SharkStalker

03/05/07 - 06/05/07 Chicago After our relaxing break in the Amish country we were ready for the hustle and bustle of big city life. Especially were we ready for Chicago Blues. We checked into the House of Blues hotel in the heart of the action and dined in the their blues club restaurant that night to the fantastic sounds of a solo guitarist and then full on bottle-necking blues band - Awesome! The next morning we headed to the museum of contemporary photography to have a nose but the work was just too contemporary for our tastes so we skipped of quickly and headed up the Magnificent Mile to check out the shops and ogle some of Chicago’s archtitecture. Architecture sure is a buzz word in Chicago. It boasts a whole (what is the collective noun ... read more

28/04/07 - 29/04/07 Springfield - Chicago, Illinois Evening entertainment in Springfield - not a yellow-headed, skate-boarding Matt Groening character in sight (One episode of ‘The Simpsons’ featured a close up shot of Homer’s driving license which read ‘Springfield, NT’ - a non-existent place) but a working 2-screen Drive-In so we parked up in front of the big screen, tuned the radio to the relevant FM station, grabbed a pizza, popcorn and sodas and settled down to “Bridge to Terabithia”. We didn’t see anyone get stranded Grease-style so no whispers round the school on Monday. We bypassed the town museum and various monuments to it’s most famous resident - a certain prairie lawyer by the name Abraham Lincoln and scooted north where we popped into the Route 66 Attraction of Funk’s Grove, a Mecca for Maple sirup ... read more

21/04/07 Amarillo, TX We were heading toward Conway on the south frontage road in order to spy the Bug Ranch - a kind of homage to the Cadillac range, only with VW Beetles, when we spied a white SUV with about 6 or 8 aerials on it’s roof, parked on the shoulder. “Stop, stop” I shouted to Jen, “they might be storm chasers”. Sure enough, as we pulled up we saw the logos on the back and side of their car - “The Kansas Storm Chaser - www.kschaser.com” and “Storm Chaser”. We had seen a severe weather warning for Amarillo on the Weather Channel a couple of days back, but to our untrained eyes looking at the sky there were no obvious signs of bad weather so we had assumed that it had passed - little ... read more

From Grand Canyon we headed south to Flagstaff and there were those two digits popping up again as we spied our first 66 attraction, the Museum Club. Unfortunately at 11 A.M. we were about 12 hours too early in the day to appreciate the atmosphere and enjoy any live music in the place voted ‘Readers favourite Dance club’ in ‘Country America Magazine’ but we were able to pop in and enjoy the route 66 print material in the booths and the amateur taxidermist owner’s handiwork. Passing the famous wooden carved Twin Arrows, that had obviously seen better days, our next detour was just 6 miles south of our main route to the world’s best-preserved and first proven meteorite impact site. Amazingly our ‘tour guide’ of the hole in the ground managed to make the ‘tour’ last ... read more

13/04/07 - 14/04/07 A Dash of Utah As we’d stopped at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, an English woman we met told us that sunrise at Bryce Canyon was so beautiful that it had made her weep. Leaving Las Vegas, it was a slight detour North and would take us into an extra State where the book of Mormon, not the Gilead Bible makes bedside reading - Utah. To cause as much confusion as possible, seemed to be the goal of whoever named the viewpoints in Bryce Canyon National Park. The best place to watch sunset is at Sunrise Point and the best place to watch sunrise is at Bryce Point and Sunset point is no good for either or was it that the best place to watch sunrise is at Bryce point and the best ... read more