Last post from America

I can't believe that my last post was only a week ago - we have covered so much distance since then! When ADC returned the car this morning, he had driven it for about 2500 miles. 

On July 29, the first day of our road trip proper, we set off quite early, heading for the Columbia River Gorge. Our first stop was at Vista House, built in the 1920s specifically for viewing the gorge at its finest. The very enthusiastic docent there gave us maps and lists of waterfalls to visit as we made our way along historic Route 30, one of the first roads ever built expressly to encourage motoring to natural beauty spots. ADC, who spent a year in Eugene when he was in fourth grade, remembered many of the names, and the description of the Bonneville fish hatchery, where the fish jump up a ladder ... the and his family then probably made many short trips along the route we covered in a single day. We stopped at Bridal Veils to admire the waterfall, but were unable to stop anywhere else along Route 30 due to the lack of parking. And this was in the middle of the week! As we drove along, we stopped at random places to look at the gorge and/or Mt Hood and for ADC to take pictures. Today was the beginning of a heatwave supposed to continue to the weekend, and we definitely felt temperatures we had not experienced since leaving the DC area. On the other hand, there was very little humidity, so we were able to spend nearly an hour walking in 36C heat. For the first time, it felt like summer should: neither the humidity of DC nor the chilliness of Washington. That was after we had crossed the Cascades into the rain shadow desert of central Oregon. The landscape changed dramatically almost immediately: from green to yellow, looking more and more like the Golan Heights with the basalt rocks and grazing beef cattle. As the temperatures rose, visibility improved, and when we came across a mountain identification plate at the crest of Mt Criterion, we were able to see, in addition to the easily identifiable Mt Hood, also Mt Adams - far away in Washington, Mt Jefferson and the Three Sisters. 

We spent a lot of time in the car that day and heard a great deal of music, the "West Coast Playlist" that ADC had prepared in advance (including, as well as musicians from California and Seattle, anyone else who seemed to have been influenced/was mocking them). We spent the night just beyond Bend in the kind of place that ADC has been looking for since our first trip in the USA: a small motel called Rodeway, cheap but clean, with very few frills, but with a room large enough for each boy to have his own bed. It is part of a chain, but not one we had come across before.

Next day we set off  for Crater Lake, hoping to escape the forecast heat. In fact, ADC was very worried that we might not be warmly enough dressed and told the children to expect to see snow on the ground (which they interpreted as "it might/will snow", it seems). In the event, there was no snow whatsoever - to the extent that the illustrated signs were false - and the weather was a pleasant low 20s Celsius. Once again, we were in a new plant zone, and on one walk Ariel became quite frustrated by the number of birds he could hear, but not see, and was unable to identify. All the same, I filled over a page in my little notebook with flowers, birds, a rodent (golden-mantled squirrel) and a butterfly (variegated fritillary). Crater Lake itself was an amazing sight - such deep blue water! It seems that even the geology in the New World is younger than what I am used to from Israel, measured in thousands rather than millions of years, but I know that that is an artefact of the volcanic Cascades range. We went on two shortish hikes - we are impossibly thorough in our nature observing, especially me when I'm not familiar with the flowers, so we didn't have time for more than that. 

Once we left the park, we were in the middle of nowhere. We passed through a couple of motels at the side of the road just after 5 p.m., but it was two early to stop, and once we entered the Rogue River Gorge, there was nothing for more than an hour. We were just starting to get a bit concerned when we reached Shady Cove, where we found the Platonic ideal of an old-fashioned motel with a diner alongside it. The rooms were cheap enough that Amos and Shaul could have a room to themselves (which turned out to have ants, so they were upgraded to s suite, thus they each have a room of their own), and at supper I had a butterscotch milkshake, which more than made up for the only vegetarian option being a mediocre garden burger. 

We reached California just before noon on July 31st, and also reached yet another climate/vegetation zone - to the extent that ADC bought me a new plants and animals pamphlet, specifically for the redwood forests national and state parks. The size of the redwoods is truly amazing. Together with the enormous sword ferns growing on the forest floor, I felt as if I were Alice after drinking the "Drink Me" flask, as we walked along the Stout Grove loop (the grove was established as part of an effort prevent further logging of the redwoods in the 1920s and was named by Mrs Clara Stout in honour of her husband, a lumber baron). We left Shady Coves that morning still in the throes of a heatwave, with added forest fires (the car was lightly coated with flakes of ash). When we reached Crescent City and the Pacific coast in the late afternoon, the temperature was 40 degrees Fahrenheit lower than they had been 24 hours earlier! No wonder there is constant fog flowing from the Pacific. To top the natural wonders of the day, we saw a small herd of elk - females and juvenile males - browsing at the side of the road just before leaving one of the sections of the state park. Our original plan had been to stay at a motel in Eureka along US 101, but when we arrived, they were all very sleazy-looking, so we found a place a few blocks into town, where we got a suite, so we have our own room, and each boy has his own bed. We had dinner at a Mexican restaurant, the first good South American food we've had (the mediocre Salvadoran meal we had as our first lunch clearly had an long-term effect, albeit an unconscious one).

August 1 was a long day, which can be summed up in two words: driving and eating. As our motel did not include breakfast, we decided to eat a few remaining things that we had bought for hikes, and to stop after the Avenue of the Giants for brunch. We set off just before 9 a.m., stopped for brunch two and a half hours' later, and at 3 p.m. really needed another break. We stopped at the closest place Google Maps suggested, Frozen Art in Santa Rosa, where we had some of the best ice-cream I've ever had. The owners are Mexican, and there were some very interesting and unusual flavours - I had a scoop of honey and lavender ice-cream, and another of rose petal. ADC had corn ice-cream! They also had paletas, or home-made popsicles, and there the flavours were even more interesting: cucumber and melon, pico de gallo, and pine-nut were just a few. 

At 5 we finally reached our Airbnb in Oakland. This was our first time doing Airbnb, and we didn't really know what to expect - we were not expecting to get the run of an empty family home, including a hot tub! There are also two cats, that come with the house. The only downside is that there is almost no closet space: the family that lives here has gone on holiday for three weeks, and decided that this was better than getting a house sitter. Finally, we went over to ADC's cousins  J&L  for dinner. It was possibly the best Chinese takeout I've ever eaten - if all Chinese restaurants served food like Shan Dong does, I would have a better opinion of Chinese food for vegetarians.

Much of Sunday and Monday were spent with cousins. We essentially spent all of Sunday with J&L - as BART was not working, we stayed in Oakland. We walked around Lake Merritt, ate pizza from Arizmendi (the original of the pizza place that serves only one flavour in Inside Out), and visited the Oakland Museum of California, which is free on the first Sunday of the month. We spent nearly two hours there, only in the History hall. I had known very little of the history of California previously, and it was good to get the Spaniards, Mexicans and Americans sorted out. It was also very useful to know a bit about the development of San Francisco before going there the next day. At the very end of the hall was a small historiographical exhibition, explaining how curators worked and derived history from material objects. Monday was our first day in San Francisco itself. We used three kinds of transport: BART, the cable car and a historic street car (made in 1948 and originally from Cincinnati, according to the posters inside it). Our first stop was in the Mission district, where we met my father's first cousin W and her family for brunch at their home. I last saw W when I was about seven, and didn't remember her at all. I am not sure we would have met so easily at the BART station if I had not said in advance that I would be wearing my purple skirt! W and her husband T were very welcoming. We talked about all kinds of things, and met their daughter M and her boyfriend J. M is about to begin medical school and J is a chef; I think we persuaded him to seriously consider visiting Israel (he isn't Jewish) by telling him about the goat cheeses made in the desert just beyond Omer. When we left, S asked them to come for his bar mitzvah in two years' time. After over two hours' having brunch, T was very happy to walk us around the upper Mission district, taking us to see Dolores Park and Mark Zuckerberg's house, and pointing out particular architectural features. I must say that the so-called Victorian style in San Francisco is lovely. After we said goodbye to T, we continued down Valencia St, looking at all the weird and wonderful shops, of which the weirdest was surely the steampunk emporium of Paxton Gate. The boys really wanted to buy things there, but we restrained them by pointing out the restrictions on importing animal parts from one country to another. After moving from Valencia to Mission St., we caught another BART to Powell St., where we wanted to get the cable car to Fisherman's Wharf. The line there was incredibly long, but we noticed that the cars were not full when they left - indicating that there were additional stations along the way. We walked just a short way up Powell to the next station, and were able to catch the next but one car, instead of the fifth or sixth car. It's very interesting how people see a line and join it, and very few think of ways to shorten their wait time. We saw a similar phenomenon at Ghirardelli Square, where you could get sundaes either at the Ghirardelli Marketplace (half empty and no queue when you approached the counter after walking past the displays of chocolate bars) or at the Ghirardelli Fountain (queue coming out of the store and around the block, for the same over-priced sundaes). Fisherman's Wharf itself was pleasant to walk along. The boys went down to the beach and paddled for a bit - I also saw small children in puffy coats! We were a bit tired by the time we finished wandering around that area, and took a street car back to Market St., where we wandered more in search of supper. It turned out that Market Street is very like Soho in London, in that the restaurants and the sleazy places are very close to each other. After half an hour, I forced ADC to book a table in an Indian restaurant, just to be sure that we ate somewhere with decent food at reasonable prices. On the way there, we found a jazz bistro called Les Joulins, which is where we ended up eating supper: very good food and even better music. It later turned out that this is one of the premier spots for live jazz in the city; as we had missed hearing a jazz quartet that IB and E like very much in Seattle, this more than made up for it.

Wednesday was a relatively restful day, in that we did not spend all of it on our feet. Instead, we went for a scenic drive (there's something we hadn't done in a while :-)) through Golden Gate Park, over the Golden Gate bridge and along route 1 to Stinson Beach. We had a bit of a late start, and saw the toll change from $6 to $4 while in line at the Bay Bridge at 10 a.m. On the way to the Golden Gate Park we saw some very different SF neighbourhoods from the ones we had seen by foot, like the millionaires' haven of Sea Cliff, where we saw the kind of crescent that in Bath has 18th-century row houses adorned here with mansions, and Richmond, which looked rather like a place we would enjoy living in. The day was chilly and overcast, so we didn't spend too long in the park, as A and S wanted to cross the bridge as soon as possible. We overheard an Irish guide giving instructions to a group of cyclists who were going to cycle over the bridge and A really regretted having to be stuck inside a car! The view from the bridge was as spectacular as promised, and so was the view from the vista point on route 1. I had a bad attack of car-sickness going around all the twists and turns, both coming and going, to the extent that I believe that I made the right decision to skip soft-serve ice-cream at Stinson Beach. Everyone was very sorry for me, and I'm not sure why I was so badly affected while the boys - who also tend to car sickness - seemed perfectly fine. Part of it, I think, was that somehow I was never at the right angle for the win to blow in my face. That aside, Stinson Beach was a lovely day out: we paddled a bit, despite the cold and even drizzle, but were amazed at the people actually swimming! The Pacific is so much colder than the Med, and the posters warning of rip tides and sharks were quite alarming. We found a nice little book shop, and more importantly at the moment, I found a post office, where I picked up boxes so we can send at least some of our books home via media mail and hopefully avoid paying overweight on our flight. The day ended with more ice-cream, this time at Fenton's Creamery, and the welcome news that our flight time had been changed: instead of leaving SFO at 8:30 with a 6 hour layover at JFK before taking off for Tel Aviv, we are now leaving at 13:20 and have only 2 hours' layover, arriving in Tel Aviv at the same time, but hopefully less complete wrecks.

Yesterday we went back into the city, entering and leaving from the Montgomery Street BART station. We began by visiting a tea and chocolate shop we had seen from the cable car, called Spicely. We spent much longer than expected there, and did not walk out empty handed (despite our luggage concerns). If Spicely opened a cafe in Powell's bookstore in Portland, I think we would move in permanently. After that, we resumed walking up Montgomery Street to the Coit Tower. We didn't go up it, but looked at the view. We then took all the steps down through Grace Marchand Garden to Battery Street and began looking for lunch. That took longer than expected, and we ended up at The Planet, an organic cafe where the men each had a different kind of sandwich and I had an interesting tomato and watermelon salad. ADC and I had juices (and I remembered why I actually prefer them without food), and Amos expanded his horizons and had a smoothie. We then went to the Ferry Building marketplace, and bought artisanal bread, cheese and salami for an early supper - ADC and the boys went with Jeremy to see Ant-Man. A and S enjoyed themselves greatly, especially S; ADC, as usual, was distracted by the bad science involved and its inner inconsistencies. I stayed home, began packing, and tried to get T-Mobile to unlock our phones so we can use them in Israel but was defeated due to not being ADC (in whose names all the lines are). This was after we'd made a special detour to a T-Mobile shop in town, having understood that the unlocking could be done there on the spot. I did make some progress, though, and as I used the chat, the agent assured me that we wouldn't need to give all the information again. I think chat helplines are brilliant: I'd tried calling, first, and ended up unsure if the agent had understood me properly, or I him. With chat, everything is much clearer and you can go back and check what you said much more easily.

I'm writing this after getting back from supper with J&L, with whom we spent much of the day today. We got a relatively late start, as there were several errands that had to be done before we could go into San Francisco one last time - mailing books (it turns out that media rate does not apply to boxes, so that was $87 - but paying for overweight luggage and having to check both trolley suitcases would probably have come to more), finally getting the unlock codes from t-Mobile, and returning the car to the rental agency. We eventually met J&L at noon, and went for a walk through Chinatown. L didn't grow up there, but her parents still have close connections and apparently her father takes two buses to go shopping there almost every day. She attempted to haggle with the seller at a jade shop where A bought a small elephant to add to his collection, but he was too quick and paid without question. We had lunch at a place whose name I didn't catch, and whose clientele seemly evenly divided between Chinese and non-Chinese. It was very good. especially the deep-fried salt and pepper eggplant we had as a starter and the garlicky pea shoots. After that, L had to go back to work, and J took us to City Lights, Lawrence Ferlinghetti's bookstore, still a mainstay of radical San Francisco. There were some interesting titles there, but this time we weren't buying ... Everyone humoured me and went into Britex Fabrics, an entire building that is one of the West Coast's meccas for anyone who sews. There is a floor of silks and woollens, another of cotton, linen and more, an entire floor devoted to buttons and trimmings of all kinds, and the fourth floor (which we didn't reach) is remnants and novelty fabrics. I was overwhelmed - I don't know how you can go into a shop like that with the intent to buy without a sewing plan. There is so much choice ... A picked out a couple of silks that he would like me to make into shorts for him; I said I would aim at making him a cotton shirt by S's bar mitzvah (giving me two years to improve my sewing), and see how we went from there. 

At 3:30 we went back to our Airbnb, finished packing except for what we still needed to use before packing up, and went to Dr Comics & Mr Games, the local comics shop, so that S could get one last fix before going home. At 7:00 Jeremy came to fetch us for supper. During supper, L asked what the highlights of the year had been. It was a surprisingly difficult question to answer, but in no particular order, my top five were meeting Patricia Crone, learning to sew, visiting Savannah, cultivated flowers (the Hoyt Arboretum, the bonsais at the National Arboretum, Portland Rose Garden and the cherry blossoms in Washington), and the Tenement Museum in New York. The list could continue, but I need more time to reflect. I'll revisit the question in a month's time, everything is too close now. 

In less than eleven hours a taxi will come to take us to the airport ... next post will be from Israel.

Washington to Oregon

This is a bit later than I expected my update to be, a combination of long and tiring days, and the fact that despite staying in the home of a senior Microsoft executive, we did not have access to wi-fi over the weekend in Seattle. 

The first part of our second week in Friday Harbor was uneventful. Both ADC and I worked hard so that - Woohoo! I finished uploading edited versions of the nine articles I had to read while at FHL, and send a summary of my comments to my co-editors. That was a marathon ten days, during which I edited another article (I'll be paid for that one, though), but now I'm done! ADC also finished writing his article, up to and including figure legends an acknowledgements, so on last Thursday our holiday really started. 

Not that this hasn't been a partial holiday, anyway, of course. Last Saturday we took the bus to Limekiln Park, aka Whale Watch Park, where we had a very enjoyable time hiking. We almost missed seeing orcas, as they were not in the vicinity most of the time, and in fact we only saw a few in the distance just before we had to leave the lighthouse viewing spot in order to catch the last bus. ADC was rather disappointed, as the potential was much greater than the actuality turned out, but the rest of us were thrilled anyway. We also saw a golden eagle while we were hiking, which was almost as impressive. 

We followed up the whale theme by going to the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor on Tuesday. It was almost as much of a trek to get there as it was to the park, on the other side of the island, because we made the bad mistake of ordering sandwiches to go from a coffee shop, rather than the deli, in town. I've never had to wait 50 minutes for sandwiches before, and not been offered any kind of recompense or apology, not even a glass of water while we waited. The staff was overwhelmed by the lunch crowd (which struck us as being probably normal for the height of tourist season), and the single woman making the sandwiches was clearly not a professional: not only did she mix up orders (part of the reason for the delay), but she was incredibly slow and inefficient. I think that even S, who spends part of his time on another planet, could have worked faster. Adding insult to injury, when we mentioned how long we had been waiting to the staff, one of the women said "We're not a restaurant" - well, if you can't cope with a "to go" option, why offer it? And in the end, neither the sandwiches nor the cookies we bought were very good.

The Whale Museum was not what I expected. It was smaller than I thought it would be, a bit over-didactic and had almost nothing on the relations between humans and whales throughout history. I was expecting a museum with much more about whaling, but apparently that was never a major industry here, only further north, in Canada and Alaska. The in-depth studies and genealogical charts of the pods of the southern resident orcas were interesting, though, even though I felt that the anthropomorphism was a bit much: yes, whales are clearly intelligent, but they are not human. 

After the museum, ADC went back to work, while the boys and I wandered around window shopping. We went into a place called Island Studios, selling arts and crafts made by locals. I was shocked to see ruffle scarves, the kind that I matched the hand-dyed wool to the previous week and whose yarn costs about $6 per ball, for sale for over $40!!

The boys have taken up geocaching with a vengeance: on Wednesday they spent all afternoon wandering round town by themselves, looking for caches. They had a false start, as after they got to town A discovered his batteries had run out. When they arrived home, S discovered that his hat (which he had been wearing) was missing. He borrowed A's spare and they set off again, and found two caches and S's hat (it was next to the hutch where you could buy eggs on the honour system). Lucky boy! On Wednesday night, once it became fully dark we went down to the docks. ADC and the boys went rowing, in the hopes of seeing bioluminescence, while I stayed on the docks and joined a group of students who were "night lighting": sending down an electric light into the water to see what might be attracted. I think that we were very lucky: a huge nereus worm swam around and around, there was a salmon migration and one swam into the net held by one of the students - I don't know who was more surprised, him or the salmon, and best of all, a harbor seal swam by really close: you could count each of his whiskers! 

Our last full day on San Juan Island was spent at the north end, thanks to a kind neighbour who lent us her car. We started at English Camp, where the British garrison lived during the joint Anglo-American occupation of the island from 1849-1871 until the Kaiser's arbitration awarded the San Juan Island s to the United States rather than to Canada, then walked up Young Hill for a fantastic view of Haro Strait across to British Columbia, and finally visited the resort of Roche Harbor, clearly where you go if you have a yacht. We found three geocaches, which pleased A greatly.  

We left Friday Harbor in the rain, similar to what we had woken up to on our first morning there. The trip back to the mainland was uneventful, although this time we knew to choose seats around a table with a jigsaw puzzle. I knitted and occasionally helped the others, and we completed the puzzle as the ferry drew in to port at Anacortes. Once we debarked, we quickly found the rental car agent, who took us in a pick-up truck into the actual town of Anacortes ("salmon canning capital of the world"), where we spent much longer than anticipated actually getting the rental car. Part of that was despite ADC having called to confirm, they didn't have a full-sized sedan that could take five suitcases, so we had to take a midi-SUV, which needed its oil changed before being driven to California. We went to have lunch - which was very nice - but took about twice as long as we thought it would. Clearly the Pacific North West lives at a different tempo than the East Coast. As a result, we only made a brief stop at Deception Bridge, instead of a proper hike, on our way to IB and E's place in Bellevue. 

It was lovely to see them again, after such a long time. IB was in ADC's class in high school, and he has known E since the army, before they became a couple. Their eldest daughter Y  is eight months older than A, and their second daughter, AM, is the same age as S. They also have a much younger daughter, N. The five children got on amazingly well together, considering that they hadn't seen each other in about five years. Some of the time they split into a pair and a trio, other times they were all together, but they all played nicely. 

Saturday in Seattle began with pouring rain, so we got up slowly, had pancakes for breakfast and only left for Pike Place Market aound 11:00. As well as having a late lunch there, we bought provisions for a picnic supper, while watching a Shakespeare in the Park production of Much Ado About Nothing by GreenStage. That was the highlight of the day - despite a light drizzle falling intermittently, it was not too cold, and the production was very good. There was great chemistry between Beatrice and Benedick (who was fantastic, I had him autograph my programme), and as usual, I failed to understand the possibility of Hero and Claudius having a happy ever after. Next day, while discussing the play, S said - on hearing that Kenneth Branagh had also played Benedick - that of course he had, since Hamlet and Benedick were really very similar. I think that there is definitely a seminar paper there, since I think that their main similarity was being written by a man who gave the main characters the best lines (except for Romeo and Juliet, there Mercurio has the best lines).

Next day was much better weather, cloudy and cool but not raining (at least once we had crossed the Cascades to the east). We set off on a hike to Gold Creek Pond, where Y and I took the wrong turning and walked the loop in the other direction from everyone else. Quite frankly, I wasn't bothered, as Y knows a great deal about the local native flowers - her school has a module on them during sixth grade and she remembered a lot. I really enjoyed spotting flowers with someone who was also enthusiastic (rather than mainly humouring me and much more interested in birds). There were far more flowers around the lake than there had been on San Juan Island, and Yael also identified various ferns and flowers that are not in my mini guide, so that was also very useful for the future, too. Once we were done at Gold Creek Pond, we continued to Snoqualmie Falls, a waterfall and the oldest underground hydro-electric plant in the world. The falls were quite small, since we are in the driest time of year and the past winter was very mild, but still impressive enough. After that, our hosts went to an art fair, and we went shopping, to stock up for our road trip south.

Monday was devoted to Mt St Helens. The forecast being for warmer weather now that the weekend was over, we all wore shorts, forgetting that we would be significantly higher than in Seattle - and we weren't dressed warmly enough. That is my only complaint, though - the views of the mountain were incredible, and visibility improved as the day went on and as we went higher. We went to three visitor centres, one telling the story of the 1980 volcanic eruption, one about the return of the forest (much more quickly than expected), and one about the current monitoring and observation of the mountain and its volcano. Each one was at a different altitude with different flowers. I found the human stories of the people who survived very moving, and the differences between the treatment of public and private land in the aftermath was very interesting. Public land became the Mt St Helens National Volcanic Monument, and was left to recover with almost no human intervention, while on private land, which was largely owned by logging companies, the first order of the day was to salvage as much of the lumber from the trees blown down by the lateral blast of the mountainside as possible. 

We were tired and hungry by the time we reached our final destination of the day, Vancouver WA. After checking in, we went in search of a restaurant, and found a very pleasant Hawaiian place called Tommy O's. Everyone was very happy with their choice, and especially with their desserts. 

We had very high expectations of Portland, where we spent the day today, and it mostly lived up to them. Our vague plan back in DC was to go to Powell's bookshop, SockDreams' brick and mortar store and the Rose Garden. We managed to do two out of three, and several other things, too. We started by parking at Washington Park, which is the cheapest place to park, and on the way to the Rose Garden we walked through the Hoyt Arboretum. The Arboretum has thousands of fully-grown trees, and walking through it is almost like walking through a natural forest. in fact, it is what I had expected the National Arboretum to be like - a green piece of nature in the middle of the town. The Japanese Garden, across the road from the Rose Garden, had been recommended to us, but we decided (mostly at my urging, I must admit) to skip it in favour of the roses. I love rose gardens, and this is really an impressive one. We spent over an hour wandering through bed after bed of roses of every colour, smelling them. Our favourites were Young Lycidas, which smelt just like Turkish delight; Elle, which had a more citrusy rose scent; and Barbra Streisand, which was a combination of the three. If I ever grow roses (Jerusalem is not the ideal climate, I fear, and our window boxes get very little sun), I would pay more attention to their scent than to their appearance, and I'd like one of those. 

By this time it was nearly noon, and we took the park shuttle to the MAX station, and then took the train to Pioneer Square, where we had lunch (Chinese steamed dumplings and Voodoo doughnuts) from food trucks and listened to live music, before setting off to Powell's bookshop, rightly called a city of books. We decided to limit ourselves to two books each, and urged the children to buy second-hand, as those books tended to be both cheaper and lighter. We reluctantly dragged ourselves away after just over two hours (ADC said to me: Can't me move in to this shop, to live?), feeling that we had only scratched the surface. I would have happily bought more - we are now considering sending all our books, except those we plan to read on the flight, home by mail so as to free up space and weight in our suitcases - and I am very glad that we went there. It makes me happy to know that such place still exists, despite Amazon and Kindle. 

After the bookshop, we experienced the least satisfying part of the day, walking down to the Willamette River and generally wandering around. Maybe we were not in the right places, but it was much less exciting than we expected. Did all the Portlanders go inside to escape the heat (it became significantly hotter as the day went on, hitting 30 around four o'clock)? What we did see was lots and lots of homeless people, far more than anywhere I've ever seen, either in the US or in Europe. I wonder if homeless people, who can easily die of exposure in East Coast winters, move to Portland to find a place with both a mild climate and a tradition of liberalism. Maybe there is more help for them there? It was unnerving going into parks, as almost all the benches were occupied by people and what were clearly all their worldly goods. Homelessness seems such a structural problem that I don't know that small amounts of cash (and who do you choose to give it to?) is of any help.  

I will now sound very heartless and shallow, I'm sure, by saying that my mood improved by finding a cupcake bakery and a games shop, and buying their respective wares. Certainly the people who told us we would like Portland were thinking of the shops - although we didn't get to SockDreams, as it is in a relatively outlying neighbourhood, not served by the trams. We ended the day at the Davis Street Tavern, where I had a more interesting meal than the previous day (kale and mushroom risotto beats stir-fry any day), and ADC enjoyed the charcuterie board very much. 

Tomorrow will be along day, as we set off to see the Columbia Gorge ... I will probably write again just before we leave San Francisco and the US. 

End of the year

Last  time I wrote, we were about to embark on a very busy weekend. On May 30, we spent the day at AwesomeCom, which really was awesome. We went to a Q&A session with John Rhys-Davies and Sean Astin, which was hilarious; a panel on the "strong woman character" trope in genre and its problems, which began slowly, but quickly developed into an interesting discussion once audience participation began; tried new games; and wandered around the immense exhibit area, looking at t-shirts, original comics, merchandise and more. The most fun was looking at all the cosplayers, some of whom had amazingly detailed costumes, and some of whom were just having fun. A and S fell into the latter category: A bought a Deadpool mask a few weeks ago, and wore red and black, generally, while S recycled his Halloween costume of Rorschach (whom he has no real idea about, just thought the mask looked cool on Amazon - I have no real idea who Rorschach is either). The food situation was not great, and in retrospect it might even have been quicker to go outside the convention centre for lunch, but we made an executive decision to regard food as fuel that day, as we barely had time for a very early supper before heading to Strathmore to hear Fauré's Requiem. I had never heard it before, and I enjoyed it very much, especially as the program kindly provided full words with translation, so we could follow along. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the wording looked like slightly skewed versions of Jewish prayers. 

Next day, we spent the afternoon at the Folger, watching Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. I had such fun! I saw the film with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth when it came out in 1990, in one of the now-gone cinemas in north Tel Aviv, and I remember laughing out loud at some point, and being the only person in the theatre to do so. That certainly didn't happen this time, everyone was laughing at all the jokes, including A and S (when S saw The Lion King on the last day of school, he came home convinced that Timon and Pumba were Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - or vice versa). I'm not sure that they have seen enough live theatre to undesrtand all the conventions that were being played with, but they have seen Hamlet, so they had an idea of what was going on. In this performance, the Player was particularly good, much more of a presence than I remember Richard Dreyfuss being in the film. Guildenstern (Adam Wesley Brown) and Rosencrantz (played by an understudy, Luis Alberto Gonzalez) were both excellent, too. When I saw the movie, I don't think I had much of an idea who the main actors were, and I was surprised to meet them years later as Sirius Black and the Abomination. The play owes almost as much to Waiting for Godot as it does to Hamlet, and ADC asked me why I enjoyed R&G so much, yet disliked Waiting for Godot. Well, to begin with I think that WfG would have been improved - the one time I saw it live - if I had not just come off a five-hour flight to London. I fell asleep there, but I am told that I did not miss much, as nothing happens in the first half, and that is recapitulated in the second half. I don't think that that is true of R&G - yes, they spend a lot of time waiting, but things do happen. Also, since I saw this first as a film, I didn't experience it as occurring on a single stage set, but in a variety of settings, with the journey actually taking place on horseback etc. Finally, I am sure that my own enjoyment of verbal dexterity deriving from a great classic has a lot to do with it; I may simply prefer the register in which Stoppard works to Becket's.

The following week was "spirit week" at the elementary school, and S had to wear interesting clothes all week, culminating in a superhero outfit on Friday - he was given a Batman suit by a friend. Pity he didn't get it in time for AwesomeCon, but he is now sorted for Purim next year. A was invited to the honors evening at school. About 800 names (some two thirds of the student body) were called up to receive some kind of honor, with some children being called up more than once. A was in the next to last group, children who had received straight As all year (the last group was 27 children who had received straight As for eleven quarters, their entire time at TPMS). I am glad that ADC went without me, as I think I would have very much resented not being able to knit had I gone. This paragraph kind of sums up the entire year's experience for the boys: S had a great time, and A was rather bored. 

Last weekend, its first half  - Friday evening through Saturday afternoon - was spent visiting the Ms and their kids in Baltimore. We were very pleased to be invited for the weekend, actually just as ADC had been about to call to ask when we could see them, as this will be our last chance to see them before we come home. As we left Takoma Park during Friday evening rush hour, Google Maps took us on a different route from our previous visit, and after a whole year in which I had only seen the part of the Baltimore that was the route between Penn Station and Johns Hopkins' Homewood Campus, this weekend I saw two areas that were quite different. To begin with, we ended up going through a rather depressed area of Baltimore before we reached the Ms' house, on W 34th St. We discussed with the boys how you identified a poverty-stricken area: peeling paint, boarded up windows, no greenery, no chain stores but rather corner shops prominently advertising liquor. A added children playing outside on the pavement and adults sitting on the steps leading up to the row houses, and S added that those adults were smoking. As we moved north, the neighbourhood improved - this seems to be a near constant, north is better than south (if your city has an up and a down, like Haifa does, with Mt Carmel, then up is better). I wonder if there is any explanation for that. 

After supper, we went to get ice cream at the Charmery, just around the corner on W 36th St., and saw another side of the city. This was the hipster Baltimore, which KM and AM had said was like Zichron, with boutiques selling various kinds of handmade food and clothes. They were quite right, and we were sorry to see that we had missed happy hour at a chocolatier. We were not too late for an oyster stall, and to our surprise, S agreed to try one (we assume because IM, rather than one of us, told him that it tasted good). He wasn't impressed, but at least he didn't reject the suggestion out of hand. We had planned to go to the Aquarium in the morning, but once again we didn't make it. IM and AW are very big on board games, and had specifically requested that we bring Seven Wonders with us. We played after coming back from the ice cream, and ended up going to bed very late. Once we got up in the morning, AM made waffles, after which the boys (including the fathers) began playing Clue, while AM and I took sixteen-month-old CR to the playground. When we got back, because CR was getting hungry, the game was still going on, and by the time it finished, we decided to just go back home and do homework and watch You Can't Take It With You, which is exactly what we did.

First thing Sunday morning, ADC mowed the lawn. He did a much better job than A does, a combination of greater weight and power brought to bear when pushing (although it is an electric lawnmower) and greater motivation (I think no one could be less motivated than A: he liked the idea of mowing the lawn - similarly to the idea of shoveling snow - much more than he did the reality). This set the stage for a horticulturally-focused day. Our previous visit to the National Arboretum was the day after a snowstorm, and we decided already then to returm in the spring. As we are now almost at the summer solstice, and running out of time left to visit, we decided to go yesterday, after a rainy week that ended in sunshine and humidity. Sadly, once again many flowers were not yet blooming - although many other were already past their peak. It seemed as if what would have been the best areas to look at are now out of bounds due to the nesting bald eagles, which is a great pity, to my mind. However, we did see the late-blooming satsuki azaleas, and found a Japanese-style pond, with godfish, water-lilies in bloom, and most excitingly, several frogs, one of them almost on a lily-pad, in best Princess and the Frog style. The herb garden was at one of its peaks, too, and I really enjoyed that: there was a whole row of mints in pots, and you could rub the leaves and smell the differences as you walked along. It was fun seeing all the familar names and shapes in the industrial and colonial sections, as well as noting which plants appeared again and again: seasonings and bases for alcoholic drinks :)

The last week of school was fairly uneventful, with a lot of time spent on final exams. The last quarter report card will arrive in the mail, apparently. Oh, and S had his class trip to Baltimore on Monday. His main comment, when he got home, was that he didn't understand why, after having seen a film about the Star-Spangled Banner at Fort McHenry, they saw another such film at the Science Museum instead of doing something related to science there. 

Friday was the last day of elementary and middle school in Maryland. Since A has finished 8th grade and S has finished 5th grade, Friday was devoted to their promotion ceremonies - a new usage to me, BTW. I had not previously run across "promotion" in this sense. I would have just said "finished primary school" and/or "finished junior high". Anyway, we split up, with ADC attending A's ceremony (12:30-14:00) and me attending Sl's (11:30-12:30, clap-out at 15:15). It sounds as if both ceremonies were very similar: the children marched in, speeches by the principal and student representatives, a musical number, prizes, names of each student read by homeroom teacher. A's ceremony, from his report, was of course more elaborate, with a PowerPoint with pictures of all the children and a short film with all the teachers wishing them luck. The TPMS principal apparently spent her day going to various promotion ceremonies, elementary schools in the morning and the middle school in the afternoon. S received his certificate in his classroom. While everyone was milling around before the children had a picnic lunch (parents were sent home and returned to clap the mortarboard-wearing children out of school at the end of the day), I took pictures of S and his teacher and best friends on my cell phone. I hope they are viewable. ADC said the same for his pictures of A's ceremony, taken on a real camera and by a far better photographer.

On another note entirely, I spent quite a lot of time this past week on crafts: I finally finished my hiking shorts, which I decided to lengthen by adding a cuff (just in time to go rafting on Saturday), and I swatched my next cardigan. It seemed oddly appropriate to be knitting while watching Terry Gilliam's Brazil on Thursday night. Very excitingly, when I logged into Ravelry on Friday, I saw I had a message from the designer of the baby blanket I knitted for my latest neice, asking permission to feature my project on the pattern's main page. Admittedly, I knitted the blanket in December, but only added the pictures (again, ADC must be credited) a few days ago. What a compliment! 

The weekend has been boiling hot, and spending Saturday on the Shenandoah River was a very good idea. We reached the rafting company at Front Royal around 10:30, and were on the river just after 11:00. We floated along until 15:30 - the Shenandoah was much wider and slower than the Jordan was when we went rafting there, and we got stuck at every "riffle" - places where rocks are high enough to cause very mildly choppy water, but it was still great fun. ADC and A did most of the rowing, and every so often we stopped at an island and had a dip in the lovely cool water. I am still trying to get the algae out of my shorts - admittedly I made them for this kind of activity, but still, I'd like them to look newish after only one wearing. You can float so well when wearing a life jacket! The boys insisted on racing the other people who had been in the shuttle to the rivers with us - two men who were camping with their six-year-old sons. Unsurprisingly, we reached our end point - 7 miles from the start - before them. On the way back, we decided to take a scenic detour along the Skyline Drive, in the Shenandoah Valley National Park. We had been there before, in early October, and this was our last chance to be there again. Unfortunately, I think we were too tired to appreciate it properly - and also the view, when we stopped at overlooks, was quite hazy. After such an exhausting day, we had a much quieter time yesterday. Ariel finally went to buy bagels for Sunday breakfast. He said that he was one of the few male customers not wearing a kippa, and that all the staff were clearly Orthodox Jews - which to my mind seemed a good indication of quality control, and indeed the bagels were delicious. I wonder why American bagels are so much softer than the ones Granny and Grandpa used to make - a difference between Polish and Lithuanian traditions, perhaps? We then slowly wended our way to the weekly farmers' market and listened to a few acts at the Takoma Park Jazz Festival. It was incredibly hot and humid - Tel Aviv seemed cool and dry in comparison - so we didn't stay as long as we might have. We ended the day by watching Flash Gordon, which A had been very eager to watch due to the soundtrack being by Queen. I saw sometime in my childhood, but remembered very little of it. It was quite hilariously campy and bad, with enough woodenness to furnish a carpenter in every scene with Flash and Dale Arden, on the one hand, and Brian Blessed chewing all scenery he came within point blank range of: "Hand me the remote control!!" sounded just like "Release the Kraken!!" 

Today was the first day of the summer holidays. The boys and I have begun packing - in the sense that they went through all their school stuff, and there is now a pile of paper almost 23 cm high waiting to be recycled - and I began inventorying which of the things we bought for the house we plan to send in a lift and which we plan to leave behind as it's not worth sending them, when you factor in the cost of shipping and customs. Tomorrow a rep of one of the shipping companies I contacted is coming to do an in-home survey; another company estimated (based on my very preliminary listing) that we had about 5 cubic metres to ship. I think the cost of shipping will come to almost equal the value of the things that we are shipping, and that's before customs is calculated. The state really wants you to buy things in Israel, rather than importing them personally!

Next letter will probably be after the Fourth of July, for which we apparently will have front row seats for the fireworks, as they are let off at the middle school sports fields across the road.

So much snow ...

Part of the reason I haven't written in so long, I think, has been snow-induced depression. The second half of February was appalling, with the schools closed or starting late almost every other day, either due to active blizzards or due to extreme cold and ice. It was only when daylight saving began, and we had a thaw, that I realised how much better I felt with the sun shining. That being said, we did do a number of things ...

We continued our exploration of the Smithsonian Museums with a visit to the National Museum of the American Indian. This had been highly recommended by DE, ADC's host, who also warned that this was a museum that aimed to celebrate the community,and thus was more activist and less strictly academic than the Natural History Museum, for example. All museums are political, I thought to myself, and thesis simply explicit about it. I must say that while I enjoyed the visit, and learned a great deal, I came away feeling rather depressed. In the end, museums dedicated to recording and preserving ways of life that are dying - if not dead and attempts at resurrection being made - are, in a way, an argument for white supremacy; or at least, for the supremacy of the Mediterranean basin, a region where teleological worldviews joined the Hellenistic scientific heritage (all shared by Judaism, Christianity and Islam) over the rest of the world, in which cyclical worldviews (shared by most "pagan" native religions) did not advance technologically (cause and effect here is hard to judge). The museum rather reminded me of the Khoi-San museum/cultural centre we visited in the Western Cape, and a Bedouin village we once visited: traditions that once were vital for survival are dying, because they are no longer necessary. And since they are based on oral traditions, once they are gone, they are gone. And even if they survive, they are partly a game: there was a video of the whale-killing ritual of an Eskimo group: not only was everyone wearing parkas made of technical material rather than sealskin, it is no longer the case that they will not survive the winter if they don't have a store of blubber - you could see the tins of Heinz baked beans on the shelves. I definitely felt sorry for the North American Indians - most of them really didn't have a chance: their surrounding were so harsh that their material culture (or what remains of it) is really pitiful compared even to pre-Columbian Central/South America, not to mention the Old World. The attempts to restore traditions were interesting, though: one group, from the Hupa Valley in California, were so Californian when they talked about being one with nature etc (wearing plaid shirts, that well-known item of Amerindian dress, as they spoke to the camera). In Chile there are indigenous professors of the languages, who are academics as well as activists, and a case of a Catholic priest who in old age left the Church and returned to his ancestral traditions, becoming a shaman. We bought a book on the world in 1491 at the museum giftshop, which is now in my TBR pile.

Due to the snow days, the testing regimen at Montgomery county schools has been severely disrupted, and it feels like the PARCC assessments have been going on forever (S has maths today, still). These are tests meant to assess the schools, rather than the pupils, as I understand it, and both boys reported that the English/literacy tests were quite easy. A said, though, that the maths segment included material that he had not covered at school ... I really hope he will not have too much of a shock when we get home. He is making quite good progress in Arabic, now that we have set up a definite time and day of the week. Once or twice he has "cancelled" due to the science project measuring the relative rates of freezing of water, apple juice and Gatorade, but then I have insisted on a make-up class on the weekend; the only advantage of having been housebound by snow has been Arabic lesson for A, ukulele lessons for S (he can play several songs now, but is not keen on performing on Skype), and watching movies. We had a Kurosawa weekend a few weeks ago, when ADC and I watched Rashomon on Friday night, and then we all watched Yojimbo together on Saturday. The boys enjoyed Yojimbo very much, and we are considering adding A Fistful of Dollars to the Netflix queue (my memory is that is a rather more graphic. I'm glad we didn't show Rashomon to the children, even though it is deservedly considered one of the greatest movies ever made - I think they are too young for it, still, despite A' belief that now that he is 13, he can see anything that is defined as PG-13 and above).

We have finally begun to take advantage of the cultural opportunities available in Washington (apart form ADC's Meetup group), and have booked three classical concerts and a play. Moreover, at the beginning of March we went to a performance of The Chieftains, a Dublin-based group who have been performing together for sixty years. We have one disc of theirs, The Long Black Veil (with Sting, Van Morrison, Mark Knopfler, Sinead O'Connor, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful (separately) on vocals), which is one of my and S's favourite albums. We had no idea what to expect, really, at the concert, but it was like being invited to a party where all the other guests could play an instrument and/or sing and/or dance. The other guests included an astronaut, who played the pipes - and had played the pipes at the space station - and the Leahy family, who all played the fiddle and danced. They came on one by one: a 15-year old girl, a 12-year old boy, a 10-year old boy, a 7-year old girl and a 4-year old girl. Every time we thought now, that was the youngest, and then another child came on - playing the fiddle. Then they danced while playing the fiddle (except for the youngest girl, who conducted!). There were also a couple of local children's groups: a choir and one of the Irish dancing schools (whose upper bodies were much stiffer and more motionless than the dancers who were part of the Chieftains backing group), and a local bagpipe band, who wore eyesearingly mismatched tartan kilts. It was great fun, and good preparation for the St Patrick's Day Parade last Sunday (the 15th). The parade was amazingly well-behaved on the part of the crowd (almost nobody stood in the road), much quieter than expected (there was music only when the actually marching bands and/or Irish dancing schools went by), and including a bewilderingly large number of vintage fire engines. We speculated that this was a trial run for the Fourth of July parades for the fire engines, since I'm not aware there's anything particularly Irish about the fire brigade in the US (on the other hand, the large number of marchers affiliated with the police seemed to be obvious. Even Richard Scarry's police man is Sergeant Murphy, with his daughter Bridget).

The weekend before last continued our cultural activities: in reparation for seeing Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead at the Folger Theater in May, we watched Kenneth Branagh's version of Hamlet. We offered the boys the choice of Kenneth Branagh or Mel Gibson, and they immediately chose Kenneth Branagh, because they know him, both as Professor Lockhart and as Henry V. I suppose a completely uncut version is not the worst way of being introduced to Hamlet - we did split the viewing over two sessions - but I'm not sure this is my preferred interpretation of the play. Kenneth Branagh doesn't have enough self-doubt for Hamlet, in my opinion; he's too pleased with himself to consider suicide seriously. I think we will see the Zeffirelli version closer to the time, so that's what we have in mind when we see Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead. Derek Jacobi as Claudius (yes, we got the joke) was very good, as was Richard Briers as Polonius. I'm not sure about Kate Winslet as Ophelia; again, I didn't like the interpretation particularly, so that's affecting my view of the acting. I'll have to see how Helena Bonham-Carter measures up ...

We have finally given in to homesickness and gone to see Jerusalem 3D at the IMAX theatre at the Natural History Museum (we also went to see the insect and non-dinosaur fossil galleries). It was so wonderful to see all the bird's eye views of so many places we miss, not just Jerusalem. I thought that it was very well done, not just Benedict Cumberbatch's narration and the chance to see the interior of the Dome of the Rock, but also the fact that they found three girls - Jewish, Christian and Muslim - who looked similar enough that at first glance you couldn't tell which was which. The Jewish girl had grandparents from Poland and Algeria, and the Christian girl had ancestors who came to the Holy Land from Greece. And everybody seemed to be eating the same food around big tables with large, noisy families. It was a good thing to see just before the elections, to remember why we want to go home.

We have new neighbours: T&S  moved to a condo in Bethesda, and have been replaced by AN &LN, and their children R (5) and T (3). We invited them over for tea the week before last, and had a lovely time (and this has already paid dividends in that we were able to find a connection from whom to borrow a travel cot for when JC and his family visit). AN is a lawyer, working for the appellate division of the Department of Justice, and L works for the Government Audit, where he writes guidelines (he has a graduate degree in philosophy). R had a wonderful time playing with A and S, although T was a little overwhelmed by all the newness, I think.

Of course, a high point of the past month for me was my birthday. A and S very sweetly bought a heart-shaped paperweight. My sewing machine arrived the day before, and ADC (who bought me sewing books) hid it so I would open it on the day, which I did. It took me an hour and a half to set it up for the first time, including winding thread from the spool to the bobbin (I love technical terms) and several attempts before I managed to get the thread through the eye of the needle. My machine is a Janome Magnolia 7318, which is highly recommended on the internet for beginning sewers. It has 25 different stitches, including a button hole, and I am very excited about using it. I've had one sewing lesson, so far, in which I learned a trick for threading the needle more efficiently, and made a drawstring bag. Sewing is definitely much more instant gratification than knitting - although I suspect that as soon as I try making something larger and more complex this will not be the case. I have bought fabric for the next lesson tomorrow, in which I will learn to make pyjama shorts, which I have washed but not yet ironed. I've also bought fabric for t-shirts and skirts, and I'm assuming that the first things I make will not really be wearable outside the house. But I'm having fun, and A and S have asked me to make them summer pyjamas already.