Fire Island and Folsom
05 November 2005
The first days over 30C (that's 86F degrees to Americans) have already come here in Melbourne even though it is still Spring. The apartment gets quite warm in the hot weather, and as we are close to parkland and the river, there have been Tiger snakes (quite dangerous) found in the driveway.
The apartment is over three levels. Here is the middle level. In the background you can see the TV which has a Linux PC attached to it running MythTV (a bit like TiVo). Jay is reconfiguring the PC with a new version of the software. We don't watch much TV, but if we did, it would have recorded the things we want to watch.
In anticipation of Summer here, we visited the US in September to enjoy the end of the Northern Summer and see friends. We flew via Auckland to LA and then overnight to New York, going immediately from JFK airport to Fire Island Pines via the Long Island Rail Road and the ferry from Sayville. It was a very long journey but we were rewarded with some delightful weather and a very quiet beach as it was after the end of the "season".
We stayed with good friends, Bruce and Billy, at their house which faces the Atlantic. The water was warm and the waves were big enough to catch. Unfortunately they were also breaking heavily on the beach and I got some significant gravel-rash. We had a very relaxing time before heading back to New York to fly to Canada. In fact we didn't visit Mahattan at all as we didn't cross the East River.
We flew via Toronto to Thunder Bay in Northern Ontario. The second leg of the journey was on a plane that was only two days old as the maintenance engineer next to whom I was seated insisted on telling me. I agreed that it seemed like a nice plane. Thunder Bay is where Jay grew up. It is a city of about 100,000 and is a port on the shore of Lake Superior. This is the "Hoito", the Finnish Social Club where we had breakfast on two occasions. Thunder Bay has a large Finnish immigrant population and apparently they serve authentic clabbered milk and fish mojakka, though I just had an omelette. Interestingly the term "mojakka" isn't used in modern Finnish.
It was Jay's father's 65th birthday and together with his sister Denise from Calgary, he visited as a surprise for the birthday party. Here he is arriving at his parents' house at Cloud Bay, about 40km from Thunder Bay on the shore of the lake. There were a lot of family and friends visiting for the party. We also got a chance to visit his sister Richelle, her husband Scott and their children.
It was the end of Summer but the weather was still hospitable. We were too early to see the best of the "fall colours". In the Winter the lake freezes over and it gets extremely cold, so Jay's parents travel South to Florida.
After a few days in Thunder Bay we flew to San Francisco. We have a lot of friends there and we stayed for a week, but even so it was not enough time to catch up with everyone we would have liked to have seen. Here we are visiting Joel and Sam in the Castro. We saw a lot of friends at the gym and quickly filled up our lunch and dinner engagements. We didn't do many of the usual tourist things in San Francisco.
I spent an afternoon at UCSF and saw a few trainees and a lot of the staff that I know there. They had completed more of the redevelopment of the operating suite which was underway when I left. I had forgotten how hectic work could be there. I also visited the research lab I had worked in and saw the work they were continuing with.
The weekend we were in San Francisco was the Folsom Street Fair. We had planned this as a number of guys we knew from elsewhere in the US were visiting San Francisco for the Fair and we were able to see them. The weather was hot on the day of the Fair and we spent four or five hours there. We were also surprised to run into a few friends from Melbourne there. The visit to San Francisco reminded me of the many reasons I enjoyed living there.
From San Francisco we flew to Los Angeles where we stayed with Bruce and Billy. Here we are with them and their dogs, Duey and Elbee (just in the picture at the bottom).
With Jay's friend Brian, we visited the Getty Museum. Here I am contemplating Van Gogh's "Irises" which was bought by Alan Bond in 1987 for $US49 million and which forms a footnote to his company's activities which eventually left Australian shareholders and lenders with a loss of $5 billion. There are no barriers in front of the paintings here, but an attendant in every room. The museum has sweeping views of Los Angeles and we were lucky enough to visit on a fairly clear day when it was possible to see to downtown LA and the Pacific.
We returned to Australia at the start of October refreshed and ready to finish tidying up the apartment which still had a lot of my boxes of stuff in it. Last weekend a friend from Sydney, Jim, came to Melbourne for the weekend and stayed with us. Here he is with Jay at Dight's Falls where there is a weir on the Yarra River close to where we live.
It's hard to believe it's time to start Christmas shopping again. This year has passed very quickly. We plan to visit central Australia between Christmas and New Year.
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The apartment is over three levels. Here is the middle level. In the background you can see the TV which has a Linux PC attached to it running MythTV (a bit like TiVo). Jay is reconfiguring the PC with a new version of the software. We don't watch much TV, but if we did, it would have recorded the things we want to watch.
In anticipation of Summer here, we visited the US in September to enjoy the end of the Northern Summer and see friends. We flew via Auckland to LA and then overnight to New York, going immediately from JFK airport to Fire Island Pines via the Long Island Rail Road and the ferry from Sayville. It was a very long journey but we were rewarded with some delightful weather and a very quiet beach as it was after the end of the "season".
We stayed with good friends, Bruce and Billy, at their house which faces the Atlantic. The water was warm and the waves were big enough to catch. Unfortunately they were also breaking heavily on the beach and I got some significant gravel-rash. We had a very relaxing time before heading back to New York to fly to Canada. In fact we didn't visit Mahattan at all as we didn't cross the East River.
We flew via Toronto to Thunder Bay in Northern Ontario. The second leg of the journey was on a plane that was only two days old as the maintenance engineer next to whom I was seated insisted on telling me. I agreed that it seemed like a nice plane. Thunder Bay is where Jay grew up. It is a city of about 100,000 and is a port on the shore of Lake Superior. This is the "Hoito", the Finnish Social Club where we had breakfast on two occasions. Thunder Bay has a large Finnish immigrant population and apparently they serve authentic clabbered milk and fish mojakka, though I just had an omelette. Interestingly the term "mojakka" isn't used in modern Finnish.
It was Jay's father's 65th birthday and together with his sister Denise from Calgary, he visited as a surprise for the birthday party. Here he is arriving at his parents' house at Cloud Bay, about 40km from Thunder Bay on the shore of the lake. There were a lot of family and friends visiting for the party. We also got a chance to visit his sister Richelle, her husband Scott and their children.
It was the end of Summer but the weather was still hospitable. We were too early to see the best of the "fall colours". In the Winter the lake freezes over and it gets extremely cold, so Jay's parents travel South to Florida.
After a few days in Thunder Bay we flew to San Francisco. We have a lot of friends there and we stayed for a week, but even so it was not enough time to catch up with everyone we would have liked to have seen. Here we are visiting Joel and Sam in the Castro. We saw a lot of friends at the gym and quickly filled up our lunch and dinner engagements. We didn't do many of the usual tourist things in San Francisco.
I spent an afternoon at UCSF and saw a few trainees and a lot of the staff that I know there. They had completed more of the redevelopment of the operating suite which was underway when I left. I had forgotten how hectic work could be there. I also visited the research lab I had worked in and saw the work they were continuing with.
The weekend we were in San Francisco was the Folsom Street Fair. We had planned this as a number of guys we knew from elsewhere in the US were visiting San Francisco for the Fair and we were able to see them. The weather was hot on the day of the Fair and we spent four or five hours there. We were also surprised to run into a few friends from Melbourne there. The visit to San Francisco reminded me of the many reasons I enjoyed living there.
From San Francisco we flew to Los Angeles where we stayed with Bruce and Billy. Here we are with them and their dogs, Duey and Elbee (just in the picture at the bottom).
With Jay's friend Brian, we visited the Getty Museum. Here I am contemplating Van Gogh's "Irises" which was bought by Alan Bond in 1987 for $US49 million and which forms a footnote to his company's activities which eventually left Australian shareholders and lenders with a loss of $5 billion. There are no barriers in front of the paintings here, but an attendant in every room. The museum has sweeping views of Los Angeles and we were lucky enough to visit on a fairly clear day when it was possible to see to downtown LA and the Pacific.
We returned to Australia at the start of October refreshed and ready to finish tidying up the apartment which still had a lot of my boxes of stuff in it. Last weekend a friend from Sydney, Jim, came to Melbourne for the weekend and stayed with us. Here he is with Jay at Dight's Falls where there is a weir on the Yarra River close to where we live.
It's hard to believe it's time to start Christmas shopping again. This year has passed very quickly. We plan to visit central Australia between Christmas and New Year.
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