Smorgasbord Letters from America –August 1986 – A nieces visit, Astroworld, rafting, South Padre and a Royal Wedding.

When I was given the folder of my handwritten letters to my parents when my father died in 1996, I was amazed that he had kept them for ten years. But so pleased that he did. We tend to remember the major events, and we had plenty of amazing experiences in those two years of living in the United States, but it is easy to forget the everyday…

It is August 1986 and my niece Emma aged 15, has been with us for three weeks, and I am writing to my parents with all the things we got up to.. well almost all of them.. I would send the photos on to them at a later date, but will share them in the post.

Dear M & D..

Thankfully all went according to plan and I met Emma along with her escort from the place at the airport and whisked her off to Parramatta Lane. Since you know the layout of the apartment you will recognise this favourite photograph spot for newcomers! Of course being fifteen, Emma was raring to go despite jet lag and the last three weeks have not stopped since.

We of course have introduced her to Walter… and David took this photo a couple of days after she arrived. We had lots of invitations to meals at people’s houses but we spent a couple of days by the pool to get used to the heat and we also of course had to go shopping for more clothes for all the social engagements!

Then Anna took Emma and I to Pappasitos for dinner, and our friendly guitarist who you will remember well Mollie for serenading you, found out Emma was your granddaughter and invited her stand up in front of the whole restaurant to sing to her. Two songs later we managed to drag her back to the table to eat her fajitas!

On the next Monday, Debbie, Walter, Emma and I set off at the crack of dawn and went rafting on the Guadaloupe again. We had a hilarious day and as the water level was down, were out there for six hours. We stayed in a motel in New Braunfels, Debbie had a bed to herself, Emma and I shared and Walter slept in a sleeping bag. Emma and I got up early and went to Mcdonalds and brought back breakfast. After much needed energy boost we went to a park nearby where they have a great water chute. We spent two hours going down it in inner tubes before driving the 200 miles home. We were all exhausted and Emma and I had fajitas and a movie before an early night.

It was needed as we had to be up early at 4.30 to catch the royal wedding… we watched the whole thing armed with supplies including some orange juice and champagne to toast the bride and groom. (Emma’s was 95% orange juice I promise). I have told her that now Prince Andrew is taken, she will have to make do with Prince Edward! We loved all the pageantry and certainly a fairy tale dress.

David was in Kansas all week but arrived back on Friday night ready to take us out over the weekend. We went to the movies on Saturday night and a Chinese at our favourite restaurant. He left again Monday morning and on Tuesday the gang got together and we headed to Astroworld which is a themed amusement park and had a great day on rides and having photographs taken ….including gate crashing the photo with Bugs Bunny and two small strangers.

We went to a concert at the park in the evening and headed home very tired but happy.

We had the weekend with David and then Debbie, Emma and I headed down to South Padre for four days to a rented house on the beach. We had a great girls only visit, with plenty of sun, swimming and lobster dinners, which got very messy. Some of the best seafood ever. Emma still looks skinny whilst Debbie and I put in at least 5lbs.

To finish off her holiday everyone piled into Pappasitos, having started at our apartment and the restaurant cordoned off the back of the room to keep us from disturbing the other customers!

I think Emma’s face says it all…..

And then it was time to say goodbye. I have to say it was a wonderful time and we cannot believe how fast it has gone. Everyone fell in love with her and we certainly enjoyed having her with us. Sending her home very tanned and hopefully with some great memories.

Then to fill the suddenly empty week I went out to Debbie’s parents ranch about 50 miles north of here. They have a man made lake on the property and they have stocked it with Bass. We spent some time on a wind surfer without any wind, and did some fishing. I also got in touch with my inner cowgirl and have proof of both my fishing and my trick riding abilities!!

As you know I have a pathological phobia about snakes (it must have been my early training around cobras in Ceylon)… and Debbie neglected to tell me until after swimming and larking about in the water, that there were also a fair few water moccasins in the lake too. Thankfully it was also after I had dismounted otherwise it might have been less than graceful.

David and I are off on 21st for a week to Barbados. We are pretty certain we will be leaving here in January and we have so many air and hotel miles to use up, it will be virtually free. I will call you next week on Sunday before we go and tell you all about it in a letter when we get back.

Then it will only be six weeks until we are home for David’s conference and my stay with you at home for a week.  Really looking forward to seeing everyone and cannot believe it is nearly a year since you were with us.

Love from us both Sally and David..XX

©Sally Cronin

 

Thanks for visiting and I hope you have enjoyed our latest adventure in Texas and will join me next week for another.. Sally

Smorgasbord Letters from America – March 1986 – Pool Parties, lost puppies, New Furniture by Sally Cronin

When I was given the folder of my handwritten letters to my parents when my father died in 1996, I was amazed that he had kept them for ten years. But so pleased that he did. We tend to remember the major events, and we had plenty of amazing experiences in those two years of living in the United States, but it is easy to forget the everyday…

March 18th 1986

Dear M & D.

Another St. Patrick’s Day over, we must have been the only two in Houston who didn’t attend the parade and celebrate it!  I hear they even turned the river flowing through San Antonio that we walked along with you last year, green. One of our friends who comes from New York said that around 40 million Americans have Irish ancestry…for a small country Ireland has managed to do what greater nations have failed to… infiltrate every continent. There were a contingent of Irish at the Alamo on both sides as there are some Mexican families with Irish surnames..

We are still looking at options should be stay here after David’s contract finishes in January 1987. The sticking point is still for me to get a visa because we would both have to work if we are to afford a house etc. David is still in talks with agencies and we have had an idea of what I might do…With my previous job with Savills in Norfolk, I am looking at what is needed to take the Real Estate exams here. Once we have an idea of which state we would like to live in, I will check that out. I would be interested to go through the course anyway to keep my brain active.

On the subject of houses, we have come up with a plan to save quite a bit of money. We currently pay rental for all the furniture in the apartment. We get a certain allowance from the company but that does not cover all the rental or the furniture. So I have been to a rental company that also sells used furniture to complexes who offer fully-furnished. We pay 200 dollars a month for the furniture and I have paid 500 dollars for everything needed to replace it. With 9 months left this means a saving of 1300 dollars that we can put towards our new home.. here or back in the UK. David’s company has confirmed that it will bring back all our belongings including my car and any furniture so either way we will get good use from it. We sold our house in Tring with a lot of the furniture included because we didn’t want to pay a lot of storage whilst we were away. So it will be useful. It is all high quality stuff and a fraction of the cost of buying brand new.

Sonia rang me so we could talk about Emma’s visit in the summer and we are looking at June for three weeks. We just need to confirm our whereabouts but she doesn’t have to book the flight until 21 days before. It will be lovely to see her and cannot believe she is now 15… Debby and I have some trips up our sleeves including a girl’s weekend to San Padre Island which is fabulous. We will rent a beach house for three days.

David has a lot of travel planned for the next three weeks with trips to Las Vegas and San Diego in the first week in April. I will send him off with ten dollars to put in the poker slot machines for me… but don’t expect to see any winnings back! And I will fly out to meet him in San Diego for the weekend as we have some air miles to redeem and I can get a bonus ticket for 50 dollars extra. I do love that west coast and we are looking forward to exploring the southern end of the highway.

Walter has a bunch of friends coming in next week for a few days and I am cleaning his carpet for him with a rented machine from the store. I don’t mind as he is very good about making sure we are okay. We are having two of his friends stay with us, there is a big party planned for their first night around the pool with a BBQ and water volleyball and another on the Sunday at his place. I don’t think there will be much time for sleep.

I am now playing water volley ball for the boys team… I am tall and having played netball am quite useful by the net. We sometimes play other apartment complex and I am not sure if I am the mascot or the ace up their sleeves…They call me Sledgehammer.. I have been called worse… There is a song of the same name which seems to get played a lot.

We nearly got a dog…..yesterday I found a small puppy wandering around Kroger’s car park and I saw it nearly go under the wheels of a truck. I managed to coax it towards me and picked her up and brought her home. I rang the SPCA but they couldn’t take her last night so we decided to keep her or at least find her a good home.  I took her for a walk around the outside of the apartment complex which has some grass, and as we passed the family section some children ran up and called her name. Seems like she had got out of the window left open for her in the truck when they were shopping at Kroger’s so it had a happy ending. But both of us were a bit disappointed.

Anyway.. time to head over and clean a carpet… and get the guest bedroom ready for the visitors. Write again next week..

love from us both S&D…

Thanks for dropping in today and I hope you have enjoyed the latest adventure. I am so glad we made the most of our two years in America..most of the partying stopped on our return to the UK and I was back to work full-time.

Letters from America – January 1986 – New Mexico, Mckittrick Canyon and the Living Desert – Part Two by Sally Cronin

This it the second part of the article that I wrote for my parents primarily but with a view to adapting to send off to a magazine at a later date. We crossed Texas and into New Mexico to hopefully experience a once in a lifetime sighting of Halley’s Comet which only appears every 76 years. Our trip offered some wonderful opportunities to explore the area and here is part one.

Unfortunately at some point over the last 32 years, the photographs that I took have gone missing,probably when we lost a great many books and other paper items when our house was wrecked by a leaking pipe when we were away in 1996. However, thanks to Pixabay.com and their free use images, I have managed to find a few to share with you.

New Mexico and some ambitions fulfilled – Part Two

McKittrick Canyon

One of the things David and Walter really wanted to do while we were in the area was to get in some Mountain Time.

Having looked at the map we decided to go south of the New Mexico border, back into Texas to Guadalupe National Park. As none of us had been in training for a long hike we settled on McKittrick Canyon, and armed with a guide book and a gallon of water we set off from the Ranger Station along a dried up stream bed. The plant life was varied and very green due to the unusual amount of water available and about every half mile or so the stream would appear from underground and form small pools shaded by evergreen trees, strangely out of place in this semi desert. Some of the pools contain trout, rare in Texas and beside one such small oasis we sat and ate our picnic lunch in the company of a small, lonely, speckled trout.

Here is a video which showcases this amazing place far better than my original photos thanks again to GoTraveler

A sandwich has never tasted so good. On our hike we stopped briefly at Pratt’s Cabin, it is now a Ranger Post with restrooms, open only in summer, but at one time Mr. Pratt had lived there in isolated splendour with only rattlers and coyotes for company. Certainly an ideal spot for getting away from the madding crowd.

Surprisingly for this time of year, the temperature for the three days we were in the area stayed in the high 70’s and low 80’s. I could feel my nose getting redder by the minute, but it was wonderful to feel the warm sun in January and was far removed from the snow and ice we had left back in England the previous winter. We turned back after 2.8 miles and retraced our steps, investigating all the things we had missed the first time. David and Walter had by this time got a little bored with the straight and narrow and so went sideways and up whenever possible.

This is not really recommended during the summer months as you are likely to meet some of the less welcome natives of the canyon, but they stayed in sight of the main path which I stuck to with the consolation that I got back to the Ranger Post five minutes before them.

My muscles ached from the unfamiliar exercise but it was wonderful to be able to study all the plants and all the geological history evident in the Canyon. This was an easy walk that anyone could do properly equipped, water being the main priority, although at this time of year there were very few people taking advantage of this beautiful place, which quite frankly suited us. Being so quiet and peaceful, it was easy to imagine an apache or two lurking behind some of the large mescal plants along the trail, and who knows maybe there was.

The Living Desert

One of the things that I really wanted to see while in New Mexico was the Living Desert. I had heard about it at school and was delighted to find that it was only a few miles the other side of Carlsbad City.

After our walk through McKittrick Canyon we drove back through White’s City and on to Carlsbad. It was not until I got out of the car that I realised just how out of condition I really was. However the next two hours were so interesting that I soon forgot my aches and pains.

At first when you enter the display all you see are some sand dunes sprinkled with cactus, most of which we had already seen on our trip. We were a little disappointed until we turned the corner and entered the aviary section.

In this area were all the animals that had been found in the desert abandoned or injured. They included bobcats, mountain lions, falcons, road runners and some gorgeous Bam Owls. Three of them sat in a row, on one leg with their eyes closed and I couldn’t help but notice their resemblance to the Andrews Sisters, with apologies, and not a comment on their singing abilities. You are able to walk through one display which has vultures flying around your head, a little disconcerting to say the least. Not wishing to be their next meal I retired gracefully and explored around the next corner. There are animal enclosures all through the Living Desert containing a variety of the area’s inhabitants, including foxes, bear, raccoon and a very unconcerned badger eating his dinner.

My favourites were the Prairie Dogs who spent their time rushing around their enclosure from hole to hole, gossiping and chattering with excitement, it reminded me a little of our apartment complex. In the paddocks were mule deer, bison and one particularly rampant elk stag. Boss of a very pretty harem. He disliked the intrusion into his courtship rituals and had been bashing his head against the brick wall, literally, forcing the rangers to fence off part of the access road overlooking the paddock.

The park was due to close so calling upon the final reserves left in my muscles I raced up to the gift shop and managed to buy two cacti to bring home to Houston to join all my other plant life.

On the way back to White’s City we stopped in Carlsbad at the Sirloin Stockade and had a great steak dinner which was excellent value, and a definite improvement on the night before. It also fuelled us up for another late night view of Halley’s Comet. A super end to another great day.

If you would like to know more about this wonderful and magical place here is a short tour thanks to TravelGuideNewMexico

The return

I felt that breakfast at the top of the canyon watching the sun come up over the desert for the last time was a fitting end to the weekend and a good start to the twelve hour journey home, and it was. What a beautiful place and one that none of us were keen to leave.

The return drive was unremarkable except for Walter sighting a coyote on the hills alongside the Orla Road. We stopped and watched this wild, free creature for a few minutes and with more than a touch of envy we carried on, taking with us some very happy memories, hopefully captured on film and the determination to see even more of this beautiful country.

I hope you have enjoyed our trip to New Mexico and will join me again next week for more letters from America.. thanks Sally.