Critters at the bottom of our garden

We are constantly enchanted by the happenings in our garden. Charmed by the stunning almost electric blue of the beautiful jays at the bottom of our garden. Who fight with the aggressive territorial robins who think they own the twiggy trees near the pond. Who fly atop the ruby throated hummingbirds flapping their wings madly around an appetising little bush in the house garden just above a bee's nest. Which is right next to a photo of a fierce fox taped to the exterior glass of a downstairs door, there to frighten off a pesky duck who kept waddling over to do its business on the patio pavement.

The fox photo works. It does nothing, however, to deter the busy scampering grey squirrel who has been busy all fall filling his fat little cheeks with acorns that have fallen from the bur oaks towering over our garden. That's our back garden.

Our front garden is kept for crazy critters. A juvenile male Cardinal spends much of each day launching himself from a beautiful twiggy red and gold tree, beak first, full into the face of our dining room window. Click! Click! Click! Click! he goes, compulsively. We initially feared he was going to go bird-brained he was hitting it so hard. 

We closed the curtain, to no avail. We stalked him each time we heard a click, but always he returned. Finally, we resorted to Google to discover what was driving our cardinal crazy, attacking the window. And according to Audobon, it is, as we thought: his reflection. He sees the tree and a strange bird reflected in the glass and he is driven to fight off the territorial invader. Like a right of passage before he begins nesting. Sometimes we even see his brightly plumed red cardinal father perched beside him, wings flapping, breast pouting, proudly urging his son on to bigger and better battles. Poor little bird. We should really be kind and cover his reflection so it doesn't drive him completely nuts, but we are so drawn to him now, we'd miss him if he didn't come by to click.

Then, there is the northern flicker woodpecker. Oooh-laah! What a strange compulsion this guy has! The house is covered with aluminium siding. Impenetrable. But the mitred corners that hold the siding flush appear to be a painted softwood to him. He is able to peck perfect round holes in it. For a home, we figure. Before winter sets in as it is getting cold outside, and he knows it. Pete caulked the first hole, and he started again. We hung mobiles of silver alfoil swinging from the tree branches, attempting to distract him. No luck. With one eye on us down below and his beak busy rat-a-tat-tatting he pecked out another hole. More caulk. Another hole. More and more. When the corners of the house started to resemble Swiss Cheese we resorted, again, to Google. And learned to paste silhouettes of predatory black hawks flying around the mitred corners. Amusing the neighbours who had never seen such eccentric behavior before. Frightening our poor little fanatic away.

Storking up acorns for the winter

Little woodpecker  rat-tat-tatting on our siding

We tried flying eagle deterrents 

Hummingbird

Our little brown birds are back 

Samara: the winged leaf

A special treat we crammed in this week was a visit to Samara, the home of John Christian, retired Purdue staffer, who, 59 years ago, commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design his home, Samara. My guess is that FLW may well have been a right royal pain in the ass to have as an architect with a self-confidence bordering on arrogance that comes to some folk who have supreme confidence in their own vision and competence. Many people, tho', might easily forgive that edge of arrogance if only he would create for them spaces that play out as in Samara.

Not so much the bedrooms, which are compact to the point of being small, claustrophobic even, many could argue. Yet they are functional, complete, and not a square inch more than most people need in truth: a peaceful, very peaceful, place to rest one's head when the day is done. Not so much the kitchen, either, which is a dual-use small space fitting both utility and preparation. Which is not the larger sharing-caring-kitchen on order nowadays but is what the client specified then: close to the dining room, suitable for entertainment preparation, unobtrusive and lit from above, naturally, through clerestory windows fretted in the winged leaf symbol that FLW designed as definitive of 'Samara'.

It is the living room space that shows FLW's genius at Samara. Thirty or more people can be seated comfortably, privately, yet amiably and socially close, in a living space where most designers would think to seat only five or six. Using horizontal seating along one entire long wall, he designed tiered multi-purpose seat-steps, furniture suitable for seating, storage or table functions he was able to create space by redefining dead space. So well done. 

Still, I bet he was a control freak. Old as he was, and he was well over 90 when he designed this, he had a say about the design used in the house colour, on rugs, shelving space, on the minimalist winged-leaf cutouts on the backs of dining chairs with a soft touch of Japanese style to them; on soft furnishings, even on the design of letterhead, stationery, and monogrammed linen throughout the house -- right down to the bed throws. 

Such was FLW's input at Samara. Nor did he stop at indoors. Outdoors he designed the garden, the cantilevered patio spaces, the downpipes refashioned as metal sculptures hanging on chains so that when it rained water poured down this architectural sculptural water pipe. As visible as a fountain. In cold weather the 'water pipe' freezes and becomes an ice sculpture, a planned feature. 

So is Samara even today, much as it was conceived, according to Frank Lloyd Wright, the self-proclaimed 'world's greatest architect'. Beautiful, and timeless, it remains.

Wing leaf cutouts

Brilliant multipurpose furniture pieces 

Colour and design all complemented

Even the garden was bespoke 

Delicate Japanese influence. 

Comfortable, spacious

Metal on chain becomes ice sculpture in winter

Boiler up! Hammer down!

On our last Saturday in Lafayette we finally managed to buy seats to an at-home gridiron football game at Purdue Uni. The Purdue Boilermakers were playing the University of Illinois team so the stadium was pumped.Which took some hot air as there were 48,000 fans in the stadium. More than the total number of students on campus. Just to watch a footy game. Shouting, waving Purdue support symbols, doing the Mexican Wave, chanting. Support for Purdue is huge.

The stadium itself is expensive-looking; everything is state of the art. There is no discernible difference between it and the stadiums of professional teams you see on TV. Where does the money come from?

For half time entertainment, a massive brass band from Purdue occupied the entire field with its supporting musicians and dancers playing out a precisely choreographed music and dance tribute to Michael Jackson. 

The spectacle filled the field in a manner not unlike an Olympic opening ceremony production. All the performers were dressed in beautifully-cut uniforms of black, white and gold, right down to hundreds of pairs of matching performance shoes, everything betassled and bejeweled. Where does the money come from?

The game was televised. Microsecond replays looped through a mega-sized television screen at the head of the field. Throughout the play blasts of deafening motivational eat-em-up Jaws music exhorted Purdue players to Boiler up! Hammer down! 

The poor Illinois team had no hope. Like Christians in a Roman Colosseum. 

Outside, vast university car parks were chockers with fee paying parents, alumni and visitors, here for the day in their over-sized campers and F350 pickups, celebrating the game with pre and post-game tailgate BBQs and parties. All flying Purdue flags, wearing Purdue-labelled scarves, fleeces and topcoats. Even their Eskys and Trash containers were labelled with expensive Purdue trade-marked tags.

Amazing spectacle. Stunning facilities. And, quite simply, unbelievable amounts of money spent, just on a college footy game. Where does the money come from?

Game on

Halftime spectacle 

Doorbells and sleighbells and schnitzel with noodles

Where we remembered the traders of old

As Bill so aptly said one day, we have, from this trip alone, so many images in our heads to look back on when we are old, tired, and done with all this travelling. Some of our favourites are these:

Ouiatenon Park outside Lafayette on the banks of the Wabash opposite the ancient site of the Wea Indian, where we can imagine the Wea awaiting the soft slapping sound of the French fur traders oars as they come downstream.

A carpet of fresh leaves, gold before the white snow fall. 

A mature Amish woman slowly clip-clopping her cart along a zippy superhighway then reigning in, in front of a small Amish fresh food stall, there to unload her produce. Dressed in simple black.

A beautiful barn in a fertile field on the great plain close to home.

A long covered wooden bridge arched precariously over a wide sluggish stream coming to rest on rocky banks either side.

Ghosts, goblins and gremlins: haunting practically every patio preparing to fight the evil spirits of All Hallow's Eve. 

Tucked, like little yellow stickies, in the jumbled filing cabinets in our brains. For later. Aeons later, we hope, to retrieve and treasure. 

Carpet of gold leaves 

Amish lady doing good works 

Beautiful barn 

Pink covered bridge 

Ghosts, goblins and gremlins 

Jaw droppers and gob stoppers

Some things enroute made us gasp in other ways. Coming out from our mountain retreat one morning we were hunting down a coffee in a small village called South Royalton in the Green Mountains of Vermont.

We quickly realised that this was no ordinary village: the entire village seemed to form some sort of school, with mature-age students wandering, books in hands, between characterful old wooden houses, many beautifully maintained; some with historic markers on their sidewalks.

South Royalton turned out to be a private law school. One of the most famous in the country. Houses in the village not given over to tuition rooms or libraries of sorts become permanent or temporary homes for staff and students. 

And what a law school! For much of its history the Vermont Law School has rated #1 school in the country for Environmental Law with dual degrees offered in conjunction with Yale and Cambridge. Not quite what you expect to find when you are chancing upon a coffee: a small village in a small state devoted solely to the study of law. Quite something.

One of the fun things we did enroute this trip was to memorize the capitals of each State we passed through; and to visit them if they were close. We managed this frequently. One very icy evening we drove into Albany, the capital of New York State where we decided to stop for the night aiming to check out the downtown before dinner. 

We drove into the heart of this small city, its population along the lines of Toowoomba -- less than 95,000. We parked, took some steps up to a central square then one by one came to a complete standstill. All of us entirely gobsmacked.

All of Albany's legislative buildings are contained within this square. They are vast, modern and visually stunning. Named after Nelson Rockefeller, they are set in this wonderful watery space called the Empire State Plaza. 

One of the buildings down one side is called the Egg: it holds the downtown performing arts centre. Next to it stands the tallest building in Albany, the Corning Tower: all marble and glass. Opposite, are its smaller progeny, lined up in minimalist rectalinear perfection: four perfect towers, all in a row. 

And at the heart, the supreme head of this beautiful collection of buildings, is the Cultural Centre which sits like a squat pagoda reigning benignly over a sublime infinity pool at its feet. Unbelievable collection of buildings. 

The money that is available for such public buildings in such tiny towns in America is more than we can possibly conceive in Australia. Where does it all come from?

The red door church, South Royalton 

Little lawyers all in a row 

Vermont Law School uses all the town buildings

Cultural Centre like a squat pagoda, Empire State Plaza

Minimalist rectilinear purity, Empire State Plaza 

The Egg for the performing arts,  Empire State Plaza

Monolith  in the Empire State Plaza in Albany 

Technicolour coat of falling leaves

Our trek in October was to Vermont to view the Fall spectacle. As a variation from the sterile hotel stopovers enroute we spent three days in a fishing cabin with a spectacular view across Crystal Lake in the north of the state, then three more in a rustic cabin further south, tucked away in the mountains and almost completely encircled by trees. Both were rural, quirky and charming.

And when our rustic cabin was decorated in a soft fall of snow laying like a white cloak over the land for two days we lit a log fire and watched white smoke curl out over the roof of our snow capped cabin. Lovely landscape!

Vermont is all hills. Its hills are completely clothed in deciduous trees. The sheer number of trees in fall colour in Vermont could almost be declared a natural wonder of the world during October. The number is staggering; the changes of colour quite breathtaking.

Besides its beautiful hills Vermont is decorated in white church spires. Tiny white painted wooden churches in every village. Quaint and gorgeous. Then, dotted on little side routes, over tiny gushing streams, are dozens of old rustic covered bridges built in ages past to protect the wooden supports from snow and water damage -- labelled freshly with the bridge builder's name. Americans honour them still. 

Quite a rural state, Vermont -- many of its towns are tiny compared with other states we've passed through. This sense of rurality pervades the way people live. Many homes in the north are actually static caravans placed loosely on large lots of land -- where vast front yards are used as storage space for strewn toys by the dozen, old cars by the half dozen, and ride-on mower relics, and other disposable items by the score. Steptoe would have been delighted to have parked himself in front of any of them.

Further south, the homes and gardens are mostly traditional, with villages sporting pretty white-washed clapboard homes: all storybook images and picturesque. Covered in a technicolour coat of falling leaves.

Melange of colour 

Bitter lemon 

So pretty 

Rusted colour

One of the many white spired churches

Covered bridge

Up close and colourful 

Rustic cabin covered in trees 

Wobbly historic bridge

And sometimes a grey and red church

All shedding leaves

Characterful covered bridge

Niagara in rainbow and shadow

Enroute to Vermont we drove via Niagara Falls and skipped into Canada for a day. Canadian border officials were as we remembered: welcoming, knowledgeable and full of good humour. Interestingly, all the Canadians we came across seemed to know exactly where Australia was -- which was new and different. 

The town, Niagara, is, tragically, full of tacky tourist gimmick attractions like Waxworks, Ripleys, and other suchlike, which seem to completely miss the mark of appeal with our age group: we never bother to enter such places. Neither, it seems, does anyone else as many were closed by 3pm from lack of interest, so we wonder if these old-hat attractions are just that: past their use by date, and likely to be torn down, re-thought, and the space reused for something less ridiculous.

The falls themselves were, as ever, stunning. The sheet of the American falls, including the narrow wispy trail of the Bridal Falls, drop sharply and straight-edged over the gorge from the left hand split of the Niagara River as it rushes around an island on the American side.  

The Canadian falls,  the more spectacular, gush to the right of the island, frothing wildly over rocky beds creating frenzied white water eddies, then, fall in a spectacular giant horseshoe deeply over the edge, pounding down into the gorge below, where tourist boats lean cautiously into the mists and currents created by the sheer tonnage of such powerfully driven water. We were able to see the falls in patches of sun, rain, wind, rainbows and shadows, then coloured at night. Quite a spectacle.

Falls and white spume

Believe it or not 

Extraordinary power of water

Tourists playing with terror 

Miss Bec enjoying the view

Thanks to Mrs O'Leary's cow

Late one night, when we were all in bed,

Mrs. O'Leary lit a lantern in the shed.

Her cow kicked it over,

Then winked her eye and said

"There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight!"

So goes the legend that Mrs O'Leary's cow started the Great Chicago Fire that burned for two days and nights from Sunday, 8 October, 1871 destroying much of old Chicago, leading to a rebuild that surely has resulted in Chicago becoming one of the great cities of the world.

Ahh, Paris, I love you yet and will forever, and always you will be foremost in my heart, but Chicago, too, is my kinda town.

It is, quite possibly, one of the most beautiful cities for architecture in the world and is one of the rare ones where you can take an architectural cruise along the river and be enchanted by everything from Art Deco to minimalist modern. I loved the tiered Sears Tower (I will not call it the Willis). Bec climbed its 103 stories, hopped out onto a glass balcony, with a glass floor, to view the terrain. With nary a tremble.

I loved the Smurfit-Stone triangular stunner, the eye-catching Gotham-like Two Prudential Plaza, and even Donald Trump's glorious new Trump Tower. I did not want to like this one because the man is such a caricature of himself that you want to disown everything he touches, but this building is breathtaking from every beautiful angle. A design triumph. And with the penthouse apartment going for thirty million, it probably needs to be.

Soft clouds roll in off Lake Michigan dancing around and about the towers. Then, just add glints of sunlight or night light, and, at any time of the day or night, Chicago's skyline is utterly and completely irresistible. None of us could get enough of it. And it is not just the buildings: it is also the space, the proportion, the breathing room, the expanse of everything.

Millenium Park rolls out alongside the downtown buildings like a lush green carpet right to the shores of Lake Michigan offering the city a vast, beautiful viewing platform. Itself breathtaking, Millenium is filled with glorious sculptures like the elliptical stainless steel egg, Cloud Gate, and the extraordinary stainess steel serpentine Frank Gehry BP bridge -- my favourite pedestrian bridge on the planet. You can walk for miles, simply ogling.

Then there are the galleries and museums. World class. The Art Institute's Impressionist art display was brilliant. And we bussed south to the Museum of Science and Industry and spent ages in the magnificent expos there. My favourite was the silent screen star Colleen Moore's glorious dollhouse collection, the Fairy Castle in miniature. A complete work of tiny collected art and sculpture, including the tiniest bible ever written, and ancient miniature statues over 2,000 years old. 

We visited the Magnificent Mile, rode the El, ate charred Chicago Hot Dogs as well as the justly famous giant stuffed Chicago pizzas, and visited the legendary Buddy Guy's southtown blues joint where we listened to a touch of Chicago electric blues while we chowed down delicious Creole fare, Chicago-style. Had an absolute ball!

Stylish Chicago 

View of the park and the skyline

Facades colliding

Miss Bec atop the Sears building

Trump Tower with $30 million penthouse

View from Millennium Park towards the city skyline 

How's that for a shirt in a shop window?

Serpentine Frank Gehry pededstrian bridge

Glinting  in the pink night light