Author: Jon

Jet Pack Adventures

 

Today we both got to fly a jet pack.

I’m not sure there’s a lot I can add to that which you can’t see in the photos and video really, other than the fact that it was obviously amazing and Jen was much better at it than me (mainly because she didn’t breath in a lung full of sea water each time she fell in!).

Apparently this is the first place in the world these jet packs have been available for public use and they’ve only been running since June 15th. Unsurprisingly they’ve been booked out every day too. If they ever open up a place like this in England we’re going to be broke, very quickly.

I’ve also added a few photos from this evening. We took a boat over to Sunset Key to eat at an amazing restaurant on the beach called Latitudes. Oh, and yes we did see a man on the way who’d trained cats to tightrope and jump through hoops of fire. I took a photo just in case nobody believed us.

 

Key West

We’ve been in Key West for two days now and it’s growing on us.

Our first experience was talking a wander out on our first night and ending up on Duval Street , looking for somewhere to eat. We didn’t see any of the 5* hotels, top restaurants and beautiful marinas and beaches I had expected. Instead, there are lots of tacky T-shirt shops and empty bars and we ended up eating in the Hard Rock Cafe (which was quite nice actually but still… ) It turns out that September is the dead season here. Everywhere is pretty empty and the bars all close at 10pm.

I did say it was growing on us though because today has been much better. We took a trolley tour around Key West which showed us some of the nicer parts, including Ernest Hemmingway’s house , Key West Lighthouse, the southernmost point in the US (which is closer to Cuba than it is to the Florida mainland) and Key West Aquarium. It’s actually a lovely place in the day and there are quite a few sights we’re going to revisit before we leave. After the tour we went to the top of the “Shipwreck Museum” which has a really tall tower on top giving great views of the island.

Tonight, we did a bit of research before going out for dinner and found a really nice ocean-front restaurant in front of one of the marinas here. The Florida Keys are famous for “Key Lime Pie” and I thought it’s be rude not to try it (hence the photo) I can confirm that it’s pretty amazing. Finally. on our way home we were treated to one of Florida’s famous lightning storms which I tried to capture on camera, but it was a bit cloudy.

So, it turns out that Key West is actually as nice as we expected it to be. You just have to walk in the right direction.

 

 

 

Theatre of the Sea

We’ve managed to escape the clutches of tropical storm Lee, although it was fairly close. The rain was so heavy as we left New Orleans that I couldn’t even see the white lines on the road in front of the car and that was just on the outskirts of a storm that was at least 100 miles away. Parts of the gulf coast have had up to 20 inches of rain in the 2 days since we left so it sounds like we got out in time. It sounds like New Orleans has weathered the storm well though, to be honest the locals were barely batting an eyelid at the prospect of a storm that size.

Anyway, on to happier things, after a night in Tampa on Friday and Key Largo last night we’re in Key West now, the most southerly point in the US, and today we took a trip to the Theatre of the Sea .

The main attraction at Theatre of the Sea is the chance to swim with dolphins. However, we’re doing that again in Orlando next week so we opted to take a swim with a sealion called Mimi. Once again we were lucky enough to be the only two people in our group so got to spend more time than normal swimming and posing with Mimi. We were both surprised how much she felt and behaved just like a labrador! Unlike dolphins, Sealions have short hair and they’re more playful. We both had a great time, especially Jen who’s been grinning ever since.

Despite it being a national holiday here and all the hotels being booked up we keep being told how dead the tourism industry in the US is this season. The economy here is in a terrible state and most of their tourism is internal so wherever we go it feels like we’re the only ones here and we’re getting good deals and no queues everywhere, which is nice for us at least.

 

 

Jazz Clubs of New Orleans

If you ask four different locals which is the best jazz club in New Orleans (and I have), you’ll get four different answers. The one thing they’ll all tell you though is that there isn’t a bad one! New Orleans is the home of jazz and you can’t throw a stone here without hitting an incredibly talented musician of some description (although I thought it best not to try).

We started last night by taking our hotel porter’s advice and seeing Irvin Mayfield at the Royal Sonesta Hotel. We were only going to stay for half an hour and we were there a bit earlier so got seated right in front of the stage. It’s not often you get to sit 3ft from a grammy award winning artist (not to mention his band) and watch them play live but we were blown away and obviously we ended up staying for the whole two hours.

Then we tried a few more bars along Bourbon Street, which were also pretty good. Most of the famous clubs in New Orleans are in Bourbon Street or Frenchmen street . The students and tourists come to Bourbon Street to drink football sized cocktails while the locals go to the proper clubs on Frenchmen street.

Tonight was our last night here so having been to Bourbon Street yesterday we decided to finish off with a  trip to Frenchmen Street to get the more authentic experience and we had a great night. Some of the clubs here are smaller than our living room and it’s amazing to see such brilliantly talented musicians playing to about 20 people.

In case it wasn’t obvious from the last few posts, we’ve both got a bit of a soft spot for New Orleans. We’re both going to be sad to leave.

 

New Orleans City

We’ve had two days to explore New Orleans now. We took a city bus tour yesterday but it was so bad that we decided to take another one with a different company today. The first one was rushed and so full that you couldn’t see out of both sides of the bus so we basically missed half the things the guide was talking about. Today’s tour guide however was much better, more relaxed and made three stops so we could explore a bit more.

Between the two tours and our own exploration we’ve seen a lot of New Orleans in two days and it really is an absolutely wonderful city. It has a richer history than most US cities having been ruled by the Native Americans, the French, the Spanish and then the Americans. The French Quarter is beautiful during the day and crazy after the sun goes down, the jazz clubs and street musicians are fantastic and we haven’t even had time to explore the swamps, the voodoo history, the Mississippi river or the plantations and the history of slavery here.

We did have time to explore one of the famous cemeteries though. New Orleans is built below sea level and floods so often it’s a really bad idea to bury people underground, so all the cemeteries are above ground. What’s more, space is limited so the tombs are often shared and even “rented” until space in another tomb becomes available. You can see in the photo below the rows of tombs which were built for yellow fever outbreaks when they had to quickly house hundreds of bodies! Pretty grim, but I must be slightly weird because I find cemeteries fascinating.

We also had time to check out the famous Cafe Du Monde in the French Market where they serve Beignets (pronounced ‘ben-yays’), kind of like a hot square doughnut covered in a ridiculous amount of icing sugar. I’m wondering how many I can bring home on the flight.

And now to the serious bit…

The two things you can’t avoid in New Orleans are great Jazz music and the after effects of Hurricane Katrina . It was the second of those that will leave us with probably the most powerful memories of our trip so far.

It’s six years this week since Katrina hit New Orleans and when we toured the Lower 9th Ward earlier today the trail of destruction was still evident. Some parts of the Lower 9th were under 28ft of water and much of it still looks like a ghost town. It’s an incredibly depressing sight.

80% of New Orleans was flooded and you can see it’s effects all over the city, but 1000 people died in the Lower 9th Ward and 4000 homes were destroyed, all because a boat (which shouldn’t have been there) was thrown into a levee wall and left a great big hole in it. You can still see the marks left on the empty houses where the water line came to, six years later.

Also obvious on a lot of houses are the markings left by authorities when they finally got to the lower 9th, two weeks late. Each house has spray painted markings on the front including a cross on it to show where the water level came to, a series of codes to explain the state they found the house in (e.g. TFW for ‘Total Flood Water’), the date they surveyed it and a number indicating the number of dead bodies they found inside…

Everybody you talk to in New Orleans was affected by the hurricane in some way or another, our tour guide lived on the Lower 9th, the jazz musician we went to see last night lost his father in the floods, everybody has a story to tell and it’s just such a massive shame because New Orleans was and still is such an amazing city and the people are so lovely. The way the city is being rebuilt is testament to that.

As I type this a state of emergency has been declared in New Orleans because there’s a tropical storm on it’s way this weekend and it could flood here again (not to anywhere near the same extent but still…) We’ll be fine because we’re leaving tomorrow anyway but it just seems like such a depressing cycle.

 

 

New Orleans Photo Tour

[quote]The Mississippi Delta was shining like a national guitar. I am following the river, down the highway, through the cradle of the civil war. I’m going to Graceland.
– Paul Simon, ‘Graceland'[/quote]

 

Well, kind of… We did that journey in reverse yesterday when we drove from Memphis down to New Orleans , running parallel to the Mississippi River .

The scenery was a little dull until we hit Louisiana, but with perfect timing we arrived in ‘The Big Easy’ at sunset last night, travelling over swamps and rivers for the last 50 miles or so and Jen managed to get a few nice Sunset photos.

Today we took a photographic tour round the historical French District which was lovely, taking in St. Louis Cathedral , Jackson Square , the French Markets etc. I’ve had far more practice at landscape photography than I have at street photography but I’m fairly pleased with the results. We started very early this morning though so we’re going to get some rest before our proper city tour tomorrow.

 

 

Graceland

I can’t claim to be the biggest fan of Elvis. He didn’t write his songs, he wasn’t a particularly notable guitarist or pianist and although he was a ‘good’ singer I doubt many would say he was the greatest.

You don’t get to be pretty much the most successful recording artist in history without having something special though. Charisma, x-factor, controversy, an uncanny knack of picking great pop songs to record… Whatever it was, Elvis had it, lots of it, and his story is one of the most interesting in pop music. As a music fan you can’t help but be drawn to Graceland .

There’s a lot more to see than the house but we started with an audio tour of the Graceland Mansion itself. It feels exactly like you’d expect a mansion bought by a very rich young man in the 1950’s to feel. It’s lavish, opulent, completely OTT in places (the ‘jungle room’ has green grass carpet on all the walls and ceiling and an indoor waterfall), but it’s also nowhere near as big as you’d expect it to be. The main floor only has a living room, music room, dining room, kitchen guest bedroom and sitting room (the jungle room, which was built on an extension) so it’s really not that big. He did have a TV room in the basement with three televisions in it though, which at the time would have cost a fortune, but still it doesn’t feel like it deserves to be called a mansion. He did add to the house though, there is quite a lot of land with stables and a huge racquetball court housed in it’s own building which he added in the 60’s.

Also located in the grounds (in his meditation garden) is his grave and those of his family. I can’t have done much research on Graceland before going because I didn’t know he was actually buried there and I wasn’t expecting to see his grave or the hundreds of gifts, floral tributes and messages that are still left there on a daily basis by visitors. I’m not sure what I made of this memorial garden. You can’t help being moved when reading the tributes and I saw a few people crying as they stood in front of his gravestone read all the messages, but at the same time it was completely nuts and obviously incredibly tacky in places.

As I said though, there’s much more to see than the house itself. We spent some time looking round his incredible automobile museum (see the photos of his Silver Ghost, Ferrrari Dino and some incredible Cadillacs) and then had a look round his two private jets.

We finished the visit with a tour of another museum containing costumes and other exhibits that obviously wouldn’t fit into the house. I’m really glad we took a detour to Memphis to visit Graceland. You certainly get your money’s worth there and here were still more exhibits and mini-museums we could have done if we’d have had more time but we had to get to the National Civil Rights Museum which Jen’s going to write about in the next post.

2 Days in Memphis

We left Texas yesterday and drove all the way through Arkansas to Tennessee where we’re spending 2 nights in Memphis .

We’ve got more updates to come from Memphis but I thought I’d put a quick post up with a few of the photos we’ve taken so far. The night time photos are from Beale Street which is famous for being the “Home of Blues”. These days it’s still full of blues clubs and bars and looked like it would have been buzzing on a Saturday night but unfortunately it was a bit empty on a Sunday.

Anyway, I’ve just eaten a full rack of BBQ ribs so I’m off for a lie down.

 

 

Sixth Floor Museum

From Roswell to Dallas , and the scene of the assassination of John F. Kennedy , we’ve covered two of America’s biggest conspiracy theories in two days.

We arrived in Texas last night and so far it’s fulfilling every stereotype I had of it. The landscape on the drive towards Dallas is littered with “nodding donkeys” (oil pumps) and you can actually smell oil in the air as you drive past the oil fields. There are also plenty of billboards advertising gun shows in Dallas and Fort Worth.

We visited the sixth floor museum today, located on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository , where Lee Harvey Oswald sat when he shot the president on November 22, 1963.

I’ll be the first to admit I knew very little about the assassination until today and I knew very little about JFK, but that possibly made it even more interesting. Because of the nature of the event the museum doesn’t contain any physical artefacts or exhibits, just newspaper clippings and photographs presented with an audio tour which told the story perfectly. The tour was comprehensive and covered the history of the man himself, the lead up to the event, a timeline of the day, the aftermath and the subsequent conspiracy theories. The highlight was visiting the corner of the floor and the window (still propped open) when Oswald hid.

Although the audio tour and the photos and clippings were great, I think what made the experience so special was being able to look out of the windows on the sixth floor and see exactly what Lee Harvey Oswald would have seen that day. We took a walk up on to the grassy knoll , where conspiracy theorists think more shots were fired from and looked towards the spot where the shooting happened. Then we drove our car down the route his motorcade took, right over the spot in the middle lane of Elm St. where he was shot. What was interesting is just how close the shooting, book depository and grassy knoll are together, a triangle not more than 100 yards wide.

It may have just been the bias of those who curated the museum and it’s unusual to feel sorry for politicians, but I left with the feeling that JFK was one of the good guys who still had a lot to offer when he was shot down. He’d  been president for just over 1000 days but in that time he made a promise to send a man to the moon within 10 years and diverted billions of dollars into the space race. He also diffused the Cuban Missile Crisis , forcing the Russians to back down and signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty . He created the Peace Corps and was a big supporter of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement , introducing the Civil Rights Act which was passed after his death in 1964. I may be wrong, but it makes you wonder what he might have done if he’d have served longer.

Anyway I’m rambling. We’re off to Memphis tomorrow and we’re keeping an eye on the news because there’s a big hurricane heading towards the east coast. It’ll be long gone by the time we get there but I hope it doesn’t leave too much destruction behind.

P.S – Not many photos today I’m afraid as the museum has a photography ban inside…

 

 

 

Roswell UFO Museum

Driving into Roswell at night is spooky.

It shouldn’t be because it’s just a city like every other we’ve visited, but it’s in the middle of absolutely nowhere in the desert and there’s nothing else on the road to Roswell than military bases, missile ranges and border patrol checks (even though it’s a fair way from the Mexican border). Add in a pretty spectacular lightning storm and I don’t mind telling you I was spooked before we even got there.

In the light of day Roswell looked fairly normal so we started with a trip to the UFO Museum and Research Center . The museum contains a large collection on newspaper clippings, testimonials, photos and other “evidence” of the UFO crash that some say happened on 4th July 1947. There is so much to read you could spend days there.

Now, obviously I don’t believe in UFO crash landings, but the sheer number of people involved in the incident and some indisputable facts about cover-ups, threats to individuals from the military and “deathbed confession” from some that had stayed quiet about the incident their whole lives all point the the fact that ‘something’ definitely happened. There are so many reports from those who either saw the crash, the military cordons or debris from the site etc. that it’s either the best organised hoax ever (involving hundreds of people), or the military were definitely trying to cover something up!

Given Roswell’s location, very close to Holloman Air Force Base and White Sands Missile Testing Range , and given that the US were testing all kinds of post WWII technologies in the desert including nuclear weapons delivery delivery and airborne radar tracking equipment, the obvious explanation is that some top secret defence technology crashed to the ground and the military came and took it away. That explanation is dull though and I’m glad there are still thousands of crazies out there perpetuating the conspiracy theories, most of them in Roswell.

So, having seen the (comparatively) serious stuff, we set out to find some of the craziness and we weren’t disappointed. We started with the worlds only UFO themed McDonalds and then visited ‘Alien Zone’ which was absolutely nuts. I won’t try to explain it but I hope you enjoy the photos.