Meet the ancestors

Today I finally got my photos from my old yahoo account transferred across to flickr so I've been having fun rediscovering photos I'd forgotten about.

Amongst them are these pictures of (I am reliably informed) two of my great-grandfathers.

You can certainly see where my brother gets his facial hair from!




The remainder of the pictures are mostly from c.2000-2002 when C was living and working just outside Chicago and I went out to stay with him. Most of them were prints which I scanned in so that my parents et al could see them, which accounts for the somewhat grainy quality of some of them.

There are some from our train trip on the California Zephyr which takes two days to go from Chicago to San Francisco through the Rockie mountains. The scenery in the Rockies and the Utah and Nevada deserts was some of the most amazing I've ever seen, partly just because of the sheer scale.


This is the foothills of the Rockies. It doesn't look like much until you realize that the line just below half-way is a huge goods train.


We spent a few days in San Francisco at the end of this trip before flying back to Chicago. San Francisco was great, though it was surprisingly cold, especially down by the sea. Still the fog was very atmospheric, even if it did leave me wishing I'd brought a coat.


This one is of the Gateway Arch in St Louis. C and I drove there for a couple of days from Chicago on Memorial Day weekend (late May).


When we left Chicago it was 42 degrees F; when we got to St Louis it was 86. That day was spring. The temperature never dropped again until the autumn.

Mind you, it is a fair way south of Chicago even though it's only just in the next state. It was a terrifically dull drive as I recall and before my knitting epiphany, so I didn't have anything to do. If there's one thing you can say about Illinois it's that it's flat and there wasn't even any map-reading to keep me occupied. The Mapquest driving directions basically said: Turn left onto N. Joliet road. After 2 miles merge onto I55 south. After 258 miles turn right. You just don't get directions like that in Britain! About half-way we stopped for lunch in a place called Normal. Perhaps appropriately it was perfectly ok but entirely unmemorable. St Louis was nice though (as is Chicago).

Finally there were some pictures from a visit to Greece with my mum and dad in 2002. We went all over the place visiting family and friends that my parents have known since before they were married and mum finally got to go to Delos. She was on her way there (nearly 40 years ago) when she met my dad and got distracted.

I rather like this photo. Spotted on the quay at (I think maybe) Andros, it seems to me like fish-shop with delusions of grandeur!