Nov 2007

A bit of trivia to drop into the conversation at your next dinner party - Washington has a greater population than all of Wyoming, and is twinned with Sunderland. How about that?

The front and back of the Capitol building.

Afternoon sun on the Supreme Court.

There are monuments to absolutely everything in Washington. This was the memorial to F. D. Roosevelt with his dog, Fala. It was controversial because it supposedly tried to hide his wheelchair.

Here's the White House.

Parthenon, Nashville.

Some cowboy boots. I bought the red and white pair in the middle.

A picture of a water hydrant.

Late afternoon on the Mississippi.

You can't really capture the razzmatazz of a basketball game (this was the Grizzlies vs the Spurs) with a photo, but try to imagine here a pop band, cheerleaders, fireworks, and somersaulting men in bear suits, and you're practically there.

Arkansas, and before here Mississippi, I explored with a car and a tent. Greyhound buses were fine, but you don't really get to see much of the countryside. You do get to see Greyhound bus stations, however, which deserve a blog of their own, but that's for another time perhaps.

Below are some of the colours along the Buffalo National River, which cuts through the Ozark mountains in the north of Arkansas.

Hot Springs (Bill Clinton's home town) is where Americans would come to in their thousands during the early 1900s for fancy surroundings and cutting edge spa technology.

In the south of the state there were miles and miles and miles of cotton fields.

The civil rights movement in the south is really well documented everywhere you go. In Little Rock there is an excellent museum on the nine black students who were barred from a high school in 1957, and the riots that followed.

For a closer look at what happened, click here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine

Finally, some mountain humour.