Motorhome News from North America 26

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Motorhome News from North America 26 15th October - 25th October 2006
New York, New York and Washington

Somewhere amongst our 35mm slide archives back home there’s a photo of Janice and I looking across the bay towards Sydney Harbour Bridge. “We’ve arrived,” Janice said, smiling. “This is Australia.” By that time we had already been in Australia for nearly three weeks. Such is the power of the mind. There are pictures framed in both memory and expectation, of people and places, sounds and feelings - and they were all there, tucked up in our little minds as we arrived in New York. Suddenly, there it is. 'We've arrived. This is America. This is New York!'

New York, where bustling crowds ride up the dizzy 86 floors of the Empire State Building, and down to the wake-up call of 9/11, to The Statue of Liberty, The Rockerfeller Center, The Bronx, Madison Avenue, Times Square and Central Park - we know them all somehow, but only when you’re there do you know you’ve arrived.

New York, where it’s possible to live your life in constant shade, an insignificant dot on a busy sidewalk, to strain your neck ever looking upwards, to over-eat five times a day, grab a coffee for just a few cents, shop till you drop at any price, or travel free on the Staten Island Ferry. New York, where the Streets run east to west, Avenues north to south, street vendors supply most things edible - on the hoof, NYPD stands at every street corner, yesterday’s skyscrapers wear style with pride, looking ever upwards at gleaming towers of today’s prosperity - huge chess pieces on a checker board of hustle and bustle. There’s no graffiti to speak of, black-bagged litter is stacked for collection each night, hot steam rises from gratings on cold autumn mornings and yellow cabs snake through the city 24/7 to the tune of ambulance sirens and wailing fire engines - while touts trade fake watches and handbags on every sidewalk.

It’s easy to feel safe in New York in the right places at the right time of day, but don’t expect a sense of humour - they don’t have a lot of time for that - and NY drivers don’t stop at pedestrian crossings, they don’t have time for that either. To think this was but open fields little more than two hundred years ago.

Industrial wealth spread north from New York up along the Hudson Valley around the turn of the 19th Century. The Vanderbilts and the Roosevelts had their summer homes on the rising hills of Hyde Park overlooking the mighty Hudson River. The Vanderbilt family owned forty huge mansions in the late 19th century, built with their Staten Island Ferry and Railway inheritance. We took it upon ourselves to visit both on another of those bright sunny days we have become accustomed to.

The Frederick William Vanderbilt Mansion is lavishly furnished as it was when the house passed to the National Parks Service, the magnificent elliptical hall is a masterpiece and the bedrooms all quite exquisite in an over-furnished kind of way. Franklin D Roosevelt’s home, Springwood, is modest in comparison, more reserved and homely in the style of a grand farmhouse. It would be most unusual for us to visit two ‘stately homes’ in one day in the UK, but these two houses are next door so to speak, just two miles apart, and both fascinating for their part in American history - of which we know so little.
Franklin entertained King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at his home in 1938 - and Churchill on a number of occasions during the war years that followed. It would be difficult to imagine how Europe would be today without the support and faith of FDR. He left this world just three months before the first Atomic bomb was exploded in New Mexico and the closing moments of war in the Far East. No monument could fully reflect Europe's indebtedness.

From our campsite across the Hudson, the peaks of the Catskill Mountains rose in the west as round-topped hills capped with trees in dulled autumn colours, sharp edged images through the rain-soaked windscreen. It was a good day to drive. The sun had been good to us in New York. We chose the route to take us in a wide circle around the mountains to the Delaware River Valley, following the winding river south into New Jersey on narrow roads reminiscent of home. Small farms nestle in the valley, fields of corn and buckwheat, cows on rolling meadows amidst hills of maple in full colour. There is such beauty in trees; beauty to touch the heart with joy, a faster beat, a smile, a bright light of delight in the eye, a tear to share - as sensuous as music in a darkened room, a handkerchief moment in the cinema.

We crossed into Pennsylvania at Bethlehem, en route to Philadelphia (which we bypassed along the manic concrete roads and hair-raising traffic) and Amish country, in Lancaster County. The Amish people came here from Switzerland, Germany and Alsace-Loraine around 1760 and they now live their simple lives in a growing community on prime farming country - neat, spruce and efficient, largely around Lancaster City in this area. A gentle people of steadfast values, they are fine farmers and craftsmen. They are shy of publicity, but their way of life has encouraged tourism and a number of small towns now thrive on visitors attracted by the quality of Amish crafts: quilting, wood-working, pottery, basket making, candles, fudge and delicious ice cream! Gentlemen with sideburns and beards, in straw boaters or black broad-brimmed hats can still be seen working in the fields, leading horse drawn scythes through ripened corn and buckwheat or driving their grey trotting-horse carriages along the roadside. Their ladies still wear long modest dresses, black capes, aprons, and bonnets. Little girls wear puffed-sleeved dresses and simple shoes and the ‘Giant’ food-store provides a covered area on its car park for ‘Horses and Buggies only’. The Amish people are to be admired for their continued faith and resolve in the face of vast social change.

The rest of us get about in our cars, the ever-pressing demands of time seemingly clouding our sense of life’s true values. The European perception of larger than life cars in America appears a little unfounded today here on the east coast. There are exceptions of course, but generally those cars we see are modest and much as we expect back home. News of car factory closures in the USA and Canada has hit the headlines in recent weeks, the possible result of published figures showing Toyota’s market share up 25% and General Motors, down 3%. Troubled Ford have also seen their market share in North America drop from 17.5% at the end of 2005 to 15.5% this year. Downsizing seems to be the chosen course to repair the damage, but my guess is it’s more to do with fuel prices, failure to move quickly away from thirsty engines and oversize vehicles and poor marketing strategy, rather than pure inefficiency.

There is good news on the gas front of late. When we arrived in Arizona in January, gas was costing around $2.50 gallon. It rose to as much as $3.15 in Washington State, but this week it was down to $2.00 (£1.27 per UK gall) in Virginia! With mid-term elections only two weeks off, methinks there could be some political fixing going on!

Driving our modest V10 at a steady 55mph, we headed further west, past York (too late in the day for the Harley Davidson factory tour), to Gettysburg, the scene of great slaughter on the first three days of July 1863. More than 51,000 men were killed, wounded or missing in this one battle of the Civil War - when Robert E Lee’s Confederate forces clashed with the Union army of Maj.Gen. G.G. Meade. White headstones stretch out across the hillside overlooking the town, reminding us that freedom here in the USA has always come at a price. Abraham Lincoln delivered his now famous Gettysburg Address at the cemetery on this spot in November of that year. Let me quote you a little.

‘That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain - that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’

Gettysburg is my kind of town. Cultured and preserved, the main street has interesting shops and homes with covered porches directly on the sidewalk leading up the hill. It now supports the large numbers of tourists interested in this important moment in America’s history. Sadly, at the cemetery, a place of sorrow and mourning has, for most visitors, become merely an attraction glorifying the past.


Washington. We all know Washington, don’t we? This is the capital city of the USA, seen in TV broadcasts from the White House lawn, or the Capitol Building, crowned by its ‘St Paul’s’ dome. We travelled to Washington from our campsite on the ‘pearly clean inside and out’ Metro, brightly lit, fast, efficient - and safe. ‘See it - Say it’, announcements every two minutes on the subway warn of the dangers of unattended parcels and the need to be vigilant. Passengers boarding mainline Amtrak trains at Union Station must pass through airport style check-in procedures - and luggage is restricted to two pieces of specific size reflecting the United States continued state of nervousness since 9/11. The city is an airy mixture of Trafalgar Square, Regents Park and Rome. Trafalgar Square for the grandeur of the British Museum, Regents Park for its acres of green, its sculptured ponds and fine trees - and Rome for its white marble monuments (though Rome is a little older, a couple of thousand years, give or take).

Washington’s buildings are grand indeed. White Neo-Classical Government offices, museums and galleries line the wide streets, truly massive pillared epitaphs to America’s scale of populace and wealth; displayed with great pride in a stunning parkland setting. There are no skyscrapers in Washington. Protocol decreed that no property should be built taller than the Capitol Building, standing unchallenged on the hill. The Capitol Building looks down towards the vast white Lincoln Memorial, two miles distant across the grassy plains of The Mall.

Huge monuments stand to Presidents past, recognising not the person, but their achievements we are told. These striking monuments are perhaps more befitting of Emperors, Pharaohs and Kings than Presidents, they are so grand. Those honoured in this way include Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and F D Roosevelt. Memorials to the fallen in America’s many wars also stand close-by: World War I, World War II, Korea, Viet Nam - reflecting the sadness, tragedy and sacrifice of war.

The horror of war, its origins and its consequences, is brought home with a vengeance at Washington’s Holocaust Museum, dramatically drawing tears of compassion from the two million visitors passing annually through its doors. It is still beyond belief that man is capable of such atrocities against man in the ‘modern society’ of my own lifetime. This moving memorial builds emotional empathy with immensely powerful portrayals as the exhibition progresses, vividly demonstrating the surge of Nazi oppression and persecution throughout WWII and the justification for America’s involvement. Messrs Bush and Blair would benefit from such evidence to support their imposition of military intervention and the continuing daily massacre of innocent soldiers and Iraqi people, by Iraqi people.

Thomas Jefferson, in his Declaration of Independence, said:
‘We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ These very words rid this country of slavery with the Civil war - and Europe of the Nazis in World War II.

‘My part in Hitler’s Downfall’, as Spike Milligan once said, was brought home to me at the Air and Space Museum where actual German VI and VII rockets from World War II were displayed. I’m just old enough to remember both these weapons of destruction in the skies over London. The museum brings home the lightning speed at which the aircraft industry has developed, fuelled by two world wars and fear of communism. Being ex RAF and a bit of a Walter Mitty, there was much to keep me entertained; from the Wright Brother’s first flight, to Man on the Moon, satellites and Skylab. And all of that in my mother’s lifetime.

It took wild horses to pull us away from Washington’s Galleries, there are so many - and they're all free! The National Gallery of Art in particular gave us the treat of Constable’s six foot landscapes, including ‘The Hay Wain’, - and Leonardo da Vinci’s wonderful ‘Ginevra de Benci’, equally as lovely as the Mona Lisa in my view, and his only work outside of Europe. But we have to move on. Two feet of snow fell in Buffalo on the shores of Lake Erie, up-state New York, this week. Later today we must turn our backs on Washington, moving westwards towards the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, long dreamed of and anxious to see - before the leaves finally fall and the snow returns to the mountains.

See you there!


Janice and David. The Grey-haired-nomads.

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Photos

New York
We've arrived!

New York
From the 86th floor. Memories of Sleepless in Seattle!

New York
Times Square

FDR's home at Springwood
Next door to the Vanderbilts

Amish ware
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania

President Lincoln
Monument in Washington DC

Washington Monument
From the Vietnam Memorial

The Metro in Washington DC
Spotless!

New York
Been there - got the T-shirt!