Emily and Mitchell in the USA

January is citrus season in Southern California, so we went to the California State Citrus Historic Park for the tour. We'd been before in the summer, but we wanted to visit again in season, and I hadn't been on a tour yet.  We arrived a little early for the tour, so we took a look around the museum inside. They had the history of citrus, starting from how it travelled on the silk road in 500BC, all the way up to 1950s agriculture in Southern California.  It was then time for the tour. Being Saturday, we had quite a large group going around, but we were told all about how they stop the orchards from freezing, how the seedless fruits are grafted and the bugs that are introducing a virus to the citrus plants, causing lots of trees to be culled. We also got to try several varieties!  Our guide standing next to the smudgepot which used to be used to keep the fields warmer until they were outlawed in the 50s First up was an Indio mandarinquat, which was like a kumquat, but lar...

Howdy! This weekend we went on an adventure to Texas! We'd had a layover in Dallas before, but this time we were here to visit for real and see our friend Asta. We flew Saturday afternoon, escaping a very wet day in SoCal, and arrived at Asta's apartment about 7:30pm. We'd started a food delivery order in the Uber on the way over, so it wasn't long before that arrived too. We spent the evening catching up about our Christmases, work and meeting Asta's new kitten Susu. He is a very cute black cat who likes to play fetch with bottle caps and to sniff feet. (Also it turns out I'm not allergic to cats - yay!) Me and Susu hanging out In the morning, we headed out to the Bishop's Arts District which is a colourful road with lots of plant shops, independent gift shops and places to get brunch. We ate at Odd Fellows and then looked around some of the shops. I got some postcards from a local artist, and Asta got a pretty book. We then made our way to the Dallas Farme...

It's been over a year and a half since we've been home! We meant to go home for Christmas last year, but Covid got in the way. It nearly did this year too, but we caught it in November instead and were fully recovered in time to travel in December.  We flew out on Saturday morning. Our first flight from Ontario to Dallas went very smoothly, and we arrived in Texas in time for our connecting flight. But this was where the trouble started.  Our flight out of Texas slowly got more and more delayed. Apparently, there was a fault in the plane and they ended up having to get us a new aircraft, which turned out to be smaller than our original plane, meaning 28 people would not be flying with us today. There was some chaos and confusion, and some passengers very angry about being bumped from first class, but we were able to get on, and our plane started out from the gate six hours after our planned departure time. This was fine by us, we'd miss meeting Kyle in London to go ice-skat...