Give them the boot

Or these Manolos for $2495. But the nearby dominatrix Jimmy Choo buckled stilettos were, even for a mere $1000, very poorly finished, I thought. So I didn't get them.

Canada, eh

Up at 5.30am to start the long, LONG day travelling home. Lovely muted grey-green scenery from the train Seattle to Vancouver - quite a contrast from the orange-blue dazzle of the last two weeks.

And now we have half a drizzly day to kill, so where else to spend it other than the Pacific Centre on Granville, to wander and to wonder. For instance, who has $1650 to spend on Guiseppe Vanotti's fetish?

Half full

In Tacoma now, on the home straight, with more than 1200 miles behind us (and considerably more than that ahead). There's a storm on the way, rolling in from the sea - but not quite yet, although it's finally cloudy and damp the way it's meant to be here. So we weren't able to see Mt Rainier as we drove through White Pass, or the glaciers that this artwork by Dale Chihuly represents.

We did have a lovely lunch in Eatonville, at Jebino's which is unexpectedly themed on the Rat Pack - and done with great enthusiasm and conviction too, as with all the themed places we've come across in our circuit. Good for them, to have a passion, and to pursue it.

Tacoma's delights have been limited by time for us to just the Washington State History Museum (history lite, with lots of hands-on things, verbal testimonies and re-enactments, but no punches pulled about less savoury aspects, such as the treatment of Chinese labourers, the drowning of Celilo Falls and Hanford's contribution to the end of the war - the plutonium for the Nagasaki A-bomb was made there).

Over the lovely Glass Bridge, the Museum of Glass is full of wonderful things, marvels of inspiration and construction, the best of it an installation opened just today; a frozen forest of clear glass trees and bushes with an icy mirror-glass stream winding through it. Just beautiful, and especially amazing as it was made simultaneously in Sweden and Wisconsin, co-ordinated over the internet. I would have liked to take a photo, but the guard said no - shamelessly, hypocritically, because I'd caught him doing exactly that when he thought there was no-one looking.

So here's part of the Chihuly Glass Bridge, which would look fabulous in sunshine, or lit up at night.

Little Treasures

Yakima's not the prettiest town we've visited, or the liveliest, or the richest - but it does have some treasures. One of them is its museum, which is beautifully presented and has some wonderful oddities amongst its collection: sheep-powered butter churner, anyone? There's something for everyone, but we were treated to a special view of one of the storerooms where Mike the curator happily showed us a selection of small marvels, like a hard-tack biscuit from the Civil War, a basket so finely woven that it held water, and stunningly fine bead-work items.

Then it was down to the Museum Soda Fountain, a vision in chrome and red vinyl, for a banana split and a milkshake that was headache-inducingly hard to suck through the straw. Yeah, I know: it's a hard life, eh.

Nearby Toppenish has an interesting Indian culture museum with a depressingly familiar story beneath its tepee roof and some startlingly - even creepily - lifelike mannequins dressed as notable figures in the history of the confederated tribes. In the town itself, there are 73 large-scale murals, many of them painted in a single day by a team of artists, watched by the townspeople sitting on specially-erected bleachers. In other words, it's a town where people come to watch paint dry.

And the day finished with another of Yakima's treasures, the Capitol Theatre and its improv show, which has launched the careers of Tina Fey, Steve Carrell, Mike Myers and Stephen Colbert, amongst others. It was such a funny and professional show tonight, there's little doubt that the magic is still at work there.

Not -

- the lite option I'd envisaged.

Why would you bother?

The Team