Robin Willis

Jamie is back at work this week, after four months’ maternity leave that have passed in a flash. We decided to go away for a final hurrah last weekend, before things got busy. (Rather, even busier.)

A destination chosen: Carmel, a seaside town near Monterey at the top end of the Central Coast. We’ve ventured up as far as San Simeon before (back in December 2007), ‘A’ on the map below, taking the scenic coastal route. This time we needed to get there a little quicker, so we zoomed up the infinitely less interesting ‘5′.

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The journey, B to C, is 323 miles.

Our hotel room at the Wayside Inn. We decided to splurge a little bit, as it was only for three nights, and we hadn’t been away on a road trip since February 2011 (to Paso Robles with our forgotten dog Bernie, or is it Basil?…).

Outside the hotel room – convenient parking, and our own tiny patio

Jamie relaxing after we’ve unpacked.

Luke very grown-up in the high-backed chair. He’s by the roaring (gas) fire, so he’s perfectly set for a Rowley Birkin, QC impression. (YouTube video – sound warning!)

Aliens are landing! Or there’s something really interesting like the ceiling to look at.

Down on the beach the next morning. It’s down a long steep hill; excellent cardio pushing the pushchair (’stroller’ as I have to call it in order to be understood) back up.

Some brave people setting up camp – it was a tad windy!

Walk through the woodland park later on around midday. This bit is again significantly uphill! And on bark mulch, so even more resistance to motion. The only solution is therefore to run up.

We walked all the way down to the Mission San Carmel, officially and more snappily named San Carlos Borroméo de Carmelo Mission. Beautiful, old (1771), and very tranquil: we had the place to ourselves.

It’s small, by the standards of most missions. It was the second mission to be established on the California coast.

There wasn’t even anyone around to get a picture of all of us, so I used the ever-handy tripod known as the ground.

Lucky we packed lunch for Luke.

On the way back, some interesting cars. Dozens of late-70’s / early-80’s Mercedes SL450s (or 560s, or 350s, etc, for which I have an inexplicable fondness), and this gem:

The view south across the Carmel River Beach; the mission is tucked in behind the bay. North from this headland is the Carmel Town Beach we were at earlier.

Luke and I got to spend loads of time together over the weekend. I don’t really see him much in the weekdays, apart from bath-times, so this was a good time to hang out with him. (Does one hang out with babies?) Look at those chubby arms! And Luke’s!

The next morning, Saturday, the entire world seemed to descend on the area. It was a beautiful day, and there were literally coachloads of people everywhere. We took another walk around Point Lobos State Natural Reserve, this time with Luke in the Ergo Baby carrier on my front. He’s peaceful in there, but it gets hot for him and though his eyes are shut, he can’t really sleep properly… so we had a very tired baby on our hands that evening.

The view out over “Devil’s Cauldron”:

The view south, down towards Big Sur. The craggy granite, with its intricate coves and pools, is most reminiscent of Cornwall’s north coast. There’s just no trace of Rick Stein here though!

A great escape for the weekend. It appears we took no photos of the town of Carmel itself. Suffice to say it was charming, compact and highly pedestrian-friendly. If you’re into art, the hundreds of little studios and boutiques would provide endless fascination. For us more practically-minded folk, the variety and number of excellent (-looking) restaurants was tantalising. We couldn’t try many of them, of course, as we haven’t yet mastered the art of Baby Comes Too. We did manage to have a nice lunch at Flaherty’s Oyster Bar and Seafood Grill.

The choice to stay in the centre of town certainly paid off; we didn’t have to drive anywhere for meals and supplies, and the leisurely activity of milling around the town was not bracketed by the hassle of bundling the family in and out of the car.

The drive back on Sunday was predictably boring but luckily mostly clear. The 530xi returned a reasonable 27.0mpg (32.4mpg in UK gallons) at an average speed of 66.0mph. This was mostly at around 75mph cruising speed.

An incidental driving-related lifestyle note: I am currently surviving my commute by listening to Books On Tape (or Books On CD as they need to have been called since the 1990s); the narration is actually audible now I finally have a quieter car! I’ve had some good ones lately: the classic A Year in Provence, entertaining and beautifully stereotyped, and Alan Alda’s two highly personable and easy-going memoirs Never Have Your Dog Stuffed and Things I Overheard While Talking To Myself. (In between, there was also the catastrophically smug and sanctimonious The One Minute Entrepreneur.) I’m now starting Operation Mincemeat, about a World War Two deception plot. I made the mistake of tuning into the talk radio again, twice today, and was repelled by the relentless Republican nominations ‘news’. Otherwise, the music selection on KCSN is often worth listening to and has provided me with invaluable new additions to my collection.

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This is old news for most of my reader(s), but Jamie and I welcomed our first child Luke into the world early in December. He was 7lb 13oz, 21″ long, and is a beautiful healthy baby.

It has been a rather busy seven weeks since then, and we are only just beginning to feel that we are surfacing back to any semblance of normal life once more. It’s only now that I finally have the time to blog!

As they say, having a baby turns your life around. We are now unequivocally on his schedule, and he leaves little time for anything else. Finally we understand the situations of those parents who seemed so unnecessarily bound by the bedtimes of their little ones.

He is the most incredibly easy baby to care for (so far, touch wood, etc), and hopefully he will continue this way! He goes down at night with little or no fuss, and wakes once in the night for a feeding – though this is looking as if it may phase out soon, thankfully.

In the last week or so he’s just started smiling frequently. This makes him dramatically more fun to interact with! He smiles at the simplest of things, like following slow movement of our heads from side to side, and gentle ‘pops’ with our fingers on his cheeks and nose. He’s not yet active enough to be constantly lifting his head to look around, so he still relaxes on our shoulders like a warm bag of potatoes.

Without further ado, here are the pictures.

Only a couple of hours old:

One of his first meals:

He had some jaundice, so he had to stay in for an extra night under the “bili” lights while we went home. It was hard to go home without him!

Snuggling up with Mummy before leaving the hospital, three days old:

In his first real clothes, in the car seat for the first time, ready to meet the world:

Basil looks on with anticipation, excitement, and not a little confusion. What is this thing?

Trying on Daddy’s glasses, two weeks old:

Mum’s hands are a little bigger:

Cocooned in the ‘Mobi wrap’:

Hungry, maybe? Or needing changing? Who knows…:

Middle-of-the-night feedings, around three weeks old on New Year’s Eve:

Checking out the view on the porch:

Standing with a little help for balance, but supporting his own weight easily, at one month old:

Gangsta get-up with an oversized white shirt:

First smiles! So rewarding. He’s finally giving something back! Six weeks – right on schedule.

He’s a cheeky one.

So now we can play!

Last night, seven weeks old: the first try-out of the Bumbo. He can sit in it easily; he just needs a little help holding his head up after a minute or so:

More to follow. And a load of other stuff I haven’t yet got round to: a hiking trip to Yosemite, my family’s visit after Christmas, and a new car!

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I’ve completed a number of construction and modification projects in record quick time over the last few weeks. I hope I can maintain this new level of efficiency once our baby’s arrived – otherwise I may never get anything done again.

We needed an area outside for keeping garden hand-tools, plant foods, fertilisers etc (which were taking up valuable space in the garage), and a work surface for growing vegetables from seed. I’d originally intended to build a movable free-standing potting bench, but I realised the ideal solution would be to make better use of the space under the lean-to on the side of the garage – currently home only to a couple of forks and some planks.

I had most of the timber just lying around, so I got started quickly!

I need to see a doctor about this dandruff…

(For some reason, chop-sawing through the knots in the wood produces shavings rather then sawdust!)

The next day, all finished. Total build time was probably only about six hours. Using Josh’s nail gun to fix the slats in place was by far the biggest time-saver (ok, having a car to fetch the timber was quicker than walking, but you get my point); just pop-pop, pop-pop… in several hundred places… and you’re done.

Jamie gets organised, and gets potting! Mmm tasty onions and lettuces for the winter.

The quickest project of the lot: putting up the shower curtain to hide the bath. Now we don’t have to clean the bath!

The most annoying project: dryer vent tube. When the gas man came to turn the gas back on, a couple of days after we moved in to the house, he left a report about the dryer vent being of an outdated material, and recommending corrective action to replace it.

We’d never identified exactly what he was talking about: I assumed he meant the vent flap on the outside of the house, but we couldn’t find it! This was something of a mystery – where did the dryer vent to, exactly? Under the house? Up the wall and through the roof? Into thin air?

We had always noticed the storage room getting very warm whenever the dryer was used, which made me wonder if it was venting to anywhere at all. I decided to investigate: if this was any safety-related issue, I wanted it solved before the arrival of our precious new joy-bundle.

So, pull the dryer out, and have a look. OK, this might be the answer to one question – there’s a big hole in the tube letting hot air out! That could be why the room gets warm.

More worryingly, this answers the other question: it vents into the wall. So, all the hot air, lint-dust, and combustion products (it’s a gas-heated dryer, rather than electric) are just floating around in the wall cavity, and probably coming back into the room from under the floor. This definitely explains the light-headedness we’d noticed whenever running the thing for a large number of loads. Certainly a safety issue.

OK, off to Home Depot to get a new tube, a vent to take it to the outside of the house, and … other stuff. $200 worth of other stuff. While I was there, I signed up for the Home Depot store credit card and was rewarded on the spot with an $8,000 credit limit. (Baffling, then, that I have to plead with the bank to get an increase from $1,300 on their credit card: I asked for $5,000 and they graciously raised it to a nice round $2,100.)

Mmmm… man-retail-therapy.

It turned out that there was originally a hole in the outside of the house for the dryer vent, as I could see a section of the underlying supports cut away in the same place. When the careless contractors re-sided the house, some time in the 1980’s we think, they didn’t bother to cut a new hole.

This just feels wrong!

Job done on the outside! Now just to attach the tube on the inside…

… and this is where things started to go wrong. The flexible tube was really difficult to attach to the dryer, and in the process, it pulled the non-flexible tube (in the wall) off the vent flap. It was only clipped in place onto the flap, so I wanted a stronger attachment with staples. So I sought the staples. I couldn’t find them in the garage, and we have various poorly-organised boxes of DIY stuff in the storage room, so I re-organised them:

Then in moving the ironing board out of the way for the fifth time (it’s cheap and nasty, and used approximately once a year), it hit me on the head. So I exiled it:

(That was most incredibly satisfying.)

Finally I found the staples in the garage, tidily stored in an unlabelled box. Everything back together, shiny new duct in place, and we are good to go!

OK, next thing. This was quick and easy: a tie-point for the dog, to allow him to sit out with us on the porch, and prevent him running off after cats and getting squashed by cars. He looks thrilled:

And the next! I bought a dog-flap ages ago but hadn’t got around to fitting it. The dog had a funny tummy (which later turned out to be tapeworm and coccidia), and we needed to allow him to go outside in the night.

Stage 1: unmolested door. Commitment level: 0%.

Dog flap. Design largely unchanged since 1979!

Instruction 1: measure dog.

Hmm, need to remove the metal panel holding rotting door together. Commitment level: 20%.

Truly delightful colours and textures are revealed!

Mark it out, plunge the drill bit in, and start sawing. Commitment level jumps to 60%.

… 70% …

… 100%.

Dog flap fitted, ensuring structural integrity of the door once again.

Now the training begins! He is skeptical, but not afraid…

Look, mummy can use it… and mummy has food outside…

A tentative first look… and he’s comfortable with it. Hurrah!

The beautiful finished look.

OK, what’s next?

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Crikey. I’ve nearly finished documenting the summer trip, and only two months late! Apologies for the terse or nonexistent captions to follow…

We finished with a weekend in Chicago, a city I’ve never been to, but which my Dad loves.

Dinner the first night was at a restaurant recommended by Ken: Shaw’s Crab House. We didn’t eat any crab…

…but the oysters were fab:

…and the fish main course (cod? haddock? I forget…), with a chilli and caper sauce (still making my mouth water even now) was probably the best fish I’ve ever had.

Chicago’s architecture is beautiful at night:

I’m full. We had three puddings!

We realised (after a hefty breakfast the next morning) that there were too many tourist sights to see in the city over a short weekend, so there was basically no point in trying. Instead, as we readily accepted, we would do better to just experience the gastronomic delights of the city. Basically we had a weekend to eat Chicago.

I don’t have any flattering pictures of that breakfast. It seemed to have involved Huevos Rancheros and indecent quantities of French toast (deep-fried) at … some place.

So we waddled around for a bit, and did a bit of shopping, then went up a really tall tower: the Hancock Centre. We got to the top, 100 stories high, just as a rainstorm was sweeping over the city, and across the lake. It was most dramatic.

Hmm. We don’t have umbrellas.

Other really tall buildings look tiny!

Lots of other tiny tall buildings – this is the view north along the lake shore. A sprinkling of groynes in evidence, to quell that pesky Longshore Drift.

T’wife. She looks a bit tired: must be all that travelling for two.

Ey oop – t’wife again. Later that evening; this was my first exposure to the phenomenon of Chicago style pizza. I had some vague notion that I knew this, from various frozen supermarket offerings, but this was like nothing else I’ve ever eaten. More of a hearty pizza pie than a delicate sprinkling of tidbits on a wafer-thin crust, it was very tasty and very filling. We couldn’t eat it all, so we had it packed for take-out and found a homeless guy to give it to. He was pleased!

The next morning. Hello, we’re hungry. Breakfast time! Let’s fill the table with food!

We waddled around again, and decided it might be safer to sit for the rest of the day, so we booked an ‘architecture cruise’ to take the not inconsiderable weight off our feet.

Curvy building.

Our hotel.

An old building. I’m sure I knew what it was at the time; something to do with newspapers or telly I think.

What’s with all these curvy buildings?

Groovy retro 60’s riverside residences, with boats.

Crusty.

I want one of these signs.

This is definitely a newspaper building – it occupies a whole city block! (Brits: that’s quite big.)

Trump Tower, up close.

An old fire boat.

The (hourly) water jet across the river, just by our hotel.

There is so much history to Chicago, even as a relatively young city. It was flattened by a fire in 1871, but the speed and energy of the rebound from this disaster propelled it to unprecedented growth and success.

So there’s more to learn, on our next visit. More importantly, and more memorably, there’s more to eat.

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Chapter three of our saga took us to Lake Como in Italy, via the delights of Gatwick and Milano Malpensa airports. (Gatwick really was a delight: they have a bright, wide new security area with nifty return conveyors for the trays.)

Arrival at Malpensa:

We enjoyed a good hour and a half’s unplanned sightseeing around the airport, and a delicious lunch in a grand restaurant nearby. The drive from the airport, in our rented cars, was nothing short of hair-raising: along tiny winding mountain roads, with narrow gaps between buildings in the crowded towns, cliffs of rock to one side, and lake to the other, and continuous rush-hour traffic.

We made it to our apartment safely, and as it was a Sunday, we couldn’t buy anything edible from any supermarkets to stock up the cupboards, so we spent the entire afternoon and evening in a bar. The view from there looked something like this:

The next morning we wandered down, through the streets of Lenno…

… to the ferry terminal to go across the lake to Bellagio. The views from the ferry were unparalleled.

This monastery (I’m guessing that’s what it was) perched high on a cliff was especially impressive.

Steep hills in Bellagio! Quite touristy; we were glad we were staying in a slightly more ‘local’ town.

On the ferry on the way back.

Sunset over the hills that evening, from the balcony of the apartment.

Mum and Dad whipping up dinner – now we’d finally been able to stock up the fridge!

Breakfast the next morning: a seriously nice chocolate croissant from a cafe in Lenno. Jamie, Barlie and I set off for Villa Balbianello out on the peninsula – only walking distance from the apartment, but not to be attempted before fuelling up!

Lenno from the hill as we walk up to the villa.

Some of the villa gardens.

A quiet spot between the buildings of the villa. It was last privately owned by an entrepreneur and Himalayan explorer, Guido Monzino.

T’wife!

T’wife and us!

We elected to take the little taxi boat back to Lenno, rather than walking. Glad we did – it afforded these spectacular views of the villa from the water:

Time for a dip at the Lenno Lido:

And a snooze:

The next morning we drove up into the mountains and got lost in the tiny mountain villages clinging to the hillsides. The gradients were tough, especially for small cars loaded with Brits and one-and-a-half Americans. The parking spot for this local’s Mondeo neatly illustrates the space issue:

On the way back, we went up the cable car for a stunning view over the lake:

Dinner that evening was a blow-out meal at l’Osteria. Our last evening already… all too soon.

We had most of the next day to amuse ourselves before leaving, so we visited Villa Carlotta (given as a wedding present by Princess Marianna of Prussia to her daughter… as you do):

The drive back to the airport mainly featured looking for George Clooney as we drove through his holiday home-town of Laglio, yet more gelato in Como, and not driving into the mountains again. Getting out at Malpensa was… delayed.

Back to England for one last short night in Woking, then the last stop of our trip: Chicago!

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