USA

We can't say that we were too sad to leave Iowa, and justifiably so given that the temperature on the way to the airport was -13 Celsius and predicted to be lower. We landed in Tampa, Florida, to balmy temperatures and stayed a night in a hostel that defied all building codes before catching an Amtrak train down to Miami the following day.

Miami is a city of beautiful buildings, beautiful people and beautiful cars and hence we were completely out of our league given our wardrobe/backpack of wash-and-wear, 100% unnatural fibres. What to do? Go on a cruise to the Bahamas, that's what.

Art deco in Miami

Now, we're not very cruise-ship type people but after thorough investigation it appeared that it was cheaper to live on a cruise ship for four nights that it was to live on the mainland USA so we got ourselves a cheap internet deal and soon found ourselves buying a helmet full of beer on the Norwegian Sky as it set sail from the port of Miami destined for the Bahamas. It took us a night to find our sea legs, but the following day we were partaking in the buffet with the best of them. After introductions all round, it seemed that the cruise ship clientele was mostly from Florida. So much so, in fact, that it seemed impossible that there was anyone left in Florida. We spent a day in port at Freeport and Nassau and on the island of Great Stirrup Cay. In spite of the weather being warmer than Iowa, it still wasn't warm enough for Bec's Iowan bikini to get a work out. Glenn went swimming as a matter of principle.

Our cruise ship

Great Stirrup Cay Airstrip

After four days of eating a drinking ourselves silly with half of Florida, we docked again in Miami and took ourselves off on a tour of the Florida Everglades. We took a run-of-the-mill airboat tour, complete with toilet paper ear plugs to reduce the ungodly racket, around the national park and watched a rather peculiar display of crocodilemanship.

Airboats in the Everglades

After a blissfully warm week in Florida, London called................

Winter has well and truly arrived in Iowa. Finally. We were getting a little worried that we might not see any decent winter weather before we left. It turns out our fears were unfounded.

The weather went from fall to winter virtually overnight. Twice we dragged ourselves out of our warm beds to go and play in the snow and throw sticks at the frozen streams. Our snowmen were of better quality than any we'd ever built before and the parks and pine trees are really beautiful covered in proper, thick snow.

Snowmen in Iowa

Living in sub-zero temperatures (Bec regularly walked to work in -13 degree Celsius temperatures) actually requires a lot of effort. Glenn had to scrape the ice from the windscreen of the car every day and only after the snow plow had been through could he actually go anywhere. Our hotel maintenance man had to shovel and salt the footpaths everyday and was often on the roof of the hotel in the snow trying to keep the gutters clear of ice.

Glenn scraping the ice off the car

Not only is living in sub-zero temperatures a lot of effort, it also comes with its own set of dangers. When the snow melts and refreezes again it becomes ice which is, of course, very slippery. Cars slide off the road everywhere and Bec witnessed two low-impact car collisions in an hour from her hotel window one particularly slippery morning before she went to work. Possibly she should have taken this a sign of things to come and stayed at home. Rather, she headed off to work only to do a very 'old lady' thing and slip and fall over on the ice in the middle of the road, the result of which was two sprained wrists and a broken tailbone (not to mention the mental trauma associated with the non-xray diagnosis of said broken backside). The following few weeks were fairly uncomfortable for Bec.

Despite the weather we've still managed to get out and about. We did a quick trip around the Bridges of Madison County and took ourselves to see some icehockey. Ice hockey is EXCELLENT!!!! It's fast, furious and completely violent. We got front row seats behind the plexiglass next to a family with two small children whose cheering repertoire alternated equally between 'LOSERS!!!' and 'You suck ref!!'. Good, wholesome family fun and much better than the football.

Ice hockey carnage

A Bridge of Madison County

We can't really say that we were sad to leave Iowa (not the least because the temperature in the taxi on the way to the airport was -11 Celsius). It's lovely during summer and fall, but we're just not tough enough to live there full-time.

Bring on the Bahamas!!!!!

And life carries on in Iowa. Bec has a job as a waitress (which is ironic given how uncoordinated she is) and is finding it very entertaining. She's had to learn what links, biscuits and Mr Pibb are in a breakfast context (sausages, scone-type things and Dr Pepper respectively) and finds it very amusing that most of her customers think she is British. She was particularly pleased when complimented on how good her English is 'for an Australian'. Why, thank you!! Glenn has traded in the hire car for the company car and we've now joined the ranks of American SUV drivers. The car has Arizona plates on it which come in handy when we're lost on back roads.

We took a trip to the Amana Colonies, a group of small towns of German heritage, and sussed out their version of Oktoberfest. We (ok, Glenn) took part in the keg tossing competition and partook in a beer or two. We kept it fairly tidy on the basis that it might be a little too cold to sleep outside the beer hall or even in the car due to a lack of hotel rooms in town.

Fun and games at Oktoberfest

Halloween decorations had been in the stores since the day we got here, so on Halloween night we got in the car and drove to a kid-filled neighbourhood. Well, there were hoards of kids everywhere dressed as anything and everything from PowerRangers to election ballot boxes. Lit pumpkins lined the streets, some of them very intricately carved. The amount of candy some of these kids collected would be enough to keep them high for two solid years.

Halloween pumpkin

We finally managed to get ourselves to a college football game. The University of Northern Iowa (UNI) is just up the road from our hotel and every weekend the place fills to capacity with purple-clad UNI Panthers fans. We were astonished to learn that there seems to be at least 60 players on a football team and that a 15 minute quarter actually goes for about 45 minutes!! A group of ten year-olds sitting beside us gave us a much needed five minute tutorial on the rules of American football which, unfortunately, still wasn't enough to keep us interested past the third quarter. Ice hockey season has just started so maybe we'll have a better attention span there.

Action in the UNI-Dome

Winter has crept up on us here in Iowa and is adding a whole new dimension to our trip. Last Wednesday the weather was a sunny 23 degrees celsius. Two days later we got a dumping of snow and a maximum temp of 1 degree celsius!! The fall colors in the lead-up to winter have been absolutely stunning and ride-on mowers have been replaced by snow plows in neighbourhood driveways.

Fall colors in a local park

Silliness in a local park

And a few more fall colors, just because they're pretty!!

It's only early days yet, but winter here seems like way too much effort. Put on three jackets, one scarf, one beanie and one pair of gloves to walk to car in morning. Scrape ice from windscreen of car with hotel swipe card. Remove three jackets, one scarf, one beanie and one pair of gloves when car has become sufficiently heated. Arrive at office and put on three jackets, one scarf, one beanie and one pair of gloves to walk from car to office. Enter office and remove three jackets, one scarf, one beanie and one pair of gloves. Repeat in reverse for homeward journey.

The upside to all of this is that bikinis are really cheap which pleased Bec no end as she had to replace the one she daftly threw out in Vancouver (under the misguided notion that she'd be able to last a year without going somewhere warm). Bring on the Bahamas!!!

We arrived into Cedar Rapids airport after dark and drove the 120 miles to Cedar Falls (the town we're to be living in), which is still 15 miles from Waverly (the town Glenn will be working in) and checked into our hotel which is to be our home for the next few months.

The following morning we got up early and set out to check out Glenn's office in Waverly and to scope out a bit of the country side and to see if Iowa really does live up to its 'Is this Heaven? No, it's Iowa' catch-phrase. They print this on bumper stickers. Seriously.

Every weekend we take ourselves on a roadtrip and have seen some superb scenery and have attended some events for which appropriate adjectives do not exist.

We've pitched a few baseballs on the Field of Dreams movie site in Dyersville:

And visited the National Farm Toy Museum:

We've ridden the world's shortest and steepest railway in Dubuque:

We've checked out a wedding at the local Scarecrow Show (exactly that, though we've decided we prefer our scarecrows traditional rather than abstract):

The Effigy Mounds National Monument (burial mounds in the shapes of animals covered in grass) was interesting:

But not as interesting (for some) as the John Deere 90th Birthday celebration:

And we're seeing lots of Iowan cornfields:

We're lucky to have had six weeks of really good weather. It's been warm enough that we're wearing t-shirts but we suspect that this might come to a screaming halt soon. Glenn has been scraping ice from the windscreen of the car with a credit card (given the current financial climate that's about all it's good for anyway) for the last couple of days and popular opinion is that we will soon graduate from credit card to shovel to snow plough.

Our last week in Whistler positively flew by and it wouldn't be us if we weren't trying to do all the stuff we should have done in the three months prior at the absolute last minute!! Bec sold her bike at 6:10pm with just enough time to make the 6:30pm Greyhound bus out of town to Vancouver. Glenn wasn't quite so fortunate and we had to lug his bike and helmet to Vancouver with the plan of selling it there. We were quite sad to leave Whistler. We'd invested so much time into thinking about it and yet it comprised such a small part of our time away.

We spent a week in Vancouver, the main purpose being to acquire our visas for the USA. This was a surprisingly smooth process given the amount of organisation and paperwork that went into it. And so we found ourselves with an extra week on our hands. The weather was typically rubbish which put the kybosh on our plans to go to Vancouver Island but we spent our days at Stanley Park, Kitsilano Beach, a baseball game and the PNE (Vancouver's Ekka) when we weren't trying to offload Glenn's bike (hereinafter referred to as the BB (bloody bike)). To be fair, there was no shortage of shady individuals around our area of town willing to take the BB off our hands. They just weren't prepared to exchange money for it. We had a lovely dinner with Lori and Wayne, friends Bec's parents made while traveling in Egypt. It was really nice just to have dinner and talk about people that we know!!

Vancouver's Ekka. No show bags, but an inflatable Thomas!!

Baseball in Vancouver. Complete with view of pole.

We flew to Las Vegas from Vancouver for a three day stopover en route to Iowa. Welcome to the USA, where people really do drive cars with wooden side-panels (think Chevy Chase, National Lampoon Vacation) and where the price you see is never the price you pay. We booked a car over the internet for $12 a day and ended up paying a total of $136 for the day when taxes and insurances were added!! Nevertheless, we drove our over-priced convertible through the lights of Las Vegas Boulevarde to our hotel where we planned our assault on the lights and buffets of Vegas.

Vegas by night

Glenn's plan to indulge in as many Vegas buffets as possible began the following morning with breakfast at a casino on the way to the Grand Canyon. $6.95 (plus taxes and tips, of course) all we could eat. And eat we did. We continued on, Thelma and Louise style, in our convertible to Hoover Dam (basically a huge dam with enormous appeal for engineering and farming types), had a look around, re-affirmed Bec's fear of small underwater spaces then took off through the desert (temp in Vegas was a consistent 38 celcius) for the Grand Canyon. We seriously (SERIOUSLY) underestimated the amount of time it would take to get there and really only had about an hour to admire the canyon when we eventually got there before heading back to Vegas to return the hire car. Despite spending three months in Canada, the closest thing we got to seeing a moose was the backsides of two elk (elks?) sticking out of some bushes just outside Grand Canyon National Park.

Dams are ugly. This picture of the lead-up to Hoover Dam is much prettier

Nurse Nasty and her friends at the Grand Canyon. Nurse Nasty has nearly been to as many places as Bec.

Our self-guided walking tour of Vegas the following day began with a hearty breakfast buffet and our rough notes on all the free stuff to see and do in Vegas. If it was free, we saw it and did it. We gambled at the MGM Grand at nine in the morning (definately not free) and drank beer at the Fremont Street light show at eleven at night. The themed casinos are amazingly like the real thing. Our personal favourite was Paris, though Bec was partial to St Mark's Square at the Venetian. We saw countless wedding chapels, however the total bride count for the day was a mere two. Our attempts to reduce our mortgage by gambling were fruitless.

The Luxor in Vegas

Venice in Vegas

We stayed at the Stratosphere Casino which has a huge tower and observation platform at the top of its 880ft spire. We took the lift up there the morning we left to check out the view and to watch a few crazies escape death on the rides up there before getting ourselves to the airport for our flight to Iowa to begin our lives as children of the corn.