Back to school: UK vs US

My New York friends go back to school this week (at least, their children do), so I've been reflecting a little bit on the differences I've noticed so far between the rituals that accompany back-to-school in the UK and in the US.

UK
Spend the week before frantically buying uniform and attaching name tags (or sew-in name tapes, in my unlucky case, see previous post).

US
Spend the week before shopping for nice new kids' clothes at Target and, if you're super-organized, writing a name on the label with a Sharpie.

UK
First day in the plaground: everyone's discussing their summer holidays and where they went.

US
First day in the playground: everyone's discussing which summer camp their kids did

UK
You're not sure what day your child has PE and when to send in the PE bag

US
It doesn't matter what day they have gym, because they don't have to get changed for it.

UK
Everyone's already looking forward to half term/wondering how they're going to arrange childcare for half term

US
Everyone's already thinking about Halloween costumes. There's no half term (although there are an awful lot of random days off in November).

UK
The school run means the traffic everywhere is a nightmare

US
The traffic isn't any different from usual, although there are more school buses around

UK
Everyone's posting pictures of the first day on Facebook
US
Everyone's posting pictures of the first day on Facebook

At least some things are the same the world over.....

My first school run

It's been a momentous week.

We've moved into our new house in London, and both the boys have started at their new schools, Littleboy 2 yesterday and Littleboy 1 today. I've spent all week unpacking boxes, labelling uniform and pencil cases and shoes, and making tedious phone calls. The Doctor, meanwhile, has been wading through reams of cable trying to make all our various media work properly, setting up direct debits and making tedious phone calls.

At least one of my biggest dreads - the sewing on of hundreds of name tapes with only five days between acquiring and wearing said uniform - went smoothly in the end. Thanks to the Doctor's aunt and a friend of hers, all name tapes were sewn on in one long session, sitting outside in a Greenwich garden one warm evening accompanied by bottles of prosecco.

I still have to sew on the "large initial" name tapes, which haven't arrived yet and which must apparently be attached in exactly the right place on sports kit or else who knows what will happen (see uniform booklet, the whereabouts of which are unknown).

All was organised for the first school run. The Doctor would take Littleboy 2 to school and I would pick him up at 12.30 (it was a half day start). I would take the local train one stop, and make a leisurely trip to a nice-looking bakery before picking him up and travelling back by bus.

All was fine until I reached the station - although I did notice there was a huge queue of traffic on the road and that the police had closed off one section, although you could still walk to the station. Turns out a lorry had hit a railway bridge, giving a knock on effect on both trains and traffic. I quickly worked out I was very unlikely to be there at 12.30 if I took the train. While this might be OK in a few weeks there was no WAY I was going to be there late to pick up Littleboy 2 on his first day at a new school in a new country.

I started sprinting up the road to the nearest bus stop. No mean feat considering that a) I haven't run in a year due to my chronic pain problems, b) I was wearing flip flops and c) and it's unusually hot in London this week - more like New York temperatures in fact. The buses were there, but stuck in a huge jam - the first driver told me "you'd be better off walking, luv". I rang The Doctor and told him to jump in the car and head for the school in case I didn't make it.

So I carried on running, at least half a mile, in my flip flops. Eventually the traffic eased (I saw the lorry which had hit the bridge) and I managed to jump on a bus for a few stops. I ran the last hot, sweaty 100 metres, and got there just as Littleboy 2 emerged into the school playground with his class. (The other mothers were all serenely chatting about their holidays in the Algarve and no doubt wondering who this wild-eyed, red faced newcomer was).

"Mummy, why are your hands so sweaty?" Littleboy 2 asked me as I took him firmly by the hand. By this point The Doctor and Littleboy 1 had also arrived and parked around the corner. We flopped into the car, hot and exhausted, then had to go off and look for lunch which I had failed to buy.

I'm really going to miss that yellow schoolbus. Still, if nothing else, my first school run taught me that I am still capable of running. I might be donning my trainers next time though.

Changes

I made an expedition to London the other day and revisited some of my old stomping grounds: as well as the Clapham North area where we still own a house, I walked around bits of Soho, particularly the Carnaby Street area where I once worked, just to see how times had changed, before lunching at Liberty's in an upstairs cafe that certainly did not used to exist.

Here are some observations.

1. Pubs that serve Thai food appear to be a fad that has died a death. At one point there were at least four in Clapham alone. But now, our neighbourhood pub advertises "Bloody Marys and Roasts" outside - presumably trad-British food is now the thing, and it also made me wonder whether the popularity of brunch (a real New York institution ) has followed us over the Atlantic.

2. Restaurants, cafes and gyms come and go, but the old pubs remain. In Kingly Street, round the corner from my old work, the plush, once brand-new Cannons gym I belonged to has been knocked down. Almost all the restaurants are different. But the dark, traditional pubs - the Red Lion, Blue Posts and Clachan - are still going strong. The Shakespeare's Head in Carnaby St, where I remember hanging out as a teenager drinking snakebite and black, looks unchanged. And the newsagent opposite Liberty's  where I always used to look at the trade mag headlines still sells Campaign.

3. Austerity Britain does not appear to have made any impact whatsoever on the Carnaby Street area. If anything, it all looks a lot posher than ten years ago, with newly constructed courtyards, even more boutiquey shops than before (where had Boots gone?) and a plethora of fancy places to have coffee. In fact, nowhere I have visited so far looks remotely recession-struck. But what's it like outside of the south of England? Guess we'll find out on the trip to Anglesey...

4. First Great Western trains are now ridiculously expensive. I paid an eye-popping 55 quid for a day return from Didcot to Paddington - a 45 minute journey that I know very well. It's the same length of time as our journey from Long Island to Manhattan, but about five times the price. For this, you get a carriage with safety announcements and a TV screen in the back of your seat, a bit like going on a plane, so that you can browse the news headlines. I can't believe anyone actually wants all this - surely most people would rather pay less for rail fares and read their own book or look at the news headlines on their own smartphone? Seems to me that the privatised rail companies have gone seriously wrong somewhere along the (leaf-strewn) line.

But there's nothing like going away for a few years to make you see your home country in a new light. I came away with the impression that London is a lively, exciting city, with just as much going for it as New York. (There's nowhere in NYC quite like Liberty's, for example - an eccentric Tudor mansion stuffed with scarves and hats and stationery. Americans just don't do that kind of thing.)  I'm looking forward to rediscovering the capital again.

Back to Blighty

The glorious West Berkshire downs

I'm back.

With a new name and new picture, but I listened to my audience and have kept the "Nappy Valley", despite the fact that we're not going to be living there any more. We're currently in rural West Berkshire, but due to move to the wilds of southeast London in September. There, we will have to negotiate the perils of school uniform fittings, moving American furniture into a narrow London town house and having no idea how the British school system works (Year 4? What's that? My son should be in third grade).

So far, being back has seemed a little unreal. None of us are at school or work yet, and days have been spent either catching up with friends and family or sorting through our mountains of stuff we kept here in storage. We've been enjoying the glorious British countryside, appreciating the lack of humidity and mosquitoes, admiring the golden fields and hedgerows, not minding the fact that most days have required socks and an 'extra layer'.

The Littleboys have been engaging with British wildlife by adopting a striped caterpillar and keeping him in a jar. And they've been engaging with all our friends' children by running madly with them around gardens and learning all about British snacks and drinks (they'd never seen a Hula Hoop or Fruit Shoot before, let alone drunk Ribena). They've tried new sports, such as cricket, which they treated as if was baseball, throwing the bat to the ground after hitting the ball. They seem excited so far, although clearly the start of term is in their minds; their stuffed animals and Lego are often lined up in classrooms as one toy joins the "new school".

Bee the caterpillar: the latest addition to the family

Certain things seem very strange; driving a manual car again, with the gearstick on the left, has taken a while to get used to; the smallness of parking spaces at the supermarket; having to pay four quid an hour to park in London on a meter. But it's been comforting to hear people who sound like me in the playground, to speak to people on the phone and have them immediately understand what I say, and to be offered a nice cup of tea (or a glass of wine) the minute you arrive in someone's home. Although I'm a bit worried by the fact that since being back I've particularly appreciated Radio 4, Waitrose and reading the Observer food section; I fear I have definitely joined the ranks of the middle aged somewhere over the past four years.

But I don't think the move will really sink in until September, particularly as we're heading off to Anglesey next week for an extended bank holiday with all the cousins. In the meantime, I'll be ekeing out the last of the British summer to the soundtrack of Woman's Hour and drinking endless cups of tea.

36 hours on the California Zephyr

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Winding our way through the Rockies

When we told people were taking a two day train trip from Denver to San Francisco with our six and eight year old, there were two alternative reactions. The first was “Oh, how amazing!" The second was “Wow, but won’t it drive you crazy?’.

The answer is: yes it was amazing, and no it didn’t drive us crazy. Well, perhaps if the iPad had yet to be invented, 36 hours in the company of two fairly bored boys would have been a living hell, but hey, at times like this I thank God for Steve Jobs. True, our boys spent a good 80% of their time glued to Minecraft and Angry Birds, rather than looking out of the window at the spectacular scenery. But reader, we let them.   After all, when you are eight you don't necessarily realise that travelling on a train through the Rocky Mountains is one of the most exciting journeys you'll probably ever make by rail in your life. Come to think of it, I've seen them more excited taking the train from Greenwich to London Bridge on Network South East....

The only exception was one hour after lunch when we decided to be responsible parents and make them do some summer homework/journal writing, at which point an elderly man came up to them (we were in the observation car) and told them (only half-jokingly) that they had a mean Mommy for making them do homework on holiday. 

Littleboy 2 is unimpressed by Amtrak's menu selection

Taking a long haul train is very different from taking a long haul flight. For a start, you can move around, explore different areas of the train, stretch your legs. Train time is different from real time; it’s defined by eating and sleeping, but one seems to roll into the other; lunchtime somehow morphs into late-afternoon drink time, and then into dinner time. Once it’s dark, there’s nothing really to do but go to bed. We had an Amtrak “family room”, in which there are two big bunks and two smaller bunks at right angles to them, so were all four in the same space. By the end of the journey, this had become extremely stuffy, so than goodness for the moves to the dining car and the observation car for long periods of time during the journey.

Scenery or iPad? iPad wins.

I had come armed with several books ready to read on the Kindle, but in the end I only managed a few chapters. The scenery was incredible. We began the trip with breakfast at 9 in the morning. As you eat your first meal, the train rises straight out of Denver into the Front Range of the Rockies, then through gorges and canyons and tunnels into the heart of the mountains. For a long time it follows the Colorado River (which eventually becomes the Grand Canyon); you pass white water rafters and kayakers who wave at the train. We had read that one stretch of track was notorious for people moony-ing the train, and sure enough, at about this point, the Doctor looked out of the window just in time to see a guy pulling his pants back up, having clambered up a rocky bank from the river just to do so. 

In the late afternoon the train moves towards Utah, passing through incredible red rock landscapes near the Arches National Park. Eventually this Wild West landscape gives way to arid, desert-like hills. We still followed the river, however, and as it got dark we watched deer wander down to drink at it. (The boys were actually interested at this point). 

Red rocks line the Colorado river in Utah

Most of Nevada is bypassed by night – fortunately, because most of it is brown desert, from what I saw. We saw the end of this landscape in the early morning light, before stopping at Reno around breakfast-time.  After that, the train starts to ascend again into the Sierra Nevada, passing pristine lakes, steep-sloped pine forests and the notorious Donner Pass, where a pioneer party came to grief in the days of the Gold Rush (it’s a grisly story involving cannibalism). 

Donner Lake in the Sierra Nevada

 

By lunchtime we were in California. The train passed through Sacramento and various small towns before making the final approach toward San Francisco Bay. We caught a brief glimpse of the Golden Gate Bridge, although it was mainly obscured by San Francisco's infamous summer fog, a cool grey cloud that makes the temperature in the city a good 10 degrees colder than that of just a few miles inland. 

So would I recommend a two day train journey to other families with children? The answer is, yes. But take electronic stimulation, book a sleeping cabin if you can afford it, and you might want to take healthy snacks (the Amtrak food, although good, consists mainly of hot dog and burger options for kids).

Finally, don't worry too much if the children aren't as fascinated as you with the spectacular changing scenery of the American continent. One day, hopefully, they'll remember that they crossed America by rail, and perhaps they will even be inspired by your own love of travel.

In the Wild West

My little cowboys

Hello from Denver, where I'm writing this from a gloomy motel room next to the station, where we have to be at 7AM tomorrow morning to catch the California Zephyr to San Francisco.

In the 10 days since we left Long Island, I've seen a totally different side of America; the Wild Wild West. We've spent time in the spectacular landscapes of the Rockies, hiking up to waterfalls and soaking in natural hot springs, taking cable cars to the tops of mountains and even riding down an alpine slide (a slide on which you sit on a tray and career down a mountain in a chute). We've seen the canyon country of northwestern Colorado and Utah, touched real dinosaur fossils, luxuriated in expensive Aspen and driven over high mountain passes to see ghost towns and ice grottoes.

Overlooking Steamboat Springs

Steamboat Springs, where we spent our first week in a ski apartment, is a charming little ski town, squarely geared towards the outdoors; rafting, tubing, and biking are among the popular activities and the Main Street is strewn with people carrying inflatable rubber rings and wearing wet clothing. It's so named for its hot springs and you can experience them in two entirely different ways. The "Old Town Hot Springs" has basically been made into a series of swimming pools, hot tubs and a mini water park with two long flume slides and a rock climbing wall.

The children loved this, but I was more taken with Strawberry Park Hot Springs. Outside of the town nestled in a hidden valley down a steep dirt road, this is a more natural environment, where you swim in muddy pools where the spring meets a stream, mingling hot and cold water to give you areas of wildly varying temperature. There were chipmunks everywhere, and the setting, amongst trees and the mountain, was stunning. After sunset, no children are admitted and clothing is optional - and although the signs say no alcohol, I've lived in the US long enough now to be certain that this will be squarely ignored. Although the kids declared the water too murky, I loved these pools and could have spent all day there.

Strawberry Park Hot Springs

We did some hiking, although Littleboy 2 seemed to suffer a little from the altitude and had several moments of simply refusing to carry on. The Doctor therefore went off and hiked by himself a couple of times, including an early morning walk up the mountain on which he saw a black bear.

After Steamboat, we moved on to Dinosaur National Monument, on the Colorado/Utah borders. The landscape is straight out of a western, and so were some of the towns we passed through. In particular we loved the small but fascinating Museum of Northwestern Colorado at Craig, where the boys loved seeing real cowboy clothes and a gun collection belonging to an elderly guy who worked there (and regaled us with tales of how he carried a gun when he visited New York).

The Doctor has really got into the Wild West spirit

The Colorado side of the park is stunning - and amazingly empty. We soon realised the reason for this - we were completely in the middle of nowhere. The nearest town where you could stay the night or even get a meal is 40 miles away in Vernal, Utah. Dinosaur, on the Colorado side, was a real one-horse town where rusty Dinosaur statues stood next to closed-down motels and shacks, a relic of perhaps an era when tourism was busier there. On the Utah side, you can see dinosaur fossils embedded in rock at the Quarry where many of the dinosaur bones found in museums around the world were originally found. For the Littleboys, this was a real highlight.

Echo Park Canyon in Dinosaur National Monument Park

We finished our Colorado stretch with two nights in Aspen. I'd expected it to be jetset and posh, and it is, but in a charming, boutique type way. The little tree-lined streets, with fantastic restaurants and bars, low rise wooden architecture, and of course the amazing mountain setting make it a uniquely special place. String quartets played in the streets, while beautiful couples in designer dresses made their way to the Opera House. Our hotel, The Limelight, was one of the nicest I've ever stayed at. From the home made granola at breakfast, to the comfy beds and the pizza restaurant where you could roast marshmallows round a firepit, it was perfect for a family and not too jaw-droppingly expensive either.

Roasting marshmallows in Aspen

Colorado has really surpassed my expectations. It was hard leaving New York, but the trip so far has really taken my mind off the move. Tomorrow we go further west, to San Francisco. Although the question of whether the boys will survive a 36 hour train trip without going completely manic still lingers, we're all looking forward to crossing the American continent by rail. See you in California....

Moving on....

Littleboy 2 gets ready for the move

With less than two weeks to go on Long Island, I feel as if we're in a kind of limbo. We've had the goodbye party, sent out the thank you cards, but haven't yet physically left.

School ended over a week ago and last night we hosted a party for 60 people at our house - the cast of characters included our former landlady (the one whose house was crushed by a tree), Littleboy 1's amazing piano teacher, neighbours and friends we've made over the last four years. But we're not done yet - we've a Fourth of July party to attend this week, and have meals with various friends who have suddenly realized we're leaving.

Of course everyone we meet asks us have we packed yet? I remember this when we left England, too. Packing for an international move is not exactly like packing a suitcase. We have a moving company coming to deal with the furniture etc., but most of the donkey-work is sorting and deciding, rather than packing. Sorting out which clothes to take with us in our cases, to last us till September when our stuff (hopefully) arrives. Deciding out which toys to bin, and which the boys actually still play with. Which of their many artworks to ship home, and which are just superfluous to requirements. Which important documents we really, really don't want to lose in a shipment, and whether or not it will actually be more dangerous to carry them around the US in our bags for two weeks.

Then there's the planning. Planning when to take the borrowed table back to our friend's house - when will be the last meal we need it for?  When do we say au revoir to the TV, sell the car? How much food do we still need in the fridge? (Turns out we have tonnes, left over from the party, so at least that is solved). What to do with the lights and electrical items we can't use in the UK.

But whatever we decide, the move is going to happen. In 12 days we leave for a trip to Colorado and Northern California, punctuated by a cross-country train trip. At the other end, England awaits. The prospect seems slightly unreal.

The other question I am constantly asked is how the boys feel about the move. I don't know exactly - children seem to take each day as it comes. They were excited about the leaving party because they were going to see all their friends (and they had a fantastic time). But whether or not it actually registered that it was because we're leaving leaving, I'm not sure.

One thing is for sure, though. I'm going to have to re-name this blog, as I'll neither be living in Nappy Valley or New York. Any suggestions welcome!