A Killer Whale of a Time

It was November last time we were in Washington, and the whale watching season had ended (at least outside of your local Walmart). This time around, we weren't going to miss the opportunity. The San Juan Islands sit within the Salish Sea, comprised of the numerous coastal waterways that lie between Washington and British Columbia. It's an area renowned for its three pods of resident orca whales, and we were determined to see them.

We began our morning with a meander through the picturesque grounds of Washington University, before catching a bus to the South Lake Union area. I never get tired of universities, so long as there's no study involved.

U Dub

Unless SeaWorld is your thing, there's always a chance you won't see orcas. With this in mind we took out an insurance policy of sorts, in the form of a seaplane. We boarded at Lake Union and flew to the San Juan Islands, landing quite literally in Friday Harbour. The idea was that a seaplane flight would lessen the disappointment if the whales didn't show.

Seattle from the Seaplane

Lake Union

The San Juan Islands from the Seaplane

Friday Harbour

I'd joked before leaving Perth that we'd be lucky to see a humpback whale, and so, of course, upon  boarding the tour naturalist announced with excitement that a humpback had been spotted on the other side of the island. No mention of orcas. Devastated. I've seen humpbacks up closer off the coast back home.

Humpback

It wasn't until later that the naturalist told us the resident orcas hadn't actually been in residence this year, and it had been one of the worst seasons ever for orca watching. The residents eat salmon, specifically chinook, and there just wasn't enough of it around. I gave up all hope at this point and tried not to be too miserable as we headed toward a minke whale.

Mr Minke

Our photographs of Mr Minke confirmed that there was also a Mrs Minke. The boring thing about watching humpback and minke whales (both baleen whales) is that they surface for twenty-odd seconds to breathe and then dive for anywhere from two to twenty minutes. By this time we'd also seen sea lions, porpoises, jumping fish and harbour seals (which are like the dogs of the ocean), and the boat had started to head back towards Friday Harbour.

NEK MINNIT...

Orca!

We had happened across a pod of transient orcas. These are your true killer whales, the ones which hunt and eat (and play with) marine mammals. They're not generally as rambunctious as the resident orcas, so they weren't breaching. In fact, they were hunting, and we think they were probably hunting Mr Minke... There were six or seven of them in total, and at least one juvenile.

Wild orcas aren't considered a danger to humans. There have been only a handful of potentially threatening incidents and none have been fatal; most can probably be attributed to the orca initially mistaking the human for prey. As for attacks on humans by captive orcas, expert opinions differ as to whether these are intentional or accidental. In any case, these are extremely intelligent, social, large and active creatures, who can swim 100 kilometres a day in the wild. Put them in a tank and their life expectancy plummets, their dorsal fins collapse, the females are forced to breed at a younger age than they would normally and the survival rate of calves is low. If the attacks are intentional, who can blame them.

The most magical part of this experience was seeing these majestic creatures in the wild, in their own habitat, just living their lives as they do. It was a privilege.

P.S. Unfortunately iPhoto has decided to disappear from my laptop, so I'm unable to process the photos. Apologies for them being a bit raw.

Retake Montlake

Perth to Melbourne. Melbourne to Los Angeles. Los Angeles to Seattle.

We've designed an itinerary to fill in some of the gaps from our last trip and minimise the number of times we cross our tracks. Seattle is the only place we're visiting for a second time, but with a very good reason. More on that in the next post (i.e. tomorrow), but rest assured that Seattle itself isn't the attraction.

Our plans were for Sunday, so we arrived on Saturday afternoon. Fortuitous, as it allowed us to catch some college football, and we'd been lamenting the fact that we won't make it to an NFL game. We didn't realise until much later that "some college football" was actually the opening of the brand new Husky Stadium, home of the University of Washington Huskies.

Husky Stadium

The $280 million rebuild began in 2011, after the original stadium, built in 1920, started to fall apart. It seats 70,138 people and is recognised as one of the loudest stadiums in the country. Some even claim that the mexican wave originated here in 1981.

The best part of the stadium is what you can't see from our cheap seats - the view. Situated on the Montlake Cut, where Lake Washington meets Puget Sound, those lucky people on the other side of the stadium can see both the Cascade and Olympic mountain ranges. I should point out that we bought our cheap tickets at an exorbitantly inflated price, such was the level of demand to see the Huskies "retake Montlake".

The obligatory marching band

Third down

The Huskies brought home a decisive win over the Boise State Broncos, with a final score of 38-6.

The real reason for this write up is to share a remarkable tale of synchronicity. During the second quarter I turned to Daniel and wondered aloud how the netball team I've been coaching did at their game, which would have finished some hours previously. The next day, courtesy of an email from the team manager, I learnt they'd also won. And the score? 38-6. Awesome.

TWO YEARS LATER

Back in 2011, our not-so-grand tour of the United States of America lasted for three months and took in more than twenty states. The blog lasted only six weeks, and my mother still reminds me how disappointed she was with my lack of staying power. I did make a half-hearted attempt to complete it upon our return to Perth, but the magic was missing. It seemed the only appropriate way to make up for my shortcomings was to return to America.

And so, less than two years later, here we are.

It's still summer in the States

When the Saints go marching in...

We got rinsed at the New Orleans train station by a taxi driver who refused to take us to our hotel for less than $20. He reasoned the traffic was too bad because of the Saints game that evening. The Superdome overlooks the station, and people were already tailgating in the car park. That said, it only took us five minutes to get to our accommodation. Always the hustle in America.

Degas House, on Esplanade Avenue in the Esplanade Ridge neighbourhood, is where French artist Edgar Degas lived and worked for the years he spent in New Orleans. Built in the 1850s, it's a picture of the affluence the city experienced in the years prior to the Civil War. It's separated from the French Quarter only by the I-10, underneath which runs the least salubrious neighbourhood you can imagine.

Degas House

Of course, we had tickets to said Saints game. The taxi back to the stadium cost us $8. It was our first and only NFL game for the trip, although we'd seen a college game a couple of weeks earlier. There's just something about the atmosphere, about being packed into a stadium with 73, 042 other people, all hooting and hollering.

The Superdome has been substantially renovated since it was used as an emergency shelter during Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath. It's huge, and the stands are so steep that if you stand up too quickly you feel as though you're about to topple downwards. We were, as always, surrounded by friendly Americans. Once they discovered we hailed from the land of Steve Irwin, they were just a little excited about explaining all the rules and commentating each and every play as it happened. Jaws still drop at our accent, which is greeted with particular wonder in the South. One sweet young thing of about sixteen responded to Daniel's half-time hot-dog order with eyes wide open and a "where ya'll from"? When we said Western Australia, she nudged one of her friends and whispered of our exotic origins. Said friend asked incredulously, "what ya'll doin' here"?

The game was a good one, I think. The Saints marched in by 14 points (WHO DAT). By the end of the evening our palms ached from high-fiving every American within a ten-yard radius of our seat.

New Orleans

We left Chicago as we arrived, on an Amtrak train. This time, though, it was a somewhat different experience, in coach. The route is called 'The City of New Orleans', so there's no prizes for guessing our destination. This trip was only 900 miles and thus only took a respectable 19 hours. We'd planned for our not so grand tour to more or less wipe out our life savings, but in the interests of avoiding going into debt on top of that, we thought we could economise in economy. We left Chicago in the evening, and we planned to simply sleep away a large part of the journey.

Given that I'd compared our last experience, in a Roomette, to flying in business class (disclaimer: I can only imagine what flying in business class is like), I was certain that coach would resemble cattle class. Alas, I was pleasantly surprised when we settled into our huge reclinable seats, me by the window, of course.

Apparently everybody else intended to sleep through the night, but their doing so certainly kept us from slumber. The problem with trains, you see, is that they're much quieter than airplanes. Which is great, if you have your own roomette. As it was, our carriage reverberated with the snores of Goliath, who must have been sitting down the back somewhere. Then there was a lady (who was anything but) across the aisle from us. This sow (and she was roughly that size) proceeded to feed her piglets COPIOUS amounts of junk food for dinner (and later twinkies for breakfast), before falling asleep and drowning out Goliath. As others dozed off too, we were surrounded by a "sounder" of pigs. Apparently that's a true collective, and I've not complained about Daniel's snoring since. 

So I was well and truly awake at daybreak. It was with silent awe that I sat and stared out the window, a little incredulous at what we were passing by. From memory, I'm fairly sure we pulled into Memphis, TN, in the early hours of the morning, which meant daylight was spent traversing almost the full height of Mississippi. There's some serious money in America (see, for example, my posts about Boston). But there's some really serious poverty. We passed through tiny town after tiny town, all with main streets scattered with derelict buildings, abandoned cars. It felt as though there were more trailer parks and mobile homes than houses. Fire had swept through many places, who knows how long ago. I don't know if anybody could afford to pull these buildings down - they were just abandoned, many of them collapsed inwards after being neglected for too long. If you think Australia has a problem with rural decay (and if you don't, go and watch Cunnamulla), it's got nothing on Mississippi. It was really, really sad.

We arrived in New Orleans mid-afternoon, exhausted, vowing never more to travel coach on a train. Even better, I'd managed to sleep on a skittle - grape, incidentally - and disembarked with a large purple patch on the bum of my jeans. Welcome to N'Awlins.

Perhaps it was lucky there would be no more train travel during this trip, though it's definitely something we'll do again. Phileas Fogg knew what was up - there really is something delicious about slow travel, about spending hours on a train savouring every scene that flies by your window. For the most part, it's very civilised. More so in a Roomette than in coach, perhaps.

“It may be taken for granted that, rash as the Americans are, when they are prudent there is good reason for it.”
― Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days

The Lincoln Park Zoo

While in Chicago we stayed at a hostel in Lincoln Park, a rather lovely suburb just north of the city. The suburb takes its name from Lincoln Park, within which is a 35-acre zoo. It was founded in 1868, and one early inhabitant was a bear with a penchant for escaping its enclosure and freely roaming the park at night.

Not only is this zoo one of the oldest in the country, it's free. Better still, each year in the lead up to Christmas it's decked out with gazillions of fairy lights in every colour imaginable. After dark the zoo becomes a rainbow playground where people eat copious amounts of warm buttered popcorn and watch ice sculpting, while the animals look on, slightly annoyed by the kerfuffle. 

For Daniel, this was the pinnacle of our American Christmas experience. They celebrate the holidays with such earnest joy and enthusiasm, it's hard not to get swept up by it.

Cloud Gate

Meet the most incredible piece of public art I've ever had the pleasure of admiring. While its proper name is Cloud Gate, it's more often affectionately known as the silver bean. It's everything a piece of public sculpture should be - beautiful, thought-provoking, interesting, memorable.

Cloud Gate

From underneath

It sits in the middle of Millennium Park, Chicago, and it's constantly surrounded by mesmerised people. Weighing roughly one hundred tons, I think it is worth every penny of the twenty-three million dollars it cost to create. Amazing, right? It's no green cactus-thingy though...