How many oranges does it take to refresh a US football team

We finally did it a match at Texas Christian University...a stadium which holds 44,000. This is a university sports facility.

You have to concentrate v hard to get the rules and action. Just think there is an offense and a defense each with its own team. Now you may ask why I posed the question at the beginning.........
Well just look at them all........

The offense are built like fast moving brick lavatories and run with the ball. The defense are bigger slower moving brick lavvies designed to stop the offense running with the ball and protect the guy throwing the ball to the offense. The key being that when you are on the offense you have to keep making so many yards in order to keep posession of the ball. Whenever the ball stops moving or the player drops the ball and to avoid loss of limb and smudging of lippy the whole game stops.
At this point without fail the home team's personal bugle and drumming band jump up with Ya ta ta taa ta ta taa err a

- to the point where the temptation to shove a banana in the end of the instruments become overwhelming.
It must be worse for the blokes concentration since half the girls in the second year are running round the perimeter of the pitch in thongs and tassled bazooka covers shaking their tic tacs to the beat of said band (picture supplied on application)
Meantime further down the pitch..local Walmart sponsored celebrity Gloria Grossablondawig has taken the opportunity to hop on the pitch on with her microphone and some unwitting patient from the local hospital who is living proof that the charitable donations you make to keep their health system afloat do work and just to prove it further they will launch a thousand pink balloons to match the football player's underwear.......TOUCHDOWN
Did I sound a little cynical there??
And so to the action outside the ground...we'll have none of yer slash, smash, crash and booze culture here thank you very much. Everyone who is anyone has their own personalised car park space

Number 36 - Mr and Mrs Clint Bankowitz who in said space hoist a Horned Frogs purple and white tent under which they BBQ half an oxen and invite family to join them whilst they watch the match reaching a heady ecumenical frenzy inside the stadium on the 62 inch TV and satellite system they just happen to keep in the glove compartment of the Chieftain Tank in which they arrived.

We are almost there now peeps with the blog update which I will try to maintain more regularly. (don't worry I hear you say)...

Catching up III - Boston 3 - The Mad Sharman goes to The Tea Party

And so to some history. Back down into Massachusettes and Concord which they pronounce conquered, the place where the first bullet of the war was fired (oh no it wasn't say the soldiers at Lexington).
But first here lived Louisa May Alcott (she wrote my life...Little Women)

and there is also a picture of Nathaniel Hawthorne's gaff too but because I can't lay claim to knowing anything abut him and it was too expensive to buy I haven't included it.
This one was an accident in terms of the framing, it is a shame the car is there and also that the image of P isn't better.

Walden Pond was also planned but we only got as far as the car park because Plymouth and other heady destinations seemed feasible.
You know you have to hand it to the Americans (and that is not meant in a patronising way) they are fantastic at talking up anything and sometimes it is absolutely fantastic but others it is absolute cr..bull...boloni. Here is an example of big boloni sausage....Plymouth Rock. Plymouth itself is pretty though not convinced they have done that well in preserving the houses.

The reproduction Mayflower II is not bad

and then we come to the Pilgrim Father's Wizard of Oz...Plymouth Rock or should I say Plymouth Boulder. Why did I think it would be like say the Needles or Durdle Door off the Dorset coast i.e. it was the first thing the Pilgrim Fathers saw off the coastline. More like they tripped over it and shouted "Who put that there!" when the set foot on land.
And to understand its life you need to conjure up the backing music of either Benny Hill or a cop chase in a slient movie. In order to maximise its tourist and veneration potential it has been up and down the hill twice, only the second time they did it, they dropped it and it split in half. Clearly the master craftsman commissioned by the local dignitaries (either that or it was the first case of the Mafia infiltrating the buidling industry) did not understand its significance. So you know what it's like he'd had a long day burying bodies in party walls and just thought he would slip this little job in at the end. And here is the subtle makeover job that resulted. Crack?????? What crack????

Trust me we've nearly done on this. Our penultimate stop. Can you guess where it is yet?


And that is Boston in the background


Confused?

A day in Boston walking the freedom trail and only once did P say if it hadn't been for the bloody French


The oldest commissioned warship in the US Navy with the oldest sailor in town stood by (he will not be impressed)

A closer Boston skyline taking in its new bridge.

Here endeth the Boston expotition....900 miles round trip covering Massachusettes, New Hampshire and Maine We didn't make Vermont.

Catching up II - Boston 2 - Would you Adam and Eve It

And back on the road again for another dull colourless journey to our next destination - Mount Washington and Franconia Notch National Park

We stopped overnight in the middle of nowhere literally since Mt Washington was back through most of New Hapmshire heading for the Vermont border.
Here we bought freshly picked apples putting our money in an honesty box. You knew they were freshly picked because really quicky aftre you start them the creamy white flesh turns brown.


One of my favourite films is The Bridges of Madison County so we had to follw the signs for a covered bridge.

US road signs leave much to be desired but this takes you to the next extreme, for those of you who came after "old money" this may not seem amusing....

And here is our first view of Mt Washington

We couldn't go all the way the 8,000 feet because the roads were blocked by ice and snow. As you would expect Mount Washington has the worst weather in the world (the US does not own the Arctic or Antarctic), three storm systems mdo converge at the top though.


Marlene Dietrich (I want to be alone) meets Jimmie Crankie

The descent was gloomy and boring:

There has been no photoshop interference or airbrushing of any kind on this one..Ansel Adams eat your heart out (not).

And it goes on


Now here is the tall story from the short person but there is photographic evidence to prove it is true. You know when you see someone or you think it's them and you spend 10 minutes deciding whether you should make a pratt of yourself because this is the most unlikely place to meet someone from your circle of acquaintances ..a girl from the Arts Institute Bournemouth, sitting in the cafe at the bottom of MT Washington. She took photographic evidence as proof, put in a request to the SITS forum if you do not believe me.
So where do we go from here (I don't know Mr David Essex???)...well Diana's Boudoir (or something like that can't quite remember. Just tucked away near Franconia's Notch (ooh missus). Ignore the smut and let me try to redeem myself with a couple more artistic shots:

Peter Pan and Wendy

History Lesson next.

Catching up 1 - Boston 1 - The fall was not so colourful this year...

I don't have much to say on this (wow I hear the collective gasp). The pictures I think say it for themselves but a brief itinerary and the rest will be concise labels (well as I set out to write it that is the intention....).
So we start off with a flight to Boston Massachusettes, drive out of Boston for first night in Portsmouth, New Hampshire where there is a Naval shipyard but we took photographs of Mary Mary Quite Contrary

And here is something else they copied

This is very rich territory with trendy cafes and boats coming out of your ears but all in a very clipped and restrained sort of way. The motto for New Hampshire is Live Free or Die.

The scenery in the crisp fall sun is energising after the dust and heat of Texas

For the record it was here that I tasted Grey Goose Vodka for the first time mixed with cranberry juice..I was always torn between bringing that or rum back from Jamaic..suffice to say the rum wwas the better choice since I would not want anyone of my friends to drink it and then have a moose on the bar wall talk to them as it did to me.
Day 2 is driving up through New Hampshire continuing our trend for property acquisition, I could have gotten (hahaha) this one but discovered there was a risk of Bushism from just up the road in Kennybunk where apparently there is a seasonal infestation of the extended family.

Then on up through the Maine Coastline.

A good 6 hours later we were getting an eerie sunset

near our destination for the day..Bar Harbor which lives in Arcadia National Park (as visited I believe as Alcatraz). It was dark when we arrived but this was the view we woke up with:

For the rest of the pictures, there is nothing to say really except the odd one or two comments.


Bloody tourists....

The colours are crap aren't they


We waved across the Atlantic from this view but you weren't looking...


I had an artistic moment:

And so to Day 3 and Mount Washington
PS Just kidding about the moose talking to me ...
It talked to everyone.

Rather Behind II - Pigs Might Fly

The Texas state fair is the place to experience a serious concentration of Texan family
presided over by the slightly chucky (oops I missed out the l) Big Tex

For those who live locally to me in England it is a cross between Hull Fair which is the old Nottingham Goose Fair minus geese
and Hull Show which is like the great Yorkshire Show but with domestic livestock which in these "chav" ridden days extends from dogs, guinea pigs and rabbits to anacondas and tarantulas. (There is a punch up just waiting to happen there when all the white mice competitors disappear and all the snake competitors have a whacking great digestive smile on their face.)
Anyway, you know the car is King in the US and the TSF is a great opportunity to display it's muscle. This year they introduced two new models, the first being the dinghycar.

followed by the carblaster.

We have to own up and say though that we did sit in a shiny shiny Mazda more horse power than at Kempton races thingy, it was very nice and amazingly we didn't get pestered (maybe word had got round from our last car buying experience that we only had $9000 max to spend).
Apart from the jaunty US Marines band

with the "minciest" marching style you have ever seen; the day was spent roaming from one corn dog stall to another plucking up the courage to try one, being momentarily swayed by the gastronomic chalenge of a chop on a stick.....until we gave up and finished almost eating here until we realised typically it was America's way of proving that Hook a Duck is for Patsies.

We rounded off the day going to see those chops who had been saved from a skewer up the jacksie by volunteering to race against each other.

But we were too late.... the pigs had despite popular conviction flown and because I have realised that the photo is too distant this is the Pig racing arena.