Driving with Dinosaurs in Montana, USA

In 2009 I took my first-ever trip to the USA, courtesy of the Montana Office of Tourism and Virgin Australia. One of the articles which resulted from that journey featured the fascinating Montana Dinosaur Trail. As it never went online, here it is now for your education and enjoyment:

Michele Fromdahl works with a tyrannosaurus rex. She’s cool with that, but some of her visitors aren’t. The gigantic model of the fearsome prehistoric creature is the very first thing you see as you step through the door of the Fort Peck Interpretive Center, lunging toward you with its jaws open for the kill.

“There are a few kids who’ll come in the first set of doors and won’t come in that second set. You have to try to get them through a side door, or they have to be carried by Mom and Dad,” she says. “It’s happened.”

Overbearing reptilian colleagues aside, Fromdahl enjoys her work as the centre’s director. “When I got the job here I inherited an empty building, so I got to build all the exhibits. I’d seen Jurassic Park, but otherwise I knew nothing about dinosaurs. So being able to get immersed in that has been fun. I love it.”

Her beloved T-Rex with its accompanying displays (Lower Yellowstone Road, Fort Peck; +1-406-526-3493) is one of 15 attractions along the Montana Dinosaur Trail, which stretches from the Rocky Mountains across the plains of the USA’s fourth-largest state.

Back in the prehistoric past (before even Bert Newton was on TV), the flat dry wheat-growing area of eastern Montana was an inland sea, along whose banks dinosaurs roamed.

Upon death, the great reptiles obligingly scattered their remains around, for 19th and 20th century farmers to find beneath their barns and fields.

Later, they ended up on the Trail. Its odds-and-ends collection of professional institutes and tiny museums is also a good excuse to drive the open highways of this underpopulated state, enjoying both fossils and small town America as you go.

Here are some of the prehistoric highlights...

Great Plains Dinosaur Museum. Interesting institution whose dinosaur fossils have nicknames. Exhibits include Giffen, the northernmost stegosaurus ever found, and Leonardo, a rare mummified fossil showing remains of skin. You can also handle a fossilised dinosaur bone here, and even apply to join a dig.
405 North 1st St East, Malta; +1-406-654-5300; greatplainsdinosaurs.org.

Museum of the Rockies. This university-affiliated museum houses the world’s largest tyrannosaurus rex skull, and one of the first female dinosaurs to be identified as such. It also has a triceratops and a deinonychus, just as nasty a predator as the velociraptor. The museum also covers the fauna and culture of the Rockies from more recent millennia.
600 West Kagy Boulevard, Bozeman; +1-406-994-2251; museumoftherockies.org.

Two Medicine Dinosaur Centre. Each of the Trail sites seems to have a first in its exhibits, and this one is no exception - it exhibits the first baby dinosaur bones found in North America. It also houses the world’s largest dinosaur reconstruction, of a seismosaurus halli or “earth-shaker lizard”.
120 2nd Avenue South, Bynum; +1-406-469-2211; tmdinosaur.org.

Rudyard Depot Museum. For the quintessential small town dinosaur experience, visit this historical museum spread around an old train station. Its dinosaur selection features The Oldest Sorehead, a fully articulated gryposaurus discovered locally in 2004. A likeness of this curious duckbilled dinosaur is exhibited among an egg nest display. Just model eggs, of course - no risk of a Jurassic Park moment. I hope.
25 4th Avenue North West, Rudyard; +1-406-355-4322; rudyardmuseum.com.

Find all the museums along the Montana Dinosaur Trail via its website.

Trying American Pie in Bismarck, USA

This article from my very first visit to the USA appeared in The Age newspaper in 2010, but never went online: so here it is. I was hosted on that trip by North Dakota Tourism and Virgin Australia.

To visit America for the first time is to encounter the strangely familiar.

Like every Australian, I’ve spent a lifetime immersed in the television and film output of the USA, absorbing the nuances of its culture. I even understand why it’s upsetting to have been cast as Benedict Arnold in the school play (thanks, Brady Bunch).

Which is why it’s mildly disconcerting to find that America is, in fact, much as it appears on screen.

Not that I’m spending quality time in the urban hotspots of Los Angeles or New York. I’m part of a media contingent that’s wending its way across Montana and North Dakota, two states as unknown to Australians as they are big.

When I’m travelling as a travel writer, I pay attention to the sights: Glacier National Park is impressive, as is the Badlands cowboy town of Medora. But I’m personally fascinated by the food culture, and how it matches our preconceptions of Americans and their collective weight problem (a problem, in all fairness, shared by many Australians, including this writer).

After several meals in roadside restaurants in small country towns along the Hi-Line, the east-west highway that runs parallel to the Canadian border, I decide that American food operates on two essential principles: choice and quantity.

“Choice” lies mainly in the micro-management of a dish’s accompaniments. By the time I reach our Bismarck hotel’s restaurant and the waitress rattles off a list of dressings to accompany my salad (“Green Goddess? What’s that?” “I don’t know sir, it comes out of a packet.”), I’m suffering choice fatigue.

The next day, while the rest of the group is riding horses and wranglin’ li’l dogies, I slip away to experience an aspect of American cuisine that’s always fascinated me: the humble diner.

North Dakota, it turns out, is not the obvious place to find one of these fast-vanishing icons, as diners were largely a feature of industrial cities along the east coast. Thus, Kroll’s Diner off the Memorial Highway in Mandan, Bismarck’s twin sister across the Missouri River, is a replica of the streamlined steel diner popular after World War II.

“I was watching a PBS special and they had a program about diners back in the early 1900s,” says owner Keith Glatt when I meet him a day later across town. “And I thought it would be really neat to do something like that. Then I was looking through a restaurant trade journal and they had these prefabricated diners. They’re built in Florida. They ship them to wherever you want them, and there you have a diner.”

Modern or not, it’s a beauty. I’m astounded by the sheer shininess of the building, a long structure of super-reflective metal. It’s easy to curl a lip at the architecture of the modernist era, but occasionally, when I see a building like this, I sense the postwar positivity behind it.

Inside, the nostalgia continues via a wealth of stainless steel, pink patterned laminate tabletops, cushioned booths, and strips of pink neon lighting. Then I take a seat within a booth, and notice a culinary element that’s very Bismarck - the number of dishes based on German cuisine, brought here by 19th century settlers.

For starters I order knoephla soup, an old-fashioned cream of chicken soup dotted with rectangular potato dumplings. It’s tasty and filling, but it’s nothing compared to the weightiness of my main course, fleischkuechle.

There’s no way to describe this dish gracefully: it’s a hamburger patty wrapped in an envelope of pastry which is deep-fried, then served on a skillet with a side of mashed potato and gravy.

The done thing is to squirt a dollop of ketchup into the pastry pocket before consuming. Strangely, the final concoction tastes satisfyingly like an Aussie meat pie.

I finish the meal with pumpkin pie. I’ve never had pumpkin pie before - in fact I don’t much like pumpkin - but it’s such a staple of American TV and movies that I have to give it a go.

The smooth, solid orange-brown filling packed with cinnamon and nutmeg doesn’t look promising, but it tastes great. With a side serve of cream, it’s damn good.

Another dessert Glatt recommends is his rhubarb crisp. “Rhubarb is very popular in this region,” he says. “You can’t kill it. You try to dig it out of your garden and get rid of it, next year it’s back. It handles the extreme climate we have up here.”

And though today is mild, it does become very cold in North Dakota in winter. I imagine the snow and ice piled up outside the Mandan diner, with myself slotted into a cheery booth and looking out at the whiteness while waiting for my hot apple pie to arrive, and somehow that seems just fine.

Kroll's Diner is located at 4401 Memorial Hwy, Mandan, North Dakota, USA.

"He Gave Joy": Visiting PG Wodehouse's Grave on Long Island, New York

When Narrelle Harris and I visited New York in September 2014, we spent our last full day out of the city.

Catching a train along the Long Island Railroad on a sunny Sunday morning, we alighted at Speonk station, which serves the locality of Remsenburg.

It was in Remsenburg that our favourite author, PG Wodehouse, had spent his final years, and we wanted to pay tribute to him with a little pilgrimage while we were in the vicinity.

Visiting Wodehouse-related sites as I travel had become something of a hobby. In 2011 I visited the prison in Poland where he had been interned in World War Two; and earlier in 2014 I'd had a drink at the Berlin hotel where he was subsequently quartered. In 2012 I had joined a group of PG Wodehouse Society members on a memorable weekend excursion to Norfolk, UK, visiting places connected with his life and work.

I didn't know what to expect when we arrived at Remsenburg, and was pleasantly surprised to find a cafe in operation next to the train station:

When we stepped inside for coffee, we realised it actually was the station. Or more correctly, had once been the station until replaced by the windswept concrete platform a slight distance west.

The interior was decked out with reminders of its railway past:

When we mentioned our quest to our waitress, she pointed to a section of wall - and we were delighted to discover a framed photograph of Wodehouse (top right), strolling to the local post office to send a manuscript to his publisher:

It was heartening to see that PGW's local fame had not entirely subsided, some four decades after his death.

We walked to the Remsenburg Community Presbyterian Church, an attractive white wooden structure with a modest spire. It was a pleasant 20 minute stroll on a sunny day, along Phillips Avenue to its intersection with Country Road.

Though it was a residential area, there were plenty of trees along the walk, giving the area a serene, semi-rural feel. I could see why Wodehouse had chosen this place as a retreat late in life, after the scarring experience of his imprisonment and manipulation by the German military in World War Two.

As we crossed to the church a pair of cyclists paused courteously to let us pass, then we stopped at the front of the building to examine a large commemorative sign:

Detailing his life and work, it ended with the words "His gentle humour and superb mastery of the English language continue to bring joy to readers all over the world."

In the graveyard behind the church, we found his final resting place:

And on top, to one side, a small figure placed there by a fan, suggesting the Infant Samuel at Prayer. Plaster figures of Samuel are mentioned several times in Wodehouse's short stories and novels, often in an amusing light at odds with their apparent piety.

In my favourite Jeeves and Wooster novel, The Code of the Woosters, Bertie Wooster's Aunt Dahlia uses a figure of Samuel to relieve her anxiety about the possible loss of her superb chef, Anatole:

She rose, and moved restlessly to the mantelpiece. I could see that she was looking for something to break as a relief to her surging emotions – what Jeeves would have called a palliative – and courteously drew her attention to a terra cotta figure of the Infant Samuel at Prayer. She thanked me briefly, and hurled it against the opposite wall.

So it was good to see an approximation of Samuel here, unsmashed and working away at the old stand (as Wodehouse would have put it):

At an initial loss of how to mark the occasion, Narrelle and I decided to read aloud a few of our favourite Wodehousean extracts (thank heaven for the Kindle app on our phones!).

So I read out part of the short story in which Bertie first hires Jeeves, then Narrelle read the funny poem A Pastoral; I continued with part of a Jeeves short story set in New York City; and Narrelle concluded with the amusing poem Good Gnu.

It was fun, and moving, and made us shed a few tears as well.

After a while we started walking back to the station, and met one of the cyclists who'd let us cross earlier. It turned out he was originally from Perth, which surprised me not at all - you find random Australians everywhere around the world, in the seemingly most unlikely places.

Living in the area, he was curious about our mission, and why so many people made the trek out to Long Island to visit Wodehouse's grave. I could tell he was unfamiliar with PGW's work, so I mumbled a few words about enjoying his books and we pushed on.

Looking back, however, I wished I'd expressed myself more fully. All I needed to do was to borrow three words inscribed at the base of his gravestone: "He gave joy."

LAX to Downtown Los Angeles by Public Transport

I stayed in LA as a guest of the Los Angeles Tourism and Convention Board, and paid for my own airfare to/from the USA.

When I visited Los Angeles in October last year, I had an experiment in mind. I wanted to see what it was like to travel from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to the city's Downtown by public transport.

I'm not talking about the official LAX FlyAway bus, which will take you from the airport to Union Station for US$9. I wanted to use 'real' public transport, ie the city's Metro system.

This is how it's done.

1. Free shuttle bus to Aviation/LAX Station.

Exiting the international terminal, you head right to catch a shuttle bus departing from a blue sign marked "LAX Shuttle & Airline Connections".

As I reached it, I was lucky enough to score Shuttle Bus "G" (for "Green Line") immediately. The "G" bus is the one which takes you to the nearest Metro station.

2. Train from Aviation/LAX Station along the Green Line in the direction of Norwalk.

At the base of the station is a ticket machine, where you can buy one of the city's electronic TAP cards, or add credit to an existing card (I had one from a previous trip). Then catch the elevator up to the island platform - note the cool quote from Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl:

Be careful here, as it's easy to get on a train going the wrong way; signage is not all it could be. I managed to get on a train heading the opposite direction, toward Redondo Beach, but it was an easy mistake to fix by switching to the other side of the platform at a later station.

3. Transfer to the Blue Line at Willowbrook/Rosa Parks Station.

When you get to Willowbrook/Rosa Parks, take the escalator or elevator down to the ground level Blue Line platforms.

Note that you must tap your TAP card again, and the validators aren't in that logical a position - they're off to the side, away from the escalators.

Once on the island platform, wait on the side marked "Downtown LA" rather than "Long Beach". When a train pulls in, get aboard.

The day I caught the train was - unknown to me - a public holiday. So the trains on the Blue Line, which pass through the hip hop hubs of Compton and Watts, were pretty lively.

People chatted with groups of friends and played music, and (I assume unlicensed) vendors made their way through the carriages selling cold drinks and, for some reason, earbuds draped in large numbers around their necks.

4. Alight at 7th Street/Metro Center Station.

This is the final stop on the Blue Line. Congratulations! You're in Downtown LA.

You can leave the system here, or transfer again to the Red Line (Union Station-North Hollywood), Purple Line (Union Station-Koreatown) or Expo Line (7th St/Metro Center-Culver City) to travel farther afield.

I was heading to the excellent Hotel Normandie in Koreatown, but as I was only carrying cabin luggage I had a look around Downtown first - visiting an Aussie pie shop on the way.

And how much did this journey cost me? A mere US$1.75, which is LA Metro's standard one-way fare, but includes transfers to other lines for up to two hours.

It's not necessarily a fast way to get away from LAX; but it is colourful, and it is cheap.

The Many Moods of the New York Skyline

For the first few nights of our recent New York visit, we were staying at the Z Hotel NYC.

When you think of visiting New York, you think first of Manhattan. But the Z Hotel is in the Long Island City district of Queens, just across the Queensboro Bridge from Manhattan's Midtown.

The advantage of this slight geographical remove? The view.

This part of Long Island City is low-rise, mostly a collection of automotive businesses. While that might not sound so attractive on the ground, it means that the tall Z Hotel building has an uninterrupted view west across the East River to Manhattan's famous skyline.

There's a good view from the hotel's rooms, but the most spectacular vantage point is the rooftop bar.

Open-air and with large glass panes around its edge, it offers an expansive view of the city, with key landmarks such as the Empire State Building and Chrysler Building clearly visible.

I went up there every evening and on the occasional morning before setting out for the day. While the view was always impressive in itself, the different light conditions made it a new experience each time.

Here's what I mean...

Pic 1: Taken 9.09pm, 8 September.

Mood: Mysterious. You can see the Empire State Building on the left and the Chrysler Building a bit to the right of that. The Queensboro Bridge is on the right.

Pic 2: Taken 7.38am, 9 September.

Mood: Cheerful.

Pic 3: Taken 7.43pm, 10 September.

Mood: Expectant.

Pic 4: Taken 7.59pm, 10 September.

Mood: Secretive.

Pic 5: Taken 6.39am, 12 September.

Mood: Freaky!

Can't wait to go back.

Disclosure time: On this trip I received discounted accommodation at the Z Hotel NYC.

Viva Las Vegas (Signs)

I'm in Las Vegas this week, attending the massive IPW, an annual travel trade show at which the USA sells its attractions to the world.

It's been a busy schedule, but on Monday night I finally got the chance to walk along The Strip, on the way to and from my accommodation at the Tropicana and a show at Planet Hollywood.

The Strip is rightly famous for its vast and sometimes bizarre resorts, often shaped into outlandish themed landmarks. New York New York has its Statue of Liberty and cityscape facade, Paris its Eiffel Tower, and Excalibur an eye-catching set of Camelot turrets and towers which glow at night.

This, for example, is the nighttime view from my hotel window, looking out toward the MGM lion:

Big resorts aside, I had fun on my walk in spotting smaller signage and other items that were still garish but presented at a more human scale (well, comparatively). Here are a few examples...

To start with, I passed this this beautiful car parked permanently in front of the Tropicana, recalling the resort's 1950s origins:

Then I saw this huge old-school Pepsi ad on the side of New York New York:

A lurking demon atop the sign for Cantina Diablo:

The garish disco entrance to Planet Hollywood:

A giant motorbike suspended high above the street at the Harley-Davidson Cafe:

And finally, the sign for a McDonald's. In Las Vegas, it seems, even mundane fast food joints become glam:

Disclosure time... On this trip I was hosted by Air Pacific and IPW.