Washington, Montpelier and Monticello

Jeannie and Sophie, James' mum and niece have been with us for about 10 days now. We have been enjoying some beautiful autumn days here and the colours of the leaves in the trees are just amazing. Here are some photos that show you some of this colour and how we have been spending our time.



Pia and Ella have been learning how to ride a bike without training wheels and they have both mastered this very well now. They love going for a ride around our local park, Lincoln Park, which looks just gorgeous at this time of year.

Ella is a blur as she runs around being a scary cheetah! Pia is a squirrel in the background.

On Jeannie and Sophie's first day in Washington (November 15) we took them to see the Lincoln Memorial. Here they are with Pia and Ella on the steps, with the Washington Monument behind them.


We then walked back past the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which is very sombre. So many names carved into the black granite structure, which is cut into the earth. We then caught the lift up to the top of the Washington Monument for some breathtaking views over Washington.

The Vietnam Memorial

Some more of the Autumn colour.

A squirrel enjoys a gluten-free cookie!

Views from the top of the Washington Monument.

On the weekend, we hired a car again and took Jeannie and Sophie on a quick trip through Virginia. On the Sunday, November 21, we visited the home of former president, James Madison. This is now the 5th Presidential home we have visited, as Pia noted! 6 really, if you count the White House. James Madison was the 4th US President (he followed Thomas Jefferson) from 1809-1817. Before becoming president he was instrumental in the creation of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Montpelier is the home where he was raised, then lived in as a married man and retired in. It was here that he did much of his important research and writing - and he also died here. The house is in the process of being restored to the way it was when he lived in it. It is in a lovely spot - just at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which as our guide pointed out, was really the US frontier when Madison lived here with his family. Very little of the US had been explored past this point at that time.

Here are some views of his house, Montpelier and the garden temple, a place to keep cool (it was built over the ice house) and reflect.





The Madison family cemetery, with James Madison's grave in the background. His wife, Dolley, is buried behind him.


We then headed into Charlottesvile, which we had visited on our last trip to Virginia, to show Jeannie and Sophie the University of Virginia. The trees and the quadrangle looked so beautiful at this time of year (you can tell I am getting obsessed with Autumn leaves!)

Pia, Sophie and Ella at the University of Virginia

The next day, we went back to Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson. While Jeannie and Sophie toured the house, James was lucky to get the last ticket for the day to the 'Behind the Scenes' tour, where he got to go upstairs in the house and see the Dome Room. The girls and I walked the gardens (they were not going to put up with another tour!) but they did enjoy visiting the Children's Centre again.

Monticello

inside the dome room.

Today is Thanksgiving here and we have been invited over to our neighbours', John and Ben's, for Thanksgiving lunch. I'll make sure to post some photos of the feast!

Texas continued....

As well as our day spent visiting the ranch of LBJ, we also saw many other sights in Austin. Here are some of our photos from the rest of the time we had there.


As the saying goes, "Everything is bigger in Texas!" and that starts with the Texas Capitol Building. We visited the Capitol Building on our first afternoon in Austin. It was built in 1888 and is actually 15 feet taller than the capitol in Washington. It is quite spectacular to see and is made out of pink granite - it was just a shame that the dome was covered in scaffolding when we were there.






There are many monuments in the capitol grounds but Pia and Ella's favourite was the Monument to Texas schoolchildren!

The interior of the Capitol dome

On the Friday (November 5) the girls and I went to the Austin Children's Museum - it was not as large as the one in Boston but the girls still managed to fill in many hours there and have a great time by.........


crafting their own inventions out of recycled materials in the Design Studio. Pia made a Bird Jar, a special type of bird house, and Ella made a "Pinkalicious telescope', which turns everything pink when you look through it!

Pia, hanging upside down like the millions of bats that live in Austin under the Congress Ave bridge.

Ella took on the job of vet with gusto and cared for many dogs, cats and bunnies.

Pia and Ella create a feast for me to tuck in to!

On the Sunday, we all went to the Botanical Gardens in Zilker Park. These were absolutely beautiful and included a lovely butterfly garden.


It was also in this spot that dinosaur footprints from millions of years ago have been found...

left behind by a dinosaur just like this one.


There was also a lovely Japanese garden, complete with a little tunnel through a cave, stepping stones which the girls loved going over and over, and a waterfall.


In the afternoon, we drove out to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Gardens. One of Lady Bird's legacies as First Lady was that she invested much time and money into beautifying the landscape of Texas and encouraging people to care for their local environment. Fall was not the best time to see wildflowers - the Texas state flower, the Bluebonnet, was not in bloom - but we did see some great examples of Texan cacti and native plants.


On the Monday, the girls and I walked through the campus of the University of Texas (again one of the biggest - the university sports stadium seats 110,000 people!)and visited the Texas Memorial Museum, which houses 4 floors of Texan natural history.


Finally, on our last day in Austin, we went to the Texas State History Museum, with its enormous star out the front. The 'Lone Star' is everywhere in Texas! We watched a great IMAX movie on the story of Texas and saw a reconstruction of the famous Alamo, where the battle for independence was held in 1836. I did not realise that Texas was once part of Mexico, then fought to become its own nation in the battle of Alamo. For the next 9 years Texas was recognised as its own independent country before becoming part of the United States. We also saw many examples of Texan inventions, especially in the areas of technology and space. The museum obviously promoted the state well because at the end of our stay Ella declared, "I want to live in Texas!"

We have now been back from Texas for a week and are enjoying having Jeannie and Sophie, James' mum and neice here to visit. I will fill you in on their visit in my next post.

All the way to LBJ: Austin, Texas

We spent 6 days from November 4-10 in Austin, the capital city of Texas. In many ways LBJ was the main focus of our visit. James did a few days research at the LBJ Library at the University of Texas, as well as giving a talk at the British Studies Centre there. On the Saturday (November 6) we headed out to his ranch. I'll let James describe our day there:

On Saturday we took the one hour drive from Austin out to the LBJ ranch along the Pedernales river. The drive afforded us some views of the Texas countryside - dry as dust, but with many of the same sorts of colours as the Australian bush. First stop was Johnson city and LBJ's (36th US President) boyhood home. Johnson City was so named after Lyndon's grandfather. The National Park Service offer tours of the home where he grew up - a modest dwelling where Johnson's early world was shaped - a mother who believed in the power of education to lift the working classes out of poverty and a father who was deeply involved in local politics and taught his children the importance of argument and debate. Not a bad preparation for politics. Forget Bradman, Bowral and the golf ball with the cricket stump - we were shown the front porch where Johnson gave his first political speech and so launched his career. Before that career, however, he had a been a school teacher, an experience that shaped much of his approach to education policy. His first political crusade was apparently geared towards helping Texan farmers get access to electricity - a poignant reminder of how primitive were his early beginnings and those of the people around him. The tour of the boyhood home was one of the least impressive however - this particular National park guide was very short on factual information and long on fairly annoying and completely irrelevant evangelical lectures.

LBJ's boyhood home

After the boyhood home and a quick tour around the museum, we headed for the ranch. LBJ certainly had a flair for the dramatic entrance - the gates to his ranch used to lead to a water splashing drive across the Pedernales river, but nowadays tourists drive around and stop first at the Junction school, where he sat for his first classes, thence to a reconstruction of the house where he was born, and then his gravesite. The reverend Billy Graham gave one of the eulogies at LBJ's funeral, saying that you couldn't understand LBJ unless you understood his relationship to the land.

The Junction school, a one-room schoolhouse

After that, you drive out along the airstrip and to the cattle yards. The girls fed the goats and the sheep here, and the National Parks service still run a herd of longhorns descended from LBJ's herd. That's American civic culture for you: at least the agricultural dimension! LBJ was big into herefords - but the barns do go into some detail about how important this image of the cattle rancher was in terms of LBJ's political personality and ability to connect to Americans. Along the tour, the National parks service provide all visitors with an audio tour, and we were treated to some songs about 'beautiful, beautiful Texas, where the beautiful bluebonnets roll...we're proud of our forefathers, who fought at the Alamo', with 'Alamo' taking about 5 seconds to pronounce. Then they play BJ Thomas' 'Raindrops are falling on my head' - LBJ's favourite apparently. It was a wonderful experience listening to this song under the huge Texas sky and thinking of Johnson, beleaguered by domestic crises and bogged down in Vietnam, finding some sort of solace in the land he called his own - the Texas hill country.

Pia and Ella survey the goats

Longhorns and white-tailed deer are common in the area of the ranch

We saw the mini Air Force One plane he used to fly from Austin to the ranch - LBJ called it Air force one half - it was so small: a world away from the 747 version of today.


So onto the ranch and the Texas White House. One of his advisers used to say that you could virtually see LBJ's tensed shoulders relaxed as the ranch came into view from the window of his plane. It must have seemed a world away from Washington, and yet LBJ apparently drove his wife and kids mad in his ceaseless efforts to recreate the world of work in their domestic 'paradise'. He had a phone installed underneath the main dining table - and there were something like 23 phones throughout the house. This guy really, I mean, really worked the phones. Apparently Lady Bird had a separate bedroom so that she didn't have to stay up with LBJ and whomever was on the ranch at the time.

During his presidency, LBJ actually used to do a lot of work from here - and now, with Lady Bird's passing in 2007, visitors are allowed to see the bottom floor of the house, including Johnson's study (replete with requisite presidential seals on the chairs and above his desk), his beloved 3 tvs - he was a media junky who loved having all 3 channels playing simultaneously (there were only 3 channels in that era - imagine what he would have done with Foxtel...). We saw his living room, the dining room (with a fantastic window looking out onto the ranch, and made specifically for them to observe the annual migration of birds) and then the kitchen, another living room, and out into the garden. I could not recall whether Australian prime ministers Holt or Gorton got invited to the ranch -certainly Holt tried his best to get there in 67, but I think logistics were against him. Johnson used to hold Cabinet meetings under the prolific oak tree in his front garden - joint chiefs of staff, defence secretary, advisers and bureaucrats etc - they all had to come to the ranch. And LBJ loved his barbecues. He gave up smoking when president but took it up again the moment he got back to the ranch on January 21, 1969. Ribs and more ribs on the barbie - he had a massive heart attack in 1973.

LBJ's ranch - the Texas White House

LBJ's office in the Texas White House

On our way home we stopped at a Tex-Mex restaurant called Oasis set up on a hilltop overlooking Lake Travis. It was a beautiful setting and a great ending to the day.

The Oasis restaurant

The girls were given the job of ringing the bell at sunset, a tradition carried out each night.

The beautiful sunset and view over Lake Travis