon Church emphasizes genealogy and is happy to help everyone learn more about their own families. We went to a floor dedicated to the British Isles to learn more about Daniel’s English grandmother, Frances Ada, and my Welsh grandfather, David Handel.

Later, when we managed to leave that gleaming, friendly square, our kind chauffeurs were once again there to collect us, enquiring after our afternoon and our children.

We asked whether they’d mind if they dropped us off at the popular Mexican restaurant the Red Iguana, which was on the way back to the campground. After an uncomfortable pause, they said they’d make an exception this time since we were such a nice family.

There, we had an amazing meal…and margaritas…yum! Then we walked back to the campground, along a street that had definitely been bypassed by the Mormon fairy dust. By then unaccustomed to imperfection, we gingerly passed the hoodies, the power station, the meth-heads and the roadworks, eventually ending back up at the Airstream.

Wyoming, wide open skies

So, ten days after entering Wyoming from South Dakota’s Black Hills, we left it via the southwestern corner bordering Utah.
What a state. It’s a massive area (365 miles by 265 miles), holding a population of just 500,000. Pictured on its license plate is a bucking bronco, which does seem to sum up the state’s sentiment: wild, open and solitary.
A lot of the housing is trailer based, with the odd nonsensical, misplaced McMansion. But that’s not the point, you don’t go to Wyoming for the lodging, but for the ravishing, endless landscapes which form the background and foreground of life there. It certainly leaves you with a sense of your own smallness.

Here are a few of the characters we met:

Mikel, the horse-driving life coach born and bred in Powell, who told us, “we Wyoming people like lots of space with no one around”. Lest we think she might be lonely, she listed the tourist events she offered as well as the number of trips she has made to the UK (four).

The LA-born lady who had left London after some 40 years, in search of a new, exciting start. Her main job these days is tending to the Charles J Belden Museum in Meeteetse. This free museum, named after the eponymous photographer, documented the life and times of this Wild West town starting from its founding in the 1890s. It included a sampling from the town’s Mercantile Exchange of goods such as clothing, shoes, food and measurements, a photo-history documenting how the effort to save the much-hunted antelope not only revived herd numbers but also yielded an international pet antelope craze. Also on display were the requisite firearms, cowboy boots and animal taxidermy (the crown jewel of which is the largest grizzly bear caught in the mainland US), as well as Belden’s famous photographs, taken locally, of the original Marlboro man.

Rex, a Kansas native who chuckled wryly at the name of this blog, saying that he too had skipped town. He, like us, has been on the road as a full-time RVer for just over a month. A kind man, we last saw him on Wyoming Route 28, as his party and ours ascended the state’s South Pass over the Rockies.

Ron Foote, the owner of RV camp Fountain of Youth in hot springs town Thermopolis. A minister preaching love, acceptance, generosity and trust as part of his own brand of what he describes as multi-denominational faith, he and his guitar perform Sunday services before a swimsuit-clad congregation of hot spring bathers. On Friday and Saturdays, he entertains swimmers with country and cowboy songs – famous ones as well as those he’s penned himself.

We’ll miss Wyoming - its wide-open spaces, helpful people, bountiful wildlife and cowboy accessories.

Astride the divide

Having waited out snowstorms and ice, we finally managed to cross the Rockies at South Pass in Central Wyoming. The pass is also a point on the Continental Divide – east of this line, waters flow into the Atlantic, while west of it, they end up in the Pacific.

Relatively speaking, it’s a gentle crossing, at an altitude of some 7600 feet.

We climbed and climbed the steep and scenic Route 28, past the short-lived gold rush cities of Atlantic City and South Pass City, until we reached a long, broad, windy plain populated by cattle, roadworks and the occasional oil or gas rig.
It was here that the pioneers on the Oregon, Mormon, Pony Express and California Trails traversed the towering mountain range, before splitting off towards their various endpoints.

At South Pass itself, one can still faintly see the four tracks. We wondered whether any of the pioneers, who would have formed strong friendships along the journey, arrived here and changed their minds about which trail - and destiny - to follow.

We’ve been thinking a lot about the pioneers, trying to appreciate their bravery and steadfastness. Starting their trips at Independence, Missouri, they spent 5-6 months crossing the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains and Southwestern deserts in search of a better life – at a speed of some 12-15 miles a day.

Sophia has a book called something like ‘What if you were a pioneer’, which recounts the pioneer experience. In that, we learned that pioneers walked the majority of their trails – one, because the ride was so bumpy, and two, to conserve the energy of the oxen or horses. Life on that road sounds pretty dire, but they managed to have some fun as well – throwing Fourth of July parties, collecting prairie flowers and making friends along the way.

Sometimes the curved, white-lined Airstream reminds us of a covered wagon, albeit one with a kitchen, heater and bathroom.

Superglue: the answer to the healthcare controversy

While at Thermopolis, we met a nice guy named Rex who is able to bypass the healthcare reform debate raging in the US thanks to one surprising household helper: superglue!
Rex slipped and fell one night when sprinting through sleet to jump into the hot pools at RV park Fountain of Youth in Thermopolis, ending up with a pretty bad cut on his foot.
Did he go to the hospital? Hell, no!
“Why am I going to pay $1,000 per stitch when I can just use Superglue?!” he said.
A landscaper taking some time out to travel, Rex swears by the stuff – assuring us incredulous folk that the adhesive not only rebinds skin but also acts as a powerful antiseptic.
Send in some more tips, Rex!!

On marriage and mortality

Since we left New York, Sophia has developed an obsession with a pair of life’s key passages: marriage and mortality.
Probably due in part to her enviable cache of Disney princess gear and Barbies, Sophia is really interested in marriage – what it is, why people do it and what the ceremony entails. We’ve tried to answer those questions as best we can: two people promise to spend the rest of their lives together, because they love each other, and you get to have a fun party and wear a fancy clothes.
Due to her own family circumstances, Sophia thinks all brides have a baby in their tummy.
But she has plans of her own: when she grows up, she will marry Rocco, her first and best friend who lives across the street from us on London’s Columbia Road. She will wear the Snow White dress her godfather Chris gave her, and has not yet finalized Rocco’s outfit – although a Spiderman get-up is currently the frontrunner.
Please see this blog for further details.

Mortality – how do you explain that to your kids? Especially when you yourself are scared stiff of it. So far, Sophia’s encounters with it involve the flies that trespass on our mobile property and the children’s song that goes “Poor Roger was dead and lay under the ground – way-yo, under the ground”. She has a fanciful idea of what happens, but doesn’t yet understand that it’s final.

She is a loving soul who approaches life all cylinders blazing, but wants to kill stuff. I guess it’s a normal rite of passage for humans, once they realize their strength and power. She’s become quite deft at using the fly swatter, which is OK as long as the flies are in our space rather than outside.
More worryingly, she keeps saying she wants a gun. Her gun, though, would be part of a Wild West, Annie Oakley type revue in which she slayed rattlesnakes, protecting her parents and sister from untold harm.
It started the afternoon we visited Legend Rock, a dusty, empty place between Coy and Thermopolis, whose cliff side petroglyphs are tens of thousands of years old.
The four of us were alone in the sagebrush valley, sharing space only with oilrigs some ten miles in the distance. Signs warning of rattlesnakes far outnumbered any information on the petroglyphs. Sophia decided that if a rattlesnake were to appear, she would yell, “stand back!” to Daniel, Lulu and me, then shooting the slithery beast.
We’ve said maybe when she’s 18, and she hasn’t forgotten it.