Zoos. I like going to them, I like going to them with children (NB: other peoples) (NB NB: With their parents as well. Or their parents permission), I like going to them alone in foreign cities, I sometimes get very sad in them, but, in many places, where the ‘education and preservation’ message is more prominent than the ‘point and stare and throw junk food if you like, we’ve not given them anywhere to hide or room to get away, so feel free’ message, then zoos are nice things to visit.

Particularly, I discovered in the case of San Francisco Zoo, when it is feeding time, and quiet.

Feeding time for the bears in SF Zoo is the best I’ve ever seen. Maybe I’m prejudiced: I really like bears, but this is how it works.

There is a viewing area that, for the minutes approaching 11am, has some nice green grass and a large-ish pond with some fish swimming around in it, with a pane of one-way glass that segments the pool and allows you to see all the way underwater, and overwater, and for the animals to see nothing but each other.

I really hadn’t thought about why the fish might be looking nervous.

“Hello fish!” shouted the children and adults standing by the glass. “Oh! Look at his little mouth! It’s going up and down and up and down, and his little fins are flapping, and…”

Well, they weren’t much longer.

It is more realistic a hunting scene than if they just flung dead fish substitute at them - though of course only so much as me hurling tasty cat treats to different corners of my living room for my cats rather than getting them to eat them from my fingers.

The bears hunt the fish. The bears kill, dismember, and devour the fish. It was thrilling to watch. Well, I thought so. Some of the other five-year-olds in attendance also. Some of the mothers, I think, were not so keen.

But I love bears. And I have never been so close.

After his fish, the bear went to get another course. There were various pieces of fruit floating around the pool. The bear got a pear (which was delightfully Dr Seussian of it) and brought it back to the point it had eaten the fish. It ate the pear.

It is as close to a bear paw that I want to get, now. Unless it is the pastry called a Bear Claw, made with maple syrup and pecans and things, in which case I am prepared to get closer.

But I don’t think I will get a pet Grizzly after all. I have decided.

Funny old week. So, where were we up to? Ah yes. We came back from the Big Brilliant Train Trip (which was indeed brilliant).

My Beloved was going back to the UK for a wedding - I was meant to be going to a different wedding, elsewhere, realised I couldn’t at the very last minute, and was already miserable at having to cancel and be at neither.

We’d arrived back on the train that morning, and after some lightning laundry and repacking, he went. On his way, he bought our tickets back to the UK.

As in, to live.

This was the beginning of a funny old week. For him, because he’d just bought the tickets, and that was weird, and suddenly he was thrown into the UK to go to this wedding and see the flat we will be living in and meet up with friends and relations and see all the things we will be going back to.

But for me, I just wandered around looking at all the things and people we will be leaving behind.

This made me sad.

But it is not a sad thing we are doing.

We’ve been here over two years now, made some amazing friends, learnt a lot about a part of the world that I would live in again, in a second, if the chance came up.
And in which we could, at a push, if we wanted to, stay. We’re both getting freelance work, have flexible enough visas and it’s not a case of must go back… It’ll just be a lot more lucrative and afford us a lot more possibilites if we work out of the UK instead of the west coast of the USA right now: that’s just the way it is.

So it is sensible, and rational, and logical - all are things I’m not very good at in general, and as I’ve been hinting, it is an idea we’ve been throwing around for months, and really is the best thing to do right now (for now).

I am happy because THINGS will be easier. Banking and accounts, insurance and all of that guff will be easier. Spending time with our very-much-loved family and friends in the UK will be easier. Getting work will be easier, in a way, depending on which of us is doing what. I am looking forward to having weekends away in lovely European places and seeing lovely friends there too. And just seeing THINGS there too. I am looking forward to having certainty about being able to stay where I am, and know what I am doing, and not have to process a lot of plans about if THIS happens then we’ll do THAT, but if THAT’s happening we’ll do THIS, OR this, depending on the result of meetings X, Y and/or Z
I am looking forward to… well, lots of things. There’s plenty of time for that as we go along. That’s what the blog is for, right?

I am sad because I won’t be here anymore. I am sad because I won’t have the smells and the light and the sunshine and the geography and the possibilities and the sense of optimism that I like about being in California. I’m sad, mostly sad, because I’ll miss the family of friends that we have built and met here.

But I can’t be that sad, because I don’t have a ban on coming back here, and I don’t have a limit on how often, either, frankly, so there.

And although these last couple of years have been very difficult, professionally and confidence-wise particularly, for me - and made infinitely more interesting with my Beloved going from fully employed to freelance - I don’t want to dwell on that. Not only because they have been crappy/interesting times for so many of us, and I don’t want to pretend we’re special in this.

But also because without them, I wouldn’t have met the people I’ve met, had the conversations I’ve had, and somehow ended up with some of the most ridiculous and fun work I could imagine, working on a game. Called Glitch (I’m still scared to say that out loud in case someone takes it away from me. But I’m going to have to stop being scared of that some time or other…) And I’m going to continue doing that, on top of some other work things I hope to continue doing, some things I used to do that I hope to get the chance to do again, and some other things I want start doing, once we get back to the UK. It is exciting and interesting. In the good way.

My beloved explains it all in a more rational, professional, manly way here.

So there you have it. We’re going back to live in Brighton - at the beginning of November. FACT.
It is exciting and sad and frustrating and brilliant and daunting and heart-breaking and anxiety-settling all at the same time.

I just thought I should make it a bit clear, for once.

It’s not a bad thing. Or a failure. Or proof that this was all a mistake (by any, any means). It’s a good thing. And a happy thing. And a logical, rational, sensible thing that will help everything be as wonderful as it should be, (or just as it should be) in the end. It is a happy thing.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not also sad.

On the eight hour ride up to Memphis from New Orleans, on which we were hoping to get a ton of typing done, I have taken an unconditional and irrational dislike to the City of New Orleans as a train (not as a city, I like that very much) - mainly on the basis that it shakes a lot. It is impossible to write postcards, to work on the computer on other things, to do anything, really, apart from listen to This American Life podcasts and stare out of the window, occasionally smacking your forehead against it really hard when the train goes over a particularly bad bit of track. A lot of the track is bad.

Partly, though, I get grumpy because the grunty man in the cafe car has none of his wares on display and apparently no interest in telling me what they are, making me go through a complex guessing game for every type of item, complicated by the fact that I’m British, he’s from somewhere DEEP down south, and our languages are apparently not the same. At all. It is a trial.

Do you have soda?
“Soda?” He says, a completely clueless look on his face.
Yes. Soda?
“SOH-DAH?” He repeats, parroting the syllables back at me he’s disgusted at having to speak whatever foreign language I am talking to him in. I am at a loss. I am using my very best half-American accent and using a word that I know is, if not the local word, at least a recognised equivalent.
Yes, I say, like Coke? Ginger Ale? Pepsi? Diet Pepsi?
“Mph! Soda! Yeeeh! I gat pepsi, daht pepsi, spraaat…”
Right. Two diet pepsi, please. Do you have any chocolate?
“Chaaklit?”
Chocolate. Yes. Candy? Of any kind?
“Cayndy?
Yes.
“Chaaklit?”
Yes.
“Yayas.”
Oh….kay then.
(We stare at each other. I cannot see what he has. Apparently, he is not willing to volunteer the information)
Do you have… Twix?… I say, hopefully.
“Twiyix?”
Yes. Yes. Twix.
“Twiyix.”
Do you have a twix?
“Yayus”
Or perhaps a?… Oh, just a twix. Please.
“Yawanna Twiyix?”
I sigh. Yayus. I say. Yayus.
Playse.

And I’ve been here two years. I was using my best non-threatening vowel sounds and bi-cultural-friendly words.
The people who stepped up behind me were REALLY English. I almost hung around to see how long it would take them to manage the same, but was in such a terrible mood by then I just couldn’t.

Two countries separated by a common language, indeed.
This trip, we end up eating more twix than we have in the last two years put together.

a) Heat
b) Impending travel
c) Worrying
d) (b+c) Worrying about impending travel.
e) Being on my own.
f) (c+e) Weird noises outside my house when I’m on my own.
g) Weird noises outside my house when I’m on my own due to other people having impending travel (b+c=e+f=g)
h) Weird noises outside when I am on my own while people that should be here are travelling and it is also hot. ((b+c=e+f=g) x a = h)
i) Being itchy.
j) The sound of mosquitos (NB, the sound of mosquitos will make me itchy).
k) Having outstanding work or projects running through my brain.
l) The cats. Who will be woken up by mosquitoes, noises outside, heat and my restlessness, and will wake me up in turn, making me hotter and more itchy (j + f + a + i = L x (a + i))

The then magnified and multiplied effects of these (and the lack of sleep caused by them), and the thoughts and imaginings and half-dreams and hallucinations generated by that:

1) The fact that the sound of mosquitoes near my ear when I am hot and half-asleep leads me to believe I have hair full of bugs (j + c + a +i = YIKES BUGHAIR!) and forces me to jump out of bed and ruffle frantically all of my hairs while doing the Dance of the Bugs (NB: a lot like moshing), and then brush it out and tie it back tightly - possibly with an alice band - before going to sleep. This would generally mean I was going to wake up with a headache, but since I’m probably going to wake up in about eight minutes anyway, it’s much of a muchness.

2) The fact that while i can fully justify the fact that murderers are more likely to murder people they know, and burglars have more attractive properties to hot-prowl than the slightly scummy ones (mine) in the middle of our street, the pure poetic tragic drama of something terrible happening to me the very night before I am due to be reunited with My Beloved always increases the risk of my being murdered or involved in a bungled robbery 300%. Of course, in realistic terms, this means it increases it from 0.001% chance to 0.004% (I think, I don’t do maths. Or statisitics, so this is a very rough guesstimate) but in anna-half-asleep-brain, it means it increases from 100% likely to 100% + (x?) 300% likely, which makes it very likely indeed. (cb +d +fg = YIKES MURDERYBUHGLAIR!)

3) The fact that I have lots of work to do and a constant stream of other things going through my head in a buzzing, anxiety-fuelled, half-asleep way means only two things: i) that I will spend the early hours starting to write things in my head thing ii) that I will wake up in the morning to discover that all these things were complete gibberish and not going to fit into my project at all, unless it happens to be a project about giant mostquito burglarmurderers, in which case they magically will.

I very rarely get to work on such projects, however. Sadly.

Anyway: point is - the number of these things that affected my night’s sleep last night: ALL OF THEM.
The amount of sleep I got: ABOUT ELEVENTY-SIX MINUTES.
Whether that is enough: NO. NOT AT ALL.

I’ll build a post connecting all the blogger types that have posted about having received a card - which is lovely, and I love them all very much - but you’ll need to give me a couple of days because my confidence and ok-ness have fallen over a bit this week, so I’m rebuilding, but give me a few days and I’ll be back to speed.

I’ll post a link to the first one I received on waking up this morning, though, from bojates/jemima, which was lovely, and had a nice summary of her card from a social anthropologist’s angle…

At 8.15 on a beautiful, sunny, (oh alright, slightly overcast, but still beautiful) San Francisco Bay Area morning, the same train as we’d hopped onto exactly two weeks before slid into the station across the bay from our our home in San Francisco, and we, slightly tired, and very travelled, fell off it. And, through some complex taxiesque rush-hour magic, got home, where the cats chided us for about three minutes, then went completely back to normal.

It has been a very odd, very enjoyable, very weird couple of weeks. And I look forward to writing lots and lots about it, but right now, I have done a first set of laundry, waved my beloved off on a flight to London (slight snafu with the planning, there), put more laundry on, hoovered a thick covering of cat hair off every hair-adhesive surface (all of them, apparently) and trying to get all my thoughts in order.

Meanwhile, people are receiving their cards - I know because some people are telling me on twitter, some are sending me pictures, some are blogging about them, and all of these things are lovely.

I haven’t really decided what next, really. I had a bit of a worry while on the way, and suddenly felt like a was doing everything precisely the wrong way around: that I was bothering everyone by sending them the dull minutiae rather than distilling the most interesting stories into things I could relate on a blog or over a pub table. And as such, I felt bad about the person that was getting a note about the quality of dinner rolls in the dining car, compared to the one who was getting one about an actual train crash. And I found myself feeling like I had to write more and more to compensate for disappointment from people who didn’t they feel they were getting value for money and…

Well, it’s a learning process. I have a list of things I know for next time, which include a) It’s impossible to use the bouncy flip-down lap table in coach class for anything as productive as writing by hand, so scale-wise, I have to cut back, and not have another thing (that has to take priority, as it’s for money) to do at the same time … although that was the main point of the trip … or just be content with maybe confusing a few people and feeling ok about the original plan of sending snatches of notes and overheard things and vignettes without necessarily worrying about contextualising.

I worried a lot about this. But then, I had a lot of time for worrying. And general thinking. And talking, and looking out of the window and sleeping.

So somewhere down the line, when I was trying to write, illustrate (or have illustrated, My Beloved lent his art skillz to many of them) stamp and tagline them all before leaving a place where I knew there was a mail box, I forgot the fifth and sixth stages: numbering and photographing them all. I think the last one I put a number on was about 93, but that was 50-70 postcards ago, and I don’t know which was which. Or what they said. Or what many of them were about. Or whether they made any sense.

Also: I am not at all confident of the postal system out of Glacier Park, especially with the blizzarding and the hotel closing for the season, so when someone gets something postmarked from there, I will be glad to hear it.

I don’t know what the plan is now. I’ll be posting various bits that needed more length to explain, and - along with getting that other work I mentioned done - collecting together people’s photos and nice pictures of what the hell I actually wrote and things, and writing lots of other things that occurred to me on the way, and just hoping that people receive something, because I was so desperate not to let anyone down, and that they’re not too let down when they do.

We have had, it is safe to say, a wonderful, bizarre, brilliant, exciting, boring, tiring, relaxing, exhilarating, mind-crushingly-dull, happy, anxious, comfortable, uncomfortable, interesting, beautiful, meaningful and hilarious couple of weeks. I’m a bit tired right now, so it’s not time to break the whole idea down quite yet. Just enough to worry a bit more, apparently.

I don’t want to make it sound like this was NOT My Brilliant Idea, by the way. It was just My Brilliant Idea: Stage I, and there are lots of lessons I want to learn for the next time I do it. And there will be a next time.

But we’ve travelled more than 7000 miles and spent more than… well, quite a lot of hours on trains. I’ve lost track. And when I say ‘lost track’, I mean it literally: I worked out all these things in sums on the front of someone’s postcard, forgot to take a picture of it, or a note elsewhere, then sent it.

Which, again, was kind of the idea, I suppose. But still.

It was a very long way. And lots of hours. And there are a LOT of things I have to tell you about.
Just you wait.

In the meantime, here is a photobooth strip (I told you about my vintage photobooth obsession, right? Well, sites like photobooth.net and their locator helped out with that element of the trip) that goes down as my favourite of all time, now.

Basically, it’s mainly because of My Beloved’s facial expression in the first one, and then the disintegration in the second one one we had been flashed by the world’s most angrily bright flash… but just to prove I was not as worrity as I sound in this post:

Also, I bought some other stuff from a shop I found in Seattle while looking up antique photo booth locations. I came away with some things that may not exactly be described as ‘essential purchases’, but that will almost certainly be making an appearance at important family and social events from now on.

HTML geeks among you might be amused to hear that the first time I tried to type the first tag on that picture, I typed ‘canter’, rather than ‘center’.
No, you’re right, it’s not funny not matter who you are.

Oh goodness me, I’m very tired (think well for My Beloved, who has not yet arrived in London as I type this). I am home, though. I can recommend the train. With reservations.

A ha ha haha. That was a joke. Reservations.
OhgodhelpmeIshouldgotobednow.

Not many flaws in the brilliant plan, of course, otherwise it would not so easily be referred to as ‘THE BRILLIANT PLAN’, but still, having been travelling now for almost a week (which in itself sounds odd) and having had various adventures along the way, from unrecommendable spates of vomiting in confined spaces and a train crash, to finding my new favourite food and discovering that there are just NO mailboxes on the street anywhere near most rail stations - none at all, and only one, apparently, in the whole of New Orleans’ French Quarter (that I have found) - I find that I don’t want to spoil the surprise of people’s postcards by publishing their content before they recieve them, so I’m going to hold off another couple of days, and then start telling you stories.

When, y’know, I have internet again.

As I write this, my train is trundling down the Pacific coast, filled with sleepy people on their way from somewhere, or on their way to somewhere, or, I suppose, both at once, because that is how travelling works. I am not ON my train, because, although it has already been travelling now for thirteen and a half hours, I’m not due to get on it until first thing tomorrow morning, two thirds of the way through its long journey from Seattle to Los Angeles.

I just find it weird to think that my train, the train on which we’ll begin our two week journey, is already out there, already on its way, already filled with people who feel like they’ve been on it forever, and I haven’t even stepped onto it yet. I haven’t even set off for the station yet. I haven’t even attempted a last night’s sleep.

The sleep thing is looking unlikely, to be honest. All the excitement about the theoretical concept of a two week train trip turned in to a bubbling mass of anticipation during the last few days, and today it’s just turned into an enormous bucket of fret. When I should have been packing, I was on the internet, compulsively flicking through forums of dedicated train-riders sharing tips and rules and horror stories and favourite seats and carriages to arrive and lists of things that you should definitely make sure you have with you, and things that you simply cannot do without.

I have thrown myself into a tizzy. Never having arranged such a complicated multi-leg trip, I’ve printed every piece of confirmation or crucial paperwork out, I’ve double checked every bit of accommodation twice and am STILL convinced that I have forgotten something, or that something will go wrong on the very first day of the trip and the rest - all that I’ve built it up to be and everything I’ve promised - will all be for nothing.

The postcards are all stamped and addressed, and shuffled into a random order that means that family, friends, internet folk and kindly passing strangers are all mixed in together so I have less of a temptation of getting muddled and being all conversational rather than doing the thing I intended and using the cards as mobile notes, parts of a whole rather than a whole in themselves. Finding an email meant for the postcard list in my email spam filter has set off another wave of panic, meanwhile, about letting people down, as has not having time to reply individually to the lovely people who’ve used that there donation button on the side to support the project and the postage involved, because I worry it makes me look like an ingrate.

I do love the word ingrate, though, so am quietly pleased the situation has meant that I get to use it, even if it was about me.

I don’t think I’ve been this nervous - or this excited - about anything in a very very long time. I’m fretting, and terrified, and excited, and, well, mainly fretting. And while I like the reason I’m fretting, I could do without the fretting itself. I could do with a magic wand that I would wave and all the fret would go away and my heart would beat at a normal rate and my brain would be filled with the normal sorts of pre-travel feelings that normal people who don’t enjoy professional levels of frettingness would feel at this particular time.

But there is no wand. There is no non-fretting-sparkle-dust that I can sprinkle over my head, so I will sit here and fret, quietly, in the corner. Or I’ll do that for the next six hours, and then I’ll go and get in a car and set off for the station. And then my train - the one that’s trundling toward us through the night, and will just keep on trundling once we’re on board, and for the next two weeks. Me, and my beloved, and a very large stack of postcards.

And at some point - I’m hoping some very early point, some time sooner rather than late - this whole thing will stop being fretty and worrity and terrifying and like a house of cards waiting to be blown over, and start being exciting again.

I’m hoping that happens about three mintes after I step onto that train, the one that is already on its way to meet me, and sit down, and pull out my little stack of postcards and a pen.

Will update when I can.
Right.
Um.
Off, then.