#they went back to eating from the deadly nightshade blossoms | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

rachelisnotatwork · 8 years ago

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Week 17- all good things come to an end...

The problem with Ocracoke is it is in the middle of nowhere, which meant we had to get up pretty early on Monday to get the ferry out of there. I compensated for our early start by wrapping a hoodie around my eyes and falling asleep in the car on the ferry, which I maintain was not at all creepy for the other very awake inhabitants on this tiny, tiny ferry that carries about ten cars.

Once we got back to the “main" islands, we grabbed some to-go breakfast (sadly no pancakes and so forth) and made a quick stop off at the Wright Memorial. We’d been planning to go there before Ocracoke but my desire to see the hill they launched the Kitty Hawk off was not strong enough to want to see it in the driving rain. Monday was sunny, so we went. It’s a big dune that they grew grass on to preserve and then they put up a very art-deco lump of stone at the top with a pompous inscription on. You did get a view of the whole island from up there, but the whole island isn’t much as this is pretty much the only thing at over 5 metres elevation (whilst on Ocracoke I did ruminate that it was probably the worst place in the world to be if a tsunami hit).

Then we spent forever in the car. But when we finally got to Washington, we were visiting friends who had made us dinner, so that made it all worth it!

Tuesday we had a lazy day (as opposed to all those “busy” days that had preceded it...) We had brunch locally and then we headed into Washington.

We toured the Library of Congress, which in American fashion had some Bibles they were extremely proud of and banged on about at length. The building is beautiful though so it was worth sitting through the “aren’t our Bibles amazing” part of the free tour. Plus they had a World War One exhibit on with some quality posters in.

We then tried to get lunch, which isn’t easy around the library of congress (I suspect the politicians have an amazing canteen tourists totally aren’t welcome at), and then we pottered around the botanical gardens. The botanical gardens has a tiny outdoor bit and a giant indoor green house, which was pretty nice and also had a room full of deadly plants all of which you could easily reach to nab a few leaves off. Guess when everyone has free access to guns, most people can’t be bothered to go down the deadly nightshade route.

Wednesday we met up with another friend who lives in DC and who had amazingly taken the day off work to hang out with us! We went to the theatre Lincoln got shot at (having seen the chair he got shot in last time) and I learnt his assassin supposedly got a Weber C ankle fracture jumping off the balcony but it might have actually come from falling off his horse later (a story I find a bit more likely having seen a few Weber C ankle fractures in my time and none of them looked ready to run across a stage and jump onto a horse. Then we pottered down to the American Natural History Museum to enjoy some free photography, giant diamonds and dinosaurs.

Marcel was very keen to tour the Supreme Court. I was not, because as I say, not my monkeys, not my circus. So we split up at that point and he went there, and I went off for a much more enjoyable leisurely lunch and catch up.

Thursday morning we had to head off to New York. Our original plan had been to return the car in Washington and get a train to NYC. Then we found out that the train between Washington and NYC was going to be a minimum of $182 for both of us. So we called Hertz and they let us change our return destination for $11. Much better value for money. We did decide we should probably take to a car wash to get rid of the dust of the deserts and the thousand dead bugs that had smashed into it on its journey of thousands of miles. But it was raining really heavily and they were all shut (which seems to be a feature of the day we return long-term rentals) so that was off the cards. We did however do a charity shop run to dump some surplus now we no longer had the car to act as extra storage. I very reluctantly let go of my electric kettle along with all of the change we’d accumulated in the car due to our problem of only being able to recognise quarters.

Marcel insisted we then go for breakfast at the same chain of pancake place he’d fallen in love with in Alabama. We got there and found out they didn’t have the sour dough pancakes he really liked and depressingly in Washington it seems to be the law they print the calorie counts of all their meals, which is really THE way to spoil a pancake brunch.

It continued to teem with rain on our way up to NYC. We made a point of stopping in Delaware for coffee, as we’d not realised we even had passed through it the last time we went. We drank starbucks (this time with the closest approximation of Marcel’s name we’d seen!) and watched bins blow away in the wind. Delaware is beautiful.

We dropped the car off at Newark Airport (incidentally the car rental return area has an ill-wind blowing over it which smells like a slaughter house, which is extremely disconcerting and grim) and then started the very, very slow process of getting into New York and across to Brooklyn to see the friend we were staying with. By the time we arrived, despite having done nothing but sit in various cars/trains/subways we were shattered so got take-out and ate in.

To make up for the previous day’s brunch disappointment, Marcel insisted we go to a place we’d frequented on previous trips called Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds. They had buy two, get a third free on slices of pie so we really overdid breakfast.

It was pretty windy and cold so we made indoor day plans. To continue our nerdy podcast tourism theme, we went to the Met and listened to the appropriate Memory Palace episodes. Which was actually a really good way to see the Met and it made me go to the American wing, which I’d never been to before but is actually quite nice.

In the evening we went out for arepas. I think we’d mistaken the branch we’d been to before so ended up in the world’s tiniest arepa restaurant where (after we’d queued for ages) we ended up pretty much with our knees to our chins. But the food was delicious and it allowed me to go on a massive plantain binge. On our way back we wanted to get dessert so we went to Camilla’s local branch of Snowdays, the shaved ice place. Incredibly disappointingly it didn’t have thermochromic spoons but I bravely ate onwards.

On Saturday we had a bad brunch (most water-y shakshuka ever, and after an extremely long wait; as a committed bruncher, I was disappointed) and then walked over to the brooklyn botanical gardens. We were meeting a friend there so we enjoyed a slow meander under the cherry blossoms that were just starting to come out and checked out their very impressive bonsai tree collection. Marcel has now decided he wants to have a bonsai tree, whereas after reading the description of the massive faff of keeping a bonsai tree I’ve decided I only want a bonsai tree when I’m rich enough to afford my own bonsai pruner.

We then headed over to another friend’s cocktail party (with beautiful sunset views) and followed up that with meeting our host and her friend for dinner over in Williamsburg. Which despite being quite close to where we were staying in Flatbush was a massive arse to get back from, so we ended up sharing a cab.

On Sunday we headed back over to Prospect Park to visit Smorgsburg, Brooklyn’s outdoor food market. It was a beautiful sunny day and there were about a million people there, which was “suboptimal” as I’m not at my best before breakfast and dealing with large crowds of people with baby strollers is beyond me. I ended up eating an ice cream sandwich for breakfast, which I entirely blame on them.

We then headed to the transit museum, because I love trains. It was housed in an old subway station (even more exciting) and had lots of antique stock, complete with hilarious weird antique adverts. So definitely worth a trip.

After that we headed to the Upper East Side to meet up with a distant cousin I had not met before. We’ve been facebook friends for a while, and when he heard we were travelling in the USA he invited us for drinks. I’m normally quite reluctant to meet strangers as I’m terrible at small talk but we had an absolute blast and ended up staying rather late as we had not only dinner plans, but we also had to go and pick up a packing slip for a parcel we’d ordered to a friend’s address. But definitely worth it. Clearly all von Simsons share the quality of awesomeness (and modesty).

The following day we tried to pick up the parcel. I had got my friend to sign it over to me as her agent. I had taken a picture of her ID. I had taken a picture of her holding her ID and me holding the parcel slip together. Was this enough to get past the woman at the Post Office on a power trip? It was not. Which was level 10 annoying but to be expected.

Afterwards we went for a long walk in Central Park and then along the High Line and ate ice lollies and talked about how weird it was that we would be going home that evening after so long.

Our flight wasn’t until 11pm so we squeezed in a cheese binge at Murray’s Cheese Bar before heading home to sit on our suitcases and load all the books into Marcel’s hand luggage so we could stay under the weight limit. On the way back, the subway was pretty crowded. The man next to me asked a fairly innocuous question and since we were less than one stop away from our station I decided to break the cardinal rule of public transport and answer him. We promptly got stuck at a red signal and he turned out to be floridly manic and spoke mostly in rhyme, interspersed with singing 80s songs at me. That was the longest twenty minutes of my life.

We headed over to the airport. Upon arrival at JFK and I immediately remembered why I hated JFK. We had more than 2 hours to go until our flight but the security queue was spilling out of the assigned lines into the main lobby with a more than two hour predicted wait time. Our airline (Norwegian) didn’t offer online check in for JFK, which would have been fine if they had had more than one counter open for the three flights they had leaving. At this point I was rather hoping we were going to be offered to be bumped as I wouldn’t have minded an extra day of holiday... But alas they eventually checked us in and we did make it through the (extremely grumpy) security as they’d brought in dogs to speed things up (which I feel always makes me look suspect due to being frightened of dogs, especially large-toothed dogs that have a legal right to be in your personal space).

Norwegian is a budget airline, and this was a co-share with a budget Spanish airline who was actually running the flight so I will leave to the imagination how “good” our flight was. There were two small advantages though. Firstly, we were in the emergency exit seats and secondly, whilst we were waiting for the flight we were sitting opposite an insanely annoying woman who use the hour we were left waiting at the gate to call everyone on her phone to talk very loudly about perceived slights of the world around her- with a bit of a racist tinge. She then got her ticket out and I noticed she was sitting in our row in seat C and we were D and E. A furious but very silent argument then started between Marcel and I about who would have to sit next to her, but when we got on the plane THANK GOD she was the other side of the aisle to us as once she got on the plane and no longer had her phone, she then talked non-stop at the very polite middle-aged British couple sitting next to her who couldn’t work out how to shut her up.

And so the 4 month adventure ended. 6 countries and once around the world later, we were back on the Overground feeling like we’d never left. So naturally time to plan the next adventure...

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