The Big Apple in 24 hours

A short while ago, I was in New York and my youngest Ali flew in to join me. It was meant to be a weekend but life intervened so it turned out to be only a little over 24 hours of father son togetherness and I meant to make the most of it.

Ali lives and works in Cayman but on occasion goes to Bermuda for work as well so it was fairly simple for him to jump on a plane for the 1 1/2 hour hop to JFK. I'd suggested he take the subway and I'd meet him and walk him around for the next 24 hours.

First thing was a late breakfast and I chose Sarge's Deli which I knew made the best all around corned beef hash in the world. Topped with 3 fried eggs and home fries, this is a real breakfast!

We ached as we came out but with the weather an unseasonal and balmy 23 degrees with bright sunshine, I proposed to walk Ali all over town. With New York set out in a classic grid pattern, all you needed to know are cross streets and you can find anywhere.

Ali needed some shopping, personal items, so we hit the stores. Midtown Mall is right next to Macy's so after blanking there, this was our target for Ali was on a budget. This all made me realise just how much US retail is suffering. There's so much of it, so many people looking to buy too, but with incomes not really rising and Amazon crowding out many retailers, those that remain have a tough time surviving.

We found a fairly ratty JC Penney as it happened with the men's department hosted by an attractive young lady who found a very special deal for Ali. I would have been absolutely mortified to be served in this fashion when I was younger and actually let an attractive young lady know what undies I wore, but then again being from the old school of Speedo's and tighty whiteys, perhaps that would be the case now too. Ali being from the new generation of board shorts and boxers held no such feeling.

As we had a subway card, we hopped on the subway for positively 4th Street (a nod to Bob Dylan who used to live there). This is Greenwich Village and home to our evening's entertainment. I wanted to show Ali the clubs and of course actually confirm that something would be on tonight. Cafe Wha was still there with the House Band due to start up around 5 pm, and around the corner Bleecker Street was also there and ..... had become almost gentrified. Possibly a Starbucks even.

When I first went to NYC back in the 1980's, it was dirty, edgy and a bit grungy. Some nice parts too of course but it had a definite Noo Yawk edge. That was one of the things that made it attractive. Perhaps it was the crack cocaine epidemic which hit the big apple in the mid-eighties? I never saw that in person but do remember walking up 5th Avenue at night near Grand Central Station with a work colleague and a couple of big black guys wearing reddish blazers came up behind us and said 'keep walking'. I hadn't a clue what was going on but my colleague said 'don't worry, they are the Angels'.... it may have been a different name but these were guys that roamed the street at nighttime to prevent people from being mugged.

There you go, the Guardian Angels.

It was Rudy Giuliani who was responsible for cleaning up NYC sometime later with his no nonsense policing tactics and I think he did a great job at that. New York is unquestionably a cleaner and safer city than it was but as we strolled along Bleecker Street, I did get the feeling that it had been tidied up a little too much. Gone were lots of the old grungy bars and eating places, gone were a number of places that showcased music like the Blues and Jazz. However Terra Blues still remains and we were able to confirm that there would be music later on.

We turned left up Broadway and because it was so lovely a day kept on walking. And walking. So much life to be seen in a city when you walk around it. New York is so fascinating too. You may think that being a huge city it has no distinctive bits and pieces but that is totally untrue. Korea Town, Japan Town, Chinatown, Little Italy, Hell's Kitchen... some great names too! Sarge's Diner was in a section called Murray Hill (2nd and 30-something). There were actually a few hills too, but not too drastic. Because big retail is suffering so much, mum and pop shops proliferate which I think is great as the independents reflect the community to a large extent and add great feel to the place. OK, I am a fan of the big apple. It's a real pleasure to visit.

Of course I wanted to eat at a venerable NY steakhouse but first choice Keens was full and Del Monico's could only manage a ridiculous time so we settled for Frankie & Johnnie's Steakhouse on W 37th street. It was great... of course. Steaks were huge and done beautifully. Martinis sang to us. Just a perfect preamble to the rest of the evening.

Cheers!

After this we soldiered back down to Greenwich Village for the Terra Blues experience and after some bar hopping, we finally arrived. I am pleased to say it was just how I remembered it. Small, low ceiling, little tables with chairs dotted around the club and some terrific blues. We stayed for 3 sets and made it back to our hotel about 3.30 am.

The following day was a Sunday so we wanted brunch which we found to be what almost every other New Yorker was doing as well. The myriad eateries that offered it were packed solid ... it was another lovely day so this is not surprising, however I remembered a Greek place on 1st Avenue and we wandered down there and were richly rewarded with piles of pancakes, French Toast and other goodies that you associate with brunch.

As we left JFK to our different destinations, we both agreed that we'd probably skip the next couple of meals.

Cocktails versus Shooters

I like Living Social, the online deal of the day company that promotes events and special offers in your targeted location.  Quite often they have curios that you wouldn't normally think about so that when you go and have a great time, it all makes for a terrific occasion.

Of course being an instructional tutorial on making Classic Martinis didn't do any harm to its potential attraction either.

So when I saw the deal offered by the Bartending School of Ontario (a very grandiose title for a small shopfront on Danforth) called "Martini/Shooter Insanity" for $69 for 2 people, I thought this was a no brainer.

12 others had turned up for the event with at least 2, maybe 3 birthdays suggesting that it would turn out to be a fun evening.  I was a little alarmed to see that we were by far the oldest but the menu for the evening comprised a detailed list of classic cocktails and another page of what seemed like awful concoctions with names such as 'Swedish Pornstar'.  This sounded fun!

The teacher (what do you call a bartender who teaches others? Not exactly school but…) started things off with the Swedish Pornstar -- a mix of melon liquor and a couple of others that ended up looking a muddy green something which was really sweet and tasted like medicine.  I declined but the others, particularly the young ladies along the bar, chugged them straight back and shouted "Whoo-hoo".  This was a theme for the evening as it turned out.

Fortunately we then moved to the classic Martini, although the teacher did ask preferences for gin or vodka -- vodka won.  He told us that vodka was unknown in North America before the 1930's so the traditional cocktails (Martinis, Tom Collins, Manhattan, etc) were either gin or whisky based and that the Classic Martini was (a) gin based, (b) stirred not shaken -- shaking would bruise the gin and dilute it, and (c ) should be served in the traditional Martini glass not the buckets introduced by the Americans later on to super size the drinks.  

James Bond, he said, was a wuss preferring vodka and shaken over stirred showing his clear preference for watered down booze.  Fortunately for the teacher, 007 wasn't there so couldn't put him right in probably robust manner.

So wrong on so many levels: wrong glass, shaken not stirred… I feel used

I like my Martinis shaken as well, incidentally.

Next was a delicious Manhattan, a bourbon based drink that I requested… perhaps I'm starting to like Bourbon after all!  The teacher added a remarkable feature namely that of adding some smoke to the operation by setting light to some hickory chips and using a device to send a focused stream of smoke into the glass before the concoction was assembled…. and shaken.

Firing up the Manhattan

Served with a cherry in classic Martini glasses, this to me was the drink of the night.

"Ooh, never had this before," was the gallery's comment.

"Not bad, but I prefer Tequila shots," was another.

Reminded me of England.

And so the evening then turned… to shooters.  No tequila on display but there was no shortage of other booze which the teacher used in showing us how to make layered shots in a test tube… really.  Apparently in clubs this is the rage but the tubes have to have flat bottoms, not those rounded bottoms that no doubt are remembered from school chemistry lessons.  

Really!

This is because the nanny LCBO believes it encourages people to chug these shots too fast as you cannot put them down anywhere.  With a flat bottom, apparently, you have the opportunity of putting the tube down somewhere and not drinking too fast.  Now, just who is going to savor a drink containing 5+ colors of supreme alcoholic content tasting of Jagermeister … for at the end of the day, that is what all these fancy shots ended up tasting like but with a varying degree of ultra sweetness too.

Our efforts.  Jagermeister anyone?

"Whoo-hoo" as my fellow students said.

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Moving on...

We had a spare day after CFA grading finished and decided to go tubing on the James River near Spottsdale, some 20 miles south of Charlottesville.  CFA had organized a wine tasting at a Virginia winery called Veritas (actually pretty decent whites and reds) so we needed to go in the morning.

The place itself was in the middle of absolutely nowhere and was one of only 2 still surviving manual ferries in the USA.  The James River at that point is about 50 yards across and 4 foot deep (very low for the time of year) but it is still in service but only at weekends.

The James River Runners company that operates the canoeing, kayaking and tubing from the Hatton Ferry location worked out of a shack that looked like a shack except that it was probably the family home as well.

They seemed professional enough and gave us the safety features talk and ran through a host of things and then we hopped into the van, a 1970's Econoline with doors that didn't really close driven by a guy called Judd who'd just spent 4 and a half years in the military and needed to 'de-stress some' before figuring out what we wanted to do for a career.  Given where the US military has been operating, I imagine he had seen some tough times.

He drove us 3 miles up river and dropped us off by the side of the river and said we should walk out beyond the really shallow water into the faster moving water in the middle of the stream and then hurled out a couple of inner tubes and drove off.

So much for modern technology!

They really were just truck inner tubes.

OK they did have the company's name stenciled on the side but that was it as far as an operator's manual was concerned.

But really it was dead easy.  Once you got down the steep muddy bank you wandered out into the middle of the river and jumped on.

It was actually refreshing to not have waivers and procedures designed to keep you from doing something stupid to yourself and just jump on and float.

This we did and it did take 2 and a half hours to get back having negotiated a couple of gentle rapids and with the only nuisance being when you ploughed into a rock where the water was more shallow.

Great fun and a lovely way to de-stress.  Maybe Judd should do it once in a while.

The final cocktail in Virginia: Cosmo and Pisco Sour... guess who's who's

**

The only other hassle was getting up at 4 am this morning only to find the plane missing a part and so unable to fly meaning that we jumped in a taxi with 2 others and drove to Washington Reagan airport to catch a plane to Chicago where we arrived around 1 pm, just in time for deep dish pizza at Giordano's followed by a nice Martini at the Peninsula Hotel nearby.

The Pentagon from the air

Chicago's sky line

Giordano's Chicago deep dish styled pizza -- apparently dreamed up by grandma 200 years ago and brought to Chicago because there weren't any decent pizzas to be found.  This was a small but still monstrously heavy pizza pie of dreams.  Really nice too!

Not really that bad a day after all!

Many Happy Returns

It has been a long trip, about 7 weeks in all, with highlights all along the way.  Here they are in no particular order:

Apple Turnover -- Texas Bakery, Galveston, Texas

Some days you really feel the need for something sweet early in the day.  The day we left Galveston was one such.  On the road our routine was to stop at a McDonald's drive thru for coffee, as it is always good and hot, but that day our sweet teeth were jangling.

Luckily we found the Texas Bakery on the main street out of Galveston called the Broadway.  The pastry was crisp and perfect whilst the filling unusually was not the gut wrenching sweetness that is often the case but actually tasted of apples.

Just perfect.

Chinese Hot Pot -- Uncle Dick's house, San Francisco, California

The final meal of our stay in SF was another home cooked meal, in fact it was a self-cooked meal, that included large numbers of extended family members called 'Da Binh Lo'.  This is a phonetic rendition on how it sounds to my non-Chinese ears.

Take a bubbling pot of broth, we had chicken and vegetable.  We also had 3 different pots, one just for the children.  Prepare endless thin cuts of meat, veggies, sea food of all sorts and leave on the side.  Connie did this and it took ages I imagine.

Seat everyone down in a mass and let them fondue style dip the meat, sea food, veggies, etc into the bubbling broth until cooked and then consume.  Dipping in sauce of varied types is optional.

As a family style event, this is about as good as it gets.  Because the ingredients are slight, it takes ages both to cook and to eat a sizeable amount so it really is difficult to eat too much.

But it is a fun way to get together with family.

Perry's Steakhouse, Austin, Texas

Possibly the best steak I have ever eaten or maybe just because it was a fantastic evening that was totally unplanned.

Viv and I had been to the Food & Wine Fair and were strolling around the downtown area fairly aimlessly until we saw a couple of young guys who were valet parking cars.  This usually means a restaurant so we paid attention and read the sign: Perry's Steakhouse.  In our experience steakhouses usually make good martini's which was just what we fancied at that moment so we went indoors and sat at the bar.

Very good the martini's were too.

Somewhere along the way at the Fair I'd picked up several beer glasses I had vague notions of bringing home and as we finished our first drink the barman asked if he could wash them for us.

How nice of him.  We had to have another drink!

When we ultimately reached a table to eat, we found an enormous, packed and elegant restaurant with yet another really pleasant and attentive waiter -- this has been widespread actually.

And the Porterhouse steak we shared… fabulous.

Wild Flowers -- Texas

The time of year was perfect for Texas wild flowers.  Springtime with plenty of sunshine.  They were everywhere.  Particularly at the side of the freeways we drove along.

The Dallas/Houston stretch was best as the grass in which the flowers were growing -- particularly the Blue Bonnets -- was so low.  By the following week, the grass had grown a bit more and concealed the flowers a bit more.

Just beautiful.

Redwoods -- Howland Hill Road, Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, Crescent City, California

The redwoods everywhere were fabulous but this 10 mile drive through a first growth redwood forest along unpaved roads was the best.

Huge redwoods all along the road with walking trails spiralling out in all directions.

Breath taking.

Stockyards -- Fort Worth, Texas

Who doesn't like cowboys?  It was the stuff we were brought up on after all.  The Lone Ranger, Rawhide, Matt Dillon, Maverick … you name them.  Just brilliant.  And the Stockyards at Fort Worth tries to recreate it all.

The Stockyards Hotel was just about perfect too right down to the holes in the bedroom shutters I imagined were bullet holes from a shoot out.

The one thing I couldn't find was swinging doors in a saloon.  These days they are all air conditioned!  Aaagh.

Silvercar -- San Francisco and Dallas, Texas

I've droned on about how good this car rental experience was so won't carry on beyond repeating their own PR mantra -- "Finally a car rental company that doesn't suck".

It helps of course that everything is simple; the pick up, drop off and the car itself -- a fully loaded Audi A4.

I happen to like Audi A4's too so this is just about perfect for me!

Napa Valley -- Napa, California

We'd planned this ahead of time and rented a big car/wagon to take Viv and I along with Alex, Ali, Cat and Anna -- all our own family in fact.

The weather on the first day wasn't great but that didn't stop us having a terrific time.  Things cleared up the next day for our wine tasting series.  We had a lot of really nice wines too.

All in all just lovely.

Public Transport -- Miami, Florida

The day we caught the bus that first time in Miami to the tennis tournament on Key Biscayne set the standard for the trip as a whole and encouraged us to use public transport as and where we could.

It worked very well indeed.

"Houston, we have a problem" -- NASA Museum, Houston, Texas

Just brilliant.  All of it.  I pushed every button I could and imagined the launch of endless rockets to the Moon.

I was a teenager all over again!

Porterhouse Steak and Wine -- Deerfield Winery, Sonoma, California

We were staying at the Deerfield Winery as guests of our Bermuda friend John and had planned a wine tasting with our hosts, Robert and PJ, the managers and wine maker extraordinaire.  Unexpectedly we found a kitchen in the cottage we were in so bought in some local grass fed steak (we chose a huge Porterhouse) for dinner after that wine tasting.

We found an entire family already tasting wine with PJ so had to race to catch up (we didn't really have to) and by the time Robert arrived we were at the end of the tasting, the family had gone and PJ had opened yet another bottle.  This had gone after a while so Robert opened another …

The steak was fantastic too!

Espresso -- One Log House, Route 1, Northern California

Probably the best coffee of the entire trip was on Route 1 in northern California next to a tacky tourist attraction.

So good that I had to have another.

Honourable Mentions

Luckenbach, Texas

Barton Springs, Austin, Texas

Standard Pour Bar, Dallas, Texas

Thermal Experience

We added another day to our stay in Austin as we'd enjoyed the city of 1.75 million so much so far and decided to add to our knowledge by a round the city tour run from the Visitor Centre just up the road.

Most interesting it was too.

The city is built around the Texas Colorado river -- not the Grand Canyon one, but the Texas one.  They are quite different.  Named after Samuel Austin who had arrived in 1821 having asked permission of the then overlords Spain and subsequently Mexico to build an Anglo population into the vast area of Tejas.  The Spanish/Mexicans were keen on this as they had no way of stopping the Indians from raiding at the extremities of their frontier so wanted a buffer between them and the Indians -- namely the new Anglo settlers.  The 300 in fact.

After much trial and tribulation, the Mexicans were booted out and the independent republic of Texas was born with Austin the first president.  Hence the name of the city.

The river has been dammed 6 or 7 times along the way in an attempt to regulate the water coming into the city and at the same time creating a series of ever higher lakes that wind their way through the city and up into the hills to the north. As the city grew, so homes moved out along the river and lakeside.  And as our tour showed, there are some pretty nice homes up in those hills too.

We also did a tour of the Capitol -- and most impressive it is too.  Built in the 1850's from local limestone, granite and marble quarried nearby and which was surplus to their owners' requirements at the time of its building it is the largest state capitol in the US (OK, this is Texas.  Why should anyone be surprised?).  It is also 14 feet taller than the Capitol in Washington DC.  Again why should anyone be surprised?

Davy Crockett was a Tennessee congressman who lost an election and decided to relocate to Texas to seek his fortune. When he arrived someone told him about the revolt against Mexico and asked if he wanted to help out at a place called The Alamo in San Antonio….

… in all Davy Crockett (front and centre in this painting) was in Texas for 6 weeks.  But he is still considered a legend in Texas and his painting hangs in the entry way near the statues of Houston and Austin.  Colonel Travers who commanded the garrison may have been the first person to utter the immortal words: "Houston, we have a problem".

The Texas senate… not currently in session.  They meet every other year for a month.

Sam Houston 

Recently substantially renovated with 4 new subterranean floors added for even more offices, this is one impressive building.

So is the university all around it.  50,000 students and 25,000 faculty make this a city in itself and comfortably bigger than Bermuda.  Its 100,000 seater stadium is bigger than Bermuda!

But boy was it hot!  Cooling off in the thermal waters of Barton Springs seemed a lovely thought so we headed off that way only stopping off to eat lunch at one of the many lunch wagons dotted around the city.

The pool itself is located within Zilker Park, the expanse to the southwest of Lady Bird Lake, Austin's own lake.  It isn't a new structure, rather old in fact and full of weeds and rather nasty looking algae in the shallow parts.  It was packed but we were able to find an empty spot and jumped in.

Whoof!

Compared to the North Sea or even the Thames Estuary around my home town of Southend, 68 degrees is actually quite warm.  But compared to Bermuda and Cayman's pea soup like water temperatures, this came as quite a shock.

But it was very refreshing.

Not sure if I found it that spiritual either (sorry Michael) as the weed was quite clingy and slimy but we did stay quite late as it was so pleasant.

On the way back to the hotel, we stopped off at a Whole Foods supermarket.  Called 'Whole Pay Packet' by some, it was packed showing people are prepared to pay for quality.  Austin is their hometown too.  The founders were university drop outs who in the 1970's wanted to eat better than was available at the time so did something about it.  The company has its HQ in Austin still.

The store was huge, 2nd in size apparently to their London branch, and had its own restaurants and wine bar inside which were jammed with people sipping wine and eating dinner.

Great concept.  Expensive food but still packed with happy shoppers.  The company attracts the younger and hipper element so with demographics behind them is here to stay.  Like Apple, they are able to charge premium prices because the quality they deliver is just what people want.

We'd been told about a steak restaurant called Jeffreys -- see website here -- by a couple of people at Perry's and other fooderies so decided to try them out.  Not downtown by any means but only a short cab ride away, it is a fine dining establishment.  But the martini's were terrific and the steaks again lovely.

Two fantastic steak houses in one city is a pretty darn good advertisement for Austin's dining scene.

We shall be back!

Good Night Austin Texas, wherever you are

The Austin Food & Wine Festival was one of the few anchor points we'd planned in this trip and took place on 25-27 April 2014 in Butler Park, just outside the city.

I'd forgotten to look at the information flyer which said that the main Saturday daytime event took place between 12 noon and 4 pm until we were in the car leaving San Antonio so it came as quite a shock to realize we'd likely miss most of the first day and meant that instead of taking the back roads we'd stick pretty close to I35 and leg it for the 120 or so miles.

We arrived around 3 pm, checked into our downtown hotel -- a very nice Marriott Courtyard -- and headed off to the event.

It was 90+ degrees by now and so what could have been a very nice stroll through town and across the bridge covering the Texas Colorado River turned into quite a sweaty slog.  But it did take only about 15 or so minutes and that left us 45 minutes for the tastings!

Tastings are meant to be unhurried strolls.  Small plates of food and small glasses of showcased liquors sipped in a gentile manner are the norm but as we'd missed out on lunch we were definitely anything but.

The Mexican tapas were nice, the ceviche delicious, smoked salmon was scrummy and then we hit the beer stand -- all Belgian, the star being Stella Artois, definitely needed in this heat!  Then I found the Cayman stand (of all things).  They'd brought Tortuga Rum cake!  Trouble was nobody on the stand actually was from Cayman  They were all representatives hired by the island's tourist authority.  But it was nice they were there (Houston is one of their airline gateway cities so there is a connection with Texas).

Right next door was the Cinco vodka stand (see website here).  They did very nice vodka gimlets which on reflection was the beginning of when things started along the wrong path.

At 4 pm on the button all the stands stopped serving so we trickled out and into the city centre again retracing our steps of the morning until we found first a beer only bar and then what turned out to be one of the nicest steak restaurants I've ever been to called Perry's -- see website here.

Neither of us wanted to go to chain restaurants but we did decide to have a cocktail there before considering next steps.  Nice martini's they were too.  But then I decided to use the men's room and when I did I discovered the full story about Perry's.  It was huge and packed.  The decor was dark of course like all steak houses but really elegant too.  And the smell of the steaks!  Wow!!

So of course I had to suggest Viv make a similar journey and was not in the least surprised when she came back saying we had to eat there.  So we did and it was simply magnificent.  We shared a beautiful Porterhouse steak with veggies and it was melt in the mouth lovely.  So good it could be the best ever.  Certainly one of the best ever.

Now Austin has the reputation (actually they say it about themselves) of being the 'Live Music Capital of the World'.  The great guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan was from Austin as was country icon Willie Nelson and as it turned out both were being inducted into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame that night -- SRV of course in absentia -- an invitation only event that didn't include us, by the way.  And 6th Street is the place where dozens of clubs are sited.  So as we were on 7th and were staying on 4th we just had to pass through this den of iniquity.

SRV's statue in the park 

What a cool place it is too!

We found a guitar bar where a 3 piece band was grinding through a bunch of guitar heavy blues numbers, SRV of course being featured.  They were pretty good too I thought but when they finished around midnight, they were replaced by a fat guy with 2 turntables and a slick line in urban speak who played dance music/hip hop/electro and whatever else the audience wanted.  Within 15 minutes the place that I'd thought was pretty busy was absolutely jamming with groups of girls gyrating on the bar taking shots and whooping like there was no tomorrow.

When we finally left, we discovered the entire street was doing exactly the same.

What a place!

Austin could just be right!!

The following day was a lot slower pace.  When we arrived at the fair we found a celebrity chef howling at an audience who were trying to replicate the cooking he was doing up on a stage.  We spoke with a couple of these people later who said it was hot as Hades and the last thing they needed was that final celebratory tequila shot.  But it was fun!

We found the BarBQ pits with several groups cooking up a storm.

Best by far was the quail cooked over hot coals and hung up to finish off on an iron tree like frame.  They tasted lovely and spicy.  The chef told us it was probably the marinating in rendered pig fat for a couple of days that made them so juicy.

Nice quail tree!

Why is everything that tastes so good actually pretty bad for your health?

Pig heads on a string too!

We watched Andrew Zimmern from TV cook eggs and then missed out on a wine pairing session (if they were Texan wines, this would have been difficult!) so sat in on a Cajun chicken cooking session which looked pretty easy actually -- use rosemary, garlic and oil.  Add salt and pepper and cook.  Obviously there's a bit more to it than this but it didn't seem to be.

Then we hit the tasting again but today were more selective than the day before.  Schmidt BarBQ'd brisket was very nice indeed, the Brazilian wines were... how I can I not offend here? We drank some Dripping Springs Texan vodka (another name) in an awful concoction and found a maker of 90% proof gin that was deadly if drunk.  The drink he made Viv was appalling to look at -- 75% of it being gin, the rest being a little ice and some ginger beer.  It was not possible to drink this concoction AND live.

So we returned to Cinco and had a nice Bloody Mary with them and stumbled across a Campari stand where the barman went beyond his normal boundaries and made us a pretty good Negroni.

We also found Michael, the very new CEO of a bakery company called 'Baked By Amy's' -- see website here.  They were showcasing pecan tarts and brownies, both of which were really scrummy.  He said he'd just returned from New York where he'd lived for 20+ years with his new husband as he missed Austin and wanted a change of life balance.  He told us about a place called Barton Springs, a thermal pool just outside the city, which sounded so good that we decided to go there if we could.

I hope they make it.  The cakes were great.

One thing that struck me about the fair was the number of small businesses that were trying to make it in this sector.  Michael said Austin was more liberal than the rest of Texas and was quite an entrepreneurial enclave of a quite different sort to the rest of the state.  The numbers of small firms seems to bear him out.  Silvercar is also headquartered there.

Austin is a pretty good city!

And the heading?  Well its from one of my favorite Frank Zappa albums, made with Captain Beefhart actually, called Bongo Fury.  Its a mainly live album recorded in Austin.  FZ uttered these words as his farewell to the crowd prior to launching into a song called "Muffin Man" -- listen here.

FZ on left and the Captain

Too much information?

Why don't you play with more topspin?

Finally, the first big post re-retirement trip for Viv and I!

Planning a lengthy trip is quite a task particularly when there's the wishes of more than one person to take into account and if you don't want to schedule every second of every day.  Strange that, the more you want it to be less of a package tour, the more tricky it becomes to organize things.  My approach was to place a few key things and leave blank spaces around it.  Our big round the world trip in 2010 was great but suffered a little I think by being too organized.  With time less of an issue, a bimble factor needs to be built in.

That said, none of the time we are due to spend in Florida is unplanned!  The overview was to attend the tennis tournament in Key Biscayne again and so I crammed things in around it.  This segment included 3 days in Saddlebrook Tennis Resort (30 minutes north of Tampa) and a recovery day in Naples (about 2 hours west of Miami) -- see website here.

Some of the tennis courts at Saddlebrook.  There's also hard courts where touring pro's come to train.  When we there John Isner came to practice on the hard courts ahead of the Miami tournament this week.

I'd organized a hire car from a smallish company called SIXT, a first for us and they turned out to be very efficient indeed down to upgrading us to a nice BMW X1 that could hold all of our luggage (we still haven't figured out how to travel light).  The GPS took us ultimately to the right road and in the goodness and fullness of time, we covered the 450 kilometers in around 5 hours to Saddlebrook.

And boy, has it changed.  Admittedly it has been since 1997 (by collective memory) since we'd been there and previously it was out in the boonies.  Now not so much.  The Waffle House that I remembered we'd enjoyed pretty much as the only local eatery is still there... and probably hasn't changed one iota.  It looks very small now.  It is in the midst of a shopping plaza, one of several that have sprung up all around and that is the thing I find odd.  There's still no industry of any sort near by nor any big city that could draw on the local population.  There's a couple of new hospitals for sure but mostly it seems to me like a field of dreams: build the shops and then developers build housing estates for people to live in.  So there's people living all around these days.  But what do they do?  In the 3 days we were at Saddlebrook we never found a town of any sort.  There were shopping plazas and housing estates for sure, but no town.  No reason for the people to be there.  I don't get it at all.

The resort itself is owned and operated by a man named Tom Dempsey, after whom the new steak restaurant is named.  He's now 88 but works every day and his family are now more involved in running things.  That does mean there's no deep corporate pockets behind them which probably accounts for the fact that the units themselves are pretty tired.  We joked that they'd probably not changed anything since we were last there in 1997, actually not true as the last major reno was back in 2006/7.

The view from our room.  Not too shabby really... unlike the room!

However the tennis was as remembered: 5 hours of intense drilling and activity.  The day starts at 7.50 am for stretching and then its tennis solidly until 11 am.  After a 2 hour break, tennis restarts at 1 pm and continues to 3 pm.  From memory this worked well in the summer months as thunderstorms came in daily around 3.30 pm.  That was the theory anyway but in practice it didn't work in the first 2 days because of the enormous storm that came slamming through at 11 am and which lasted for the next 15 hours.

Talk about deluge but to be fair to Saddlebrook they managed to get the courts ready for play by 9 am the following day.  Given the amount of rain that came down, I'd half expected for there to be no play for the whole day at least.  Very impressive.

That meant we had the afternoon free so we went to a shopping mall 30 minutes away near Tampa airport.  It was a hideous drive in torrential rain. Poor Viv who drove but she then rallied and came up with the great idea to have a restoring Martini at the Capital Grille there before embarking on some retail therapy.  We'd had a more than respectable Martini the previous evening in Saddlebrook's sports bar so were prepared to embark on a 7-week taste test across the USA.

Capital Grille is an up market steak and cocktail chain and I for one am a supporter if they produce Martini's like that.  The vodka used makes an important difference and Viv and I had become fans of Tito's which is smoother than some but less bland than, say, Grey Goose which I think is massively over rated.  Viv stayed with olives whilst I'd recently made a change to a twist of lemon.

This proved to be a nice restorative enabling us to face the malling prospect in better humor.  As it turned out we didn't buy anything, nor did many others by the look of it as the mall was relatively empty.  Mind you the Apple store of course had a solid coterie of people inside whilst I did note that Microsoft has given up on its notion of branding stores and is now calling them X-Box stands.  The game side was busy but the computer side totally empty.  That must say something about Microsoft in the future.  I see they are planning a new version of Office for the iPad.  I call that surrender.

Back to tennis though, the format is 1 pro per court with 4 players.  Viv and I shared the court with another husband and wife, from Toronto of all places, who hadn't played for quite a few years and wanted a crash course in muscle memory.  They were very sporty so by the 3rd day, their progress was pretty impressive.  But this did mean that Viv and I weren't taxed that hard competing with them and the coach, a Russian guy named Alex, was actually very good at ensuring we all worked at our respective skill levels.

By the 2nd day though the main coach, an English guy named Howard, moved me to another group of harder hitters run by a young coach who committed in my mind the indignity of asking me why I didn't play with more topspin.

"All the current guys do this and so should you."

To underscore his words he showed us all a video on his phone of Djokovic playing his forehand which of course is just ridiculous in both its severity of grip and the amount of topspin he therefore can play.

"You should try to do it like that."

Now I understand that this is the current norm, but then again I learned with a wooden racquet when nobody hit topspin at all so I thought I'd done pretty well at least playing with a little topspin.  Bloody cheek!  And I wasn't impressed that when we were all picking up tennis balls after a drill, he immediately went onto his phone to text.  Bloody young kids!!

Howard invited the guests to cocktails by the pool at 3.30 pm that day which was nice and of course we attended prior to lounging by the pool as the sun had returned in force.  I tried out the pool and immediately regretted it.... it was really cold!

The final day was back to the usual schedule and our afternoon was with another husband and wife from New Jersey who were good, the wife particularly so.  Because Alex had 15 racquets to string, we had a new coach, John, who was 62 and an ex-touring pro and was great fun.  He loved to talk too and had some great stories but still found time to work us thoroughly as well as critique my stroke dynamics -- forehand lazy, backhand structured well but I have to hit both harder... and with more topspin.  Aaagh!!!

We even managed to get filmed in action using an iPad and some really neat editing tools.  Somehow they'd managed to put my head onto some really dumpy chap's body.  But his forehand was quite lazy and he certainly didn't hit much topspin either.

The backhand was nice though!