Coco Crisp & Warren Barton

This man is called Coco Crisp. There isn't much more to say than that really. He plays for the Oakland Athletics and seems to be most famous for running to the mound while playing for Boston Red Sox, in order to fight the guy that just threw a ball at him, pretty funny. I'm trying pretty hard to understand baseball, I have a book and I'm getting there, but still a long way to go.

I'm also getting used to football being called soccer. Fox Soccer channel show all Premier league games and lots of goals from around the world. You get Warren Barton in the studio and a lot of commercials, a much more pleasant proposition than Mark Lawrenson and no commercials.

Rusty cars and not having one

We don't have a car. We are very much in the minority. Even though it does seem a whole load of the cars you see here in Columbus are a bit battered, I'm assured that they do have some sort of MOT equivalent called "Inspection". *

Having walked a few blocks down the road and buying a pretty cheap second hand CD player, you can't help but feeling a little bit like a looter walking back home with it.

We also don't have cell phones yet. This doesn't help when you walk 45 minutes to go and pick up your re-assembled bike and you haven't had a call to tell you it'll be another 50 minutes. It does mean that you can kill time at a local cafe reading all about the local college football scandal. The coach (Jim Tressel) was on $3.5 million a year... Oh sorry, that wasn't the scandal. This below from Sports Illustrated:

Tressel's most recent troubles began in December, when the Department of Justice, passing along information it had gathered in a raid while investigating the owner of a Columbus tattoo parlor for drug trafficking, informed Ohio State that at least six current players, ­including quarterback Terrelle Pryor, had traded team memorabilia for tattoos or cash at the parlor.

Sometimes you just HAVE to have a tattoo I suppose.

Tomorrow we may try and set up a bank account here in Ohio. We tried to do this yesterday but they weren't open. We really should have checked before we left; instead we made our first trip to our local record shop - Used Kids Records.

*It appears that there is no sort of MOT type inspection, which would go a long way to explaining the state of a lot of cars we've been seeing. Also, am guessing bringing in some sort of law about talking on your phone while driving is a long way down the list.

And from there to here

What do you do when you spend the best part of a week trying to get rid of things before you move to America? That's right, you spend two days in Pennsylvania driving around trying to find the same things to buy all over again. While trying to get over the guilt and our general wastefulness, we followed our U-Haul truck in heavy rain down Interstate 70 towards Columbus. We stopped at Cracker Barrel which is a funny kind of old time store and restaurant where they serve food like this:

My carrots were kind of a bit mushy and tasted a little bit like they had been cooked with caramel. Arrived at Deming Ave and unloaded... and sweated... and didn't realise until the next day that we have air conditioning.

Getting Here

Here is my blog. I’m going to try and be funny and informative. Maybe it’ll just be informative. Either way you’ll hopefully learn a bit more about what I am or am not doing in America.

Terminal 5 is the way to leave Heathrow and England. You don't have to queue, people are helpful and the bacon rolls at EAT are pretty good value. Terminal B is not the way to arrive in Newark NJ. It is even more not the way to arrive when your wife is arriving in Terminal C on a Virgin flight that turns out to be a Continental flight and doesn't arrive at Terminal B. When you try and find her and realise she isn't there you are in a long line behind everyone from your flight and the flight from Belfast including Rory McIlroy... Better still after an hour or so you get through the line and the lady tells you she can't process you and your mystery envelope and has you taken somewhere else. Your fingerprints are taken and your name is signed and you are pretty much a US resident.