After the month of May in Canada, from Vancouver Emma travelled South to the USA and sunny California. Wine country, the Charlie Brown Museum in Santa Rosa, more culture, more trees and a beloved city, San Francisco… Emma is uploading the WhatsApp blog she wrote for family and friends below as she goes… Please keep returning here to catch the unfolding story – and click here for the next instalment of June-July.
Sun 2 June 2024
Hi all, I’m on the train again. Today I left beloved Canada and crossed the border into the USA. Can you see a damp stars-n-stripes hanging there? It’s raining...
However, I am headed in this direction…
I’ve just spent a couple of days in Vancouver, a beautiful city, doing more art and cycling the perimeter of Stanley Park. I even got to swim in the outdoor pool. It’s not often you get to see herons flying overhead when swimming!
Yesterday was my last day in Canada and I spent it close to home, in the suburb of Burnaby Heights where I was staying, where there was a local festival going on – Hats Off Day.
I’m not normally interested in old cars but these things were pretty cool.
As I travel away south now I look back at my time in Canada very fondly. It was quite a month. I feel sad to be leaving my birth land where I have had such a good time, but excited too to be heading south to the next part of my adventure. Tomorrow morning I will arrive in San Francisco, a city I love, where I will be met by a friend and staying with her in wine country in California, as well as doing a few days in the city itself. Before heading further south for the real centre of this trip, a month-long training at theSchool of Lost Borders.
I’m making the most of every moment as I don’t get in this neck of the woods very often and who knows when I’ll be here again?
I hope all is well with you with whatever you are doing, wherever you are. Good adventuring and life-living to us all. Love Emma xx
Mon 3 June 2024
Good morning, still on the train. It was all going so well but this one too hit delays during the night, par for the course it seems on these long rail journeys across Turtle Island. For all the pride in the railroad history of these lands, these long routes are mostly single track and freight gets priority over passengers. I don’t mind, I’m here for the ride, and it does give me time to do another post...
So to catch you up a little, on my last full day in Vancouver I had to go to the library of course, the Central one…
An amazing place, 5 floors of it, books and computers for miles… Loads of people in there using it...
Oooh and look what’s on the front of the UK Guardian
(* Note at May 2025 – feels very old news now.)
At The Bill Reid Gallery I saw more indigenous art of the West Coast, including this piece and its human creation story. I love the timid bottom poking out!
A boxwood pendant by Bill Reid, Dogfish Woman. And First Nations wooden boat and paddles display.
The totem poles in Stanley Park were amazing, though I did feel something of a gawking tourist, as there were so many of us there, snapping away, me amongst them.
Very interesting though.
A powerful sculpture of Harry Jerome, an African Canadian athlete I heard about on an interesting podcast along the way.
Being on the West Coast has been interesting as it doesn’t face West so much as East, reflected in the strong Chinese, Japanese and other East Asian cultures here. See this map – no real traffic or engagement with UK and Europe from here.
I spent my last afternoon in Vancouver in the local library, again intimidating opening hours, till 6pm Saturday and Sunday!
A beautiful location too. At Todmorden Library we can offer many things, but a view of the park and the mountains is not one of them! 💕😄
Yesterday I made the great crossing from Canada to the USA, which I was a little nervous about. But they only took a grapefruit off me (US Customs have a thing about fruit). Otherwise all good. 👍🏼
It was nice to be back in a US Amtrak station. I made a similar trip in 2010. The lovely old wooden benches and fancy stations. This is Seattle.
Now on the train again, we are weaving our way South through California. I enjoy seeing the back of a place from the railroad tracks too. For some reason there seem to be many abandoned yellow school buses in such places all over Canada and USA!
A drier climate here, this far South. Yellow grass amongst trees hardy for the heat. And finally the sun is coming out…
Despite the delay, I am told by my friend meeting me in San Francisco that we’ll be sipping Californian wine on her deck by the end of the day. 🥂 Cheers to that! Lots of love wherever you are. xx
Tues 4 June 2024
Happy landings in Sonoma, CA! Off the train at last last night – a shower, a meal and turned out to be a GnT on the deck!
Today is going to be in the scary 90°s I’m told, a whole other climate from Vancouver but all part of the adventure.
Good vibrations wherever you are. xx
Thurs 6 June 2024
Hey folks, I’m in Sonoma wine county, Californian wine country staying with my friend Catherine…
Yesterday I made a personal pilgrimage…
…To the Charlie Brown and Snoopy Museum! Or rather the Charles Schulz Musuem and Research Center in Santa Rosa. A fan from childhood, it was glorious! Snoopy everywhere, even in the bathroom… Can I live here?…
Very well laid out and interesting. Plus the original artwork of some of my favourite Peanuts cartoons.
Luckily I’m not having this problem on my trip!
As a former thumb-sucking, blanket-carrying child I have always been able to relate to Linus…
A fab day.
Today Catherine and I headed out for a day trip on the California highway… Luckily Catherine was driving!
More beautiful ancient trees at Muir Woods, redwoods these.
On the way we happened past Green Gulch Zen Center, related to the San Francisco Zen Center, reminding me fondly of the Hebden Bridge Zen Group I go to at home and the sangha there.
We finished the day with fresh oysters at Tomales Bay. I’m clearly having an awful time… 😆😋
Tomorrow I head back to San Francisco for the weekend, looking forward to that. Before heading west and south next week to the month-long training I’m doing in the mountains, even more exciting. I will post again before I go off-grid somewhat with that.
I hope all is good with you, lots of love xxx
Sun 9 June 2024
Hi folks. I have spent the last couple of days in a beloved city, San Francisco.
Typical, beautiful San Francisco architecture. If you look closely you’ll see this is a writers’ work space, appropriately on Page Street. My kind of place.
Yesterday I went on the cable cars, and saw the amazing views you can see nowhere else…
Followed by a great tour with San Francisco City Guides of the Alamo Square area of the city and its iconic Victorian architecture and Painted Ladies.
Later I went across the Bay, a journey which proved San Francisco has its own (somewhat foggy and dull) micro-climate. As just a few miles away in Oakland it was sunny, warm and bright.
I am ready now to pack up my bags one more time before heading towards the beauty ofInyo National Forestfor a month of wilderness guide training at The School of Lost Borders, putting my bags down for a good while, diving deeply into that. The journey will take 2 days by bus, starting early tomorrow, via Reno, Nevada. I’ll try to post again on the way.
Lots of love, Emma xx
Tues 11 June 2024
Hi all. So this will be my last post for at least a week and possibly a month.
Yesterday I left San Francisco for Reno on an early Greyhound bus. There’s probably a song about that, hum it if you know it...
I felt sad to leave the West Coast, to turn the corner beginning my (slow) journey back East. But I was also glad to get out of the crazy city and find beautiful landscape again. This time from a bus rather than a train window – mountains and deserts now – and MUCH hotter. 🥵
From these long distance buses or trains you notice how ‘civilisation’ emerges strangely from the natural landscape… What bizarre human worlds we have created!
Especially these casino cities emerging from the flat desert! I came to Reno on a similar journey 14 years ago, and played around with the whole casino experience then.
I learnt then that all places are more than their most obvious feature and not to be judged on one’s own superficial first ideas.
Yesterday I found my Air BnB refuge in the baking 30°+ heat. Then ventured out again to get groceries for the first week of the monthlong training programme I’m heading towards. I found the first place on Turtle Island with reasonably priced food, Grocery Outlet! (Food has been very expensive.) USA’s Lidl, thank you kindly.
Today I carry the groceries – and all my stuff – and make my last big journey for a while, from Reno to Inyo County and Big Pine for another adventure altogether atThe School of Lost Borders.
Thank you for keeping me company on this journey and all the messages along the way. I’ll see you on the other side of 14 July, if not before. More adventures then as I have another 3 weeks making my way East again, to Nebraska, Ohio, New York State back to Toronto and then home. The journey never ends! xxx
If you enjoy this you might also be interested in the travel blog Emma wrote on a trip she made in 2010 following her father’s footsteps. (She subsequently turned this into her first show Beyond Dreams of Aberystwyth plus the Online Book you can read here).
