Part 9 – Washington DC and lots of changes of plans

Washington DC

There are so many museums and monuments in DC! We had decided to give ourselves a good 5 days in Washington because Mary and Rob had told us that there was so much to see and do there. I could definitely have spent another 5 days, but Chiraag would have been pulling his hair out by then. As it was we had enough time and figured out a bit of a compromise on how long to spend in each museum… Chiraag stayed for at least an hour longer than he wanted to, and I stayed about the same amount less J All of the museums were really quite good, but I guess the highlight for us was probably the Newseum, which covered the history of news as far back as they could take it, and had a whole lot of really varied interesting exhibits. We actually spent almost a full 2 days there!

We stayed in Anacostia while in DC, which is pretty much a black neighbourhood that might seem a bit dodgy. However, the house that we stayed in was lovely and Greta, our host, was great as well. We went out and stayed in for a few drinks on most nights and it really made the stay in DC much better, as we got to know a lot more about life in DC through her.

Heading Back West

Virginia & West Virginia

After DC, we started on our journey back to Western Canada, with our first stop being Shenandoah National Park. The main reason we went through here was to go along the Skyline Drive, which is a 100 mile drive over the top of the Appalachian mountains. There were some pretty spectacular views and awesome driving through dense forest. I guess it would have been even better in a nice sporty car or a motorbike. Another bonus was that we had quite a few wildlife spottings, seeing a black bear and a few deer nice and up close.

We then continued through to Fayetteville in West Virginia, where we decided to do some Class V white water rafting along the New River Gorge. It was awesome fun, although we were obviously a bit too skilful since no one ended up in the water by accident. Our guide for the rafting was hilarious. He had so many dirty jokes, and he told us about the woman he had hypnotised to become his girlfriend and move into his tent with him. As soon as we set out he started to tell us a funny story about a holiday we went on, but then stopped and asked if any of us were police… the guy in the other couple with us was! The guides face was great! We didn’t get the rest of the holiday story. I think the other highlight of our brief stay in West Virginia was a random lunch stop in a small town pub, where Megan ordered a side salad and it actually had more than one piece of tomato, some other vegetable like carrot and cucumber, and no cheese or croutons! I think that’s probably the only proper salad we encountered during our time in America.

Creation Museum

After a long day of driving, we ended up in a small town in Kentucky, where we made a pit stop for the night. The next morning, we drove another couple of hours to one of the highlights of the trip – the Creation Museum. This was one of the major reasons for changing our plans and heading west early – so we could fit this in our route more easily. For those that don’t know about it, it’s basically a “museum” explaining and proving that the commonly held scientific understanding about evolution, the history of the world and the universe is wrong. All of the real answers and facts are in the bible. We took a whole lot of pictures, which Megan has on a dedicated album on facebook, but some of the highlights include:

·         The most important thing to start with is that they considered the universe to be 6000 years old.

·         All the animals ever were vegetarian in the garden of Eve – all the dinosaurs and lions and stuff. It was only after Adam and Eve got kicked out of Eden all the animals started getting mean.

·         There was a lot of information about Noah’s Ark and the Flood. The flood caused all extinction and all the fossils we find. The reason there are different layers of fossils is that’s the way the water moved up… So all life didn’t start in the ocean, but as the oceans boiled up all that life got covered first, then the rest got laid down in layers like that. I didn’t hear why fossils are spread out the way they are though.

·         During the flood and in the year or two after it all geological formations were made. So the Grand Canyon wasn’t made by water over millions of years, it was made over a few months. All mountains took the same amount of time. The volcano at Mt St Helens made a smaller canyon in that much time so they extrapolate it’s possible.

·         The whole museum gave you this information, with heaps of displays where they gave evidence for all of the points they made… Some of it was ‘scientific’. They said that the reason radio-dating is wrong is that the decay rate of radioactive atoms used to be a lot faster in the past….

·         Basically all the proof was the bible. They explained that all these scientists are working from a flawed assumption that the Universe is billions of years old, whereas when you look at things like fossils if you think about the bible, and then you can come up with stories about them that fit it…

I actually think it wasn’t all that bad, and was quite impressed at the amount of time and thought they’d put into it. I did find it all rather amusing though.

I disagree with Chiraag – it was funny to start with, but there were all these people walking around saying ‘yeah, I never thought of it that way’ about ‘evidence’ that was not properly explained. They talked about how they would go back to school and confront their teachers with that eveidence and they taught it to their children. Apparently almost 50% of Americans don’t believe in evolution. This is the most powerful country in the world – they have nuclear weapons and the economy of the world depends on them.

Bourbon, Caves and Car trouble

We headed South to see a bit of the Kentucky Bourbon trail. I hate bourbon, but the first distillery we went to had a tour by an old guy who had huge amounts of information about how they make the stuff. The tasting was traumatic, until they got to the cream liquer and chocolates that I’m pretty sure they do for the ladies.

South of bourbon country there is Mammoth Cave – the longest in the world, it has 391 miles of tunnel mapped and possibly hundreds more to go – they’ve been exploring it for 200 years. We had a tour booked and were heading to that when Beazley stopped. We tried to jump it but when nothing was happening we rolled it down the hill we’d broken down on to a lucky mechanic…

It took very little time for him to tell us that we were out of oil and had basically destroyed the engine. We had two choices – abandon the car or get a new engine. He clearly thought we shouldn’t bother and should ditch Beazley. For a while I agreed with him. In the end though we decided that we would probably be able to sell the stupid thing for something on Canada, and that getting ourselves anywhere else from the middle of nowhere, with all the stuff we had in the car would be a quite a few hundred dollars worth of hassle. So we found ourselves a motel and settled down in Cave City Kentucky for the next few days…

Luckily the cave people were really nice so they let us do the tour the next day instead. We ended up going there twice during our wait – we did a 4 mile tour and a 2 mile one and didn’t cover any of the same ground. The cave was amazing – it was mostly dry, so no stalactite/mites but there was a great variety of tunnels to walk through –from high and narrow to low and wide to massive high and wide boulevards. We even saw some tiny tiny little bats. Mammoth cave is really old, so it has some really interesting history as well – it was first explored and guided by black slaves, half of the saltpeter used to make gunpowder during the war of 1812 was mined from it, and there was a pretty interesting period of time before it became a national park where there was a bit of a war between all of the different private cave operators in the area.

We also took a couple of days to head up to Louisville, where we didn’t really do too much exciting, besides visiting the Muhammad Ali Center (since he was from Louisville), which was very cool – I never realised Ali did so much after and outside of boxing, like meeting with Saddam to try and negotiate the release of hostages!

Eventually after the best part of a week, the van was ready to go again. The new engine was running well, and we hit the road again. However, we had another change of plans! Megan started applying for work in Canada while we were waiting in Cave City, and got a response really quickly from the University of Toronto for a radiation safety officer position, so we decided to head there instead of Calgary to give her the best chance of getting the job.

Indiana

After a pitstop overnight in smalltown Kentucky, our first stop in Indiana was Edinburgh, where we did some much needed outlet shopping. I finally replaced my runners, which have been badly in need of retirement since Bali, and Megan sorted herself out with an outfit for the interview. It was about this time that we realised the van was really churning through the fuel on the new engine – almost twice as quickly as the old one, only getting about 8 to 9 mpg! We talked it over with the mechanic, but he reckoned there was nothing we could do about it. Typical.

Anyway, we pushed on to Indianapolis, where we checked out a few of the sites and then went to the Rib America festival, which happened to be in town. It was pretty cool, although a bit pricey. There was some decent live music, some very tasty ribs and some good people watching for overweight Americans :P

Since we were on a tight schedule, we continued our push northward, where we visited Amish Country in Northern Indiana. It was pretty interesting and entertaining – there were horse and donkey drawn carts and carriages everywhere, the classic bad haircuts and outfits and super friendly people. We had lunch at an Amish restaurant, which had wifi which was a bit confusing, and some very average food. We also went to a centre that went through a lot of the background of the Amish, which was most enlightening and made us think being Amish wouldn’t be all that bad. It turns out that there 2 other groups like the Amish that don’t quite go to the same level, so that probably explains the wifi in the restaurant.

Detroit

Then we headed to Detroit, which has apparently been self destructing over the last few years after the financial crisis since most of the industry that the city was based on shutting down. It is portrayed pretty badly in the media, so we had been warned by quite a few people not to go there, but I figured it couldn’t really be all that bad, and it would be good to see that side of America as well. In the end I was right – we didn’t have any problems, felt pretty safe the whole time and everyone we talked to was rather friendly and helpful. There were definitely a lot of abandoned, boarded up houses that were falling to pieces, and across the road from where we were staying there was a pretty permanently situated gang of dodgy looking individuals selling “goods”, but unfortunately no one stole or damaged Beazley so that we could claim it on insurance. We also happened to hit Detroit while their jazz festival was on which was a nice coincidence, although most of it was a bit too technical or classical jazz for our taste.

Toronto

So now we’re in Toronto, where we’ve been for about a week, staying with Manher Uncle and Umi Auntie, friends of my family. Megan’s interview at the university went pretty well, although they asked her quite a few tricky technical questions which she struggled through after not thinking about any of that sort of stuff for about a year, and she is still in the race for the job. They are currently going through and checking her references. She’s also sent out a whole lot of other applications across Canada, so we’ll see if she progresses with any of those.

We’ve been concentrating a lot of our time on trying to sell Beazley, which is unfortunately taking longer and being more difficult than we’d hoped. For anyone to register it here, it needs to pass a safety certification and emissions test. We took it to a mechanic, and it failed the emissions test pretty spectacularly (CO% reading was 11% compared to a limit of 0.6%, and HC ppm was 776 compared to a limit of 82!), and needs a few smaller things fixed to pass the safety as well. We don’t really want to risk taking it to another dodgy mechanic, so have just dropped the price accordingly and will let whoever buys it take care of it. Anyway, we’ll see how we go, and will just keep dropping the price until we manage to sell it.

And that’s pretty much where we’re at. Just waiting on selling the van and finding out about Megan’s job applications. If we manage to sell the van and Megan’s jobs aren’t looking great, I think we’ll head down to Mexico, Cuba, Jamaica or something like that. If Megan finds a job, I’ll guess we’ll start looking at settling down wherever the job is and I’ll start looking for work. Hopefully it all happens sooner rather than later, since we’re starting to feel a bit bad about staying so long at Manher Uncle’s house….

States we have been to:

British Columbia (Canada)

Alberta (Canada)

Idaho

Washington

Oregon

California

Nevada

Arizona

New Mexico

Texas

Oklahoma

Missouri

Illinois

Indiana

Michigan

Ontario (Canada)

Quebec (Canada)

New York

Vermont

New Hampshire

Maine

Massachusetts

Rhode Island

Connecticut

New Jersey

Pennsylvania

Delaware

Maryland

District of Columbia

West Virginia

Virginia

Kentucky

Ohio

Some repeats…

Part Eight – Montreal to New York City

Montreal

Last time we left you on a bit of a cliffhanger of an ending, since we didn’t really know what we were going to do after Montreal. Kind of luckily, this was mostly decided after finding out that if we wanted to sell Beazley in Quebec, we’d have to put it through a comprehensive inspection, and if it failed, we’d have to get everything repaired or take it out of the state. So Beazley is still with us!

We met up with Saurabh at the nice and conveniently located apartment we’d be renting out for the next few weeks and had a good catch up. Montreal had been Saurabh’s idea a while ago – he suggested we go for the Jazz Festival and stay for a while to really get to know the place. This worked out really well for us because we’d been racing from place to place for over a month – so some time in one place was much appreciated. And the festival was great. The jazz festival was massive! It went for about 10 days, and every night covered an area of about 4 or 5 very large blocks in the centre of the city, with about 6 big stages where free acts would play for most of the day and night. There was a huge range of music as well – classical jazz, funk, soul, blues, big band, latin and much more, plus there was other random entertainment all over the place like circus acts. We only went to 2 paid gigs over the whole festival (one of them was London Elektricity – so awesome!), but got to listen to great music every night it was on.

During the days and in the couple of weeks after the festival, we pretty much spent our time riding around town on Bixi’s (the public bike system they’ve got all over town), exploring the various sights, eating, drinking and being merry. We got the inside word on a few local places thanks to Mira, a friend of Saurabh’s, and her brother Charles. We also went to see Cirque du Solei’s Michael Jackson show – it was amazing. The craziness of Cirque du Soleil combined with the awesome music and dancing of MJ! I’m sure Twisha is super jealous :P

In our last week there, Claire, the friend we made in the immigration line in Canada joined us - as she was continuing her adventures on the eastern side of Canada. She got to Montrral just in time for the weirdest comedy festival ever. Claire is from Edinburgh, so she knows what a proper comedy festival should be like. However it seems that the French Canadian sense of humour is rather twisted, and stuff that is just weird or creepy is supposed to be funny. I don’t think we really saw anything actually funny over the few days we were there for it. We did pay to see one show, which turned out to be a super amateurish burlesque / circus act show, that was mostly amusing because of how bad it was. Anyway, it could be that we were there for the French week of the festival, with all of the English acts starting after we left, but from what we saw we wouldn’t recommend it.

So since Beazley was still with us, we decided we may as well continue the road trip through America and do the east coast. We were planning on going to the Acadia National Park on the coast of Maine straight after Montreal… But on our last night we went out drinking with Charles, and somehow decided to go visit his parents at their farm, a few hours in the opposite direction. It turned out to be another great move. We got to the farm just in time to join Charles’ dad Brian and his blues band as groupies, for a gig they were doing in Ottawa. They ended up being really good! The next day we got a tour of their huge property, with Margarite showing us all of the stuff she grows and makes (which is pretty much everything – wool, beer, wine, cheese, maple syrup, apple juice, veges….) and Brian taking us on a tractor ride across the property down to their very picturesque river.

Upper New England

We left the farm to continue the road trip south. We had a very amusing border crossing into the USA, where we confused the border security guard about how we all knew each other and where we were all going (after a while even I was confused).

We knew we had enough time that afternoon to get us into north Vermont, but nothing more concrete than that, so you can imagine our excitement when we found out there was a brewer’s festival going on along the way (in Burlington) the next day. We thought we’d been pretty smart to find this festival, but it turned out to be pretty well known and popular… all of the accommodation in town was booked out. We were not to be deterred though, so we ended up having all 4 of us sleeping in Beazley, in a car park. That was a new record for him. And there was still room to spare! Probably the most luxurious accommodation Saurabh has enjoyed on his birthday I would imagine.  … or maybe not. After a reasonable night’s sleep (and no shower – we were keen for this brewers festival) we headed down to the site. To our dismay, it was sold out! So we left town, and headed for a great maze that sounded exciting elsewhere in Vermont. It turned out to be closed until next week as well, so after 2 strikes, we decided to flee Vermont. We ended up staying the night in a random ski town near Mt Washington, and spent the next day floating down a river in kayaks which was awesome.

The Mechanic

We then headed towards Boston, via the coasts of Maine and New Hampshire (where the state slogan is ‘Live free or Die’) and were almost at our planned campsite for the night when Beazley broke down. This time it was a proper breakdown, and he didn’t want to start up again at all. We were standing around looking under the hood, thinking about calling AAA, when all of a sudden, a man with no shirt on jumped out and said “it’s the fuel pump!”. He had huge amounts of energy, and started trying to help us figure out where we should take it, and how much it would cost – even calling a few shops to check on prices. After racking his mind and deciding he couldn’t really recommend any honest mechanic in town, he mentioned that he could probably fix it for us. After not much thinking, we thought why not – we couldn’t do any worse than the mechanics we’d taken Beazley to so far! After Chris (the mechanic) went to check that he could use his parents’ garage, we left Beazley and pretty much all of our possessions with him, and he drove us to a motel. What could go wrong?

After a few discussions, he picked us up the next morning having done 7 hours of work or so on the car. He had checked the fuel pump and filter (not the problem in the end), changed the ignition coil (also not the problem, so he returned the new part), replaced the distributor head and something else that had burnt out, checked the spark plugs, run some compression tests and changed the spark plug wires. It turns out we had only been running on 7 cylinders because of a dodgy spark plug wire possibly since we bought it, and somehow the other mechanics hadn’t been able to figure this out. So I fired up Beazley and it was running a treat! The massive amounts of vibration was gone and he was purring. All in all it ended up costing about the same amount as each of the other mechanics we’d tried so far, but Chris actually did something. Third time lucky I guess. Apparently Chris only had 27c in the bank as well, so we ended up helping him out a fair bit as well. So unbelievably lucky that we broke down in front of his parents’ house, and a definite trip highlight!

Boston & Lower New England

The new and improved Beazley cruised into Boston, where we stayed for a couple of nights. We ate some good food, got a bit of history, checked out Harvard, Shakespeare in the park and caught up with Estelle, another friend from Perth who was in town for a conference. Then we all headed off in separate directions – Claire back to Canada, Saurabh to NYC early and Estelle staying in town a bit longer.

Megan & I stopped off in Salem, home of the witch hunts, and were disappointed since it was rather tacky and without history. We then camped a couple of nights in Cape Cod, apparently one of the premiere beach holiday destinations in the USA. We were underwhelmed. It was nice enough, but the weather was pretty average, the water freezing and the beaches packed and not free.

After that we headed to Rhode Island, astounded by the hordes of cars heading into Cape Cod for the weekend. There were a few unexciting stops along the way, although generally good scenery, but a place worth mentioning is Newport. This was where a lot of the money seemed to be during the Gilded age (early 1900’s), and there were some rather huge mansions. We spent a day going through a few that had been preserved and saved from demolition and subdivision since a few decades after being built, nobody could afford to maintain them. They were amazing and over the top, with varying characteristics like being completely built of marble, platinum and gold gilded walls and ceilings, silver furniture and much more. We were totally blown away.

New York City

Not really sure what to say about New York. We saw pretty much all of the important sites, ate and drank at a lot of really cool places, did lots of people watching, saw some good comedy and the Phantom of the Opera, and had a generally good time, despite the crippling heat and humidity. We got to catch up with Robyn and Adam again, who happened to be heading up the east coast, as well as Saurabh, Estelle and a last minute guest Alex (Saurabh’s long term serious girlfriend).

We have made it sound like we didn’t do much, or didn’t enjoy New York, but we really did. It was just so much that it’s hard to describe…

Philadelphia and Baltimore

We are now on our way down to Washington. Last night we stopped in Philadelphia to check out some important historical sites – where the declaration of independence and the constitution was written – but more importantly, where Rocky trained and ran up those steps (an iconic American image). We are writing this email from the lovely Inner Harbour in Baltimore – wondering where we will sleep tonight J

Where to from here…

While we were in New York we talked a lot about what we wanted to do next. We were trying to fit as much of the rest of the US (Florida, Texas, the Mississippi, New Orleans…) into the time I had left on my visa, when we realised that we had kind of lost enthusiasm for America. We’ve seen so much here already that we are not getting as excited about places anymore – we were kind of just starting to tick off the places you should go. So we drastically changed our plans. We will continue down to Washington, but after that head back to Canada where we might start looking for work early, or more likely we’ll fly down to Mexico for a change of culture and scenery.

And that’s all for now folks!

States we have been to:

British Columbia (Canada)

Alberta (Canada)

Idaho

Washington

Oregon

California

Nevada

Arizona

New Mexico

Texas

Oklahoma

Missouri

Illinois

Indiana

Michigan

New York

Vermont

New Hampshire

Maine

Massachusetts

Rhode Island

Connecticut

New Jersey

Pennsylvania

Delaware

Maryland

Ontario (Canada)

Quebec (Canada)

Part Seven - Crossing the Middle of the US

Hi everyone!!!

As you can see from all the blue - Chiraag wrote most of this email!

Las Vegas Baby!

We got to Las Vegas (with Crossy – who is Chiraag’s friend from highschool – I didn’t explain that last email) as planned, in time for the wedding of Robyn & Adam (some more of Chiraag’s friends from high school), which is why we had been hurrying down the west coast. We had decided to live it up a bit in Vegas, so stayed in a 5 star penthouse suite with Crossy, as well as Rob & Mary, who Robyn & Adam had graciously allowed to crash the wedding!

First night in we caught up with everyone and jumped into the Hens/Bucks.

Hens:

Without going into too much detail – what happens on a Vegas hen/bucks stays in Vegas – we had a great time! I didn't really know the girls before we got there, so it was great to get to know them. One amusing part of the night was Robyn and I riding a mechanical bull. Robyn was really good at it! She stayed on for ages and made it look really easy. I didn’t do so well… it took me 3 runs to get onto the thing (they wouldn’t let Robyn help me up)… after all that hassle I tried to stay on as long as I could… Advice - don’t try to ride mechanical bull sin short non stretchy dresses – I had the thing pulled up to my waist and flashed the crowd both getting on and flying off :)

Bucks:

As for the bucks, I’ll stick to the what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas pretty much. It was an epic night, that managed to turn to gold despite or possibly because of a complete lack of a plan, and thankfully didn’t have the drama of the Bali Buck’s I’d been to a few months ago. Definitely one of the best nights I’ve had probably ever, which seemed to be a common sentiment between all of the boys.

Wedding:

The wedding was 2 days later. It was a beautiful, short ceremony, followed by a nice short stint of photos, and then a surprise reception at the extravagant Venetian Hotel (of which only Robyn & Adam knew of before we got there), including gondola rides by all, followed by another great night out on the town.

We didn’t really know what to expect from the wedding, but it was definitely one of the best we’ve been to, and well worth the rush getting there during the previous few weeks. 

I have never met a bride as laid back as Robyn. All of you girls out there who think you were a pretty good bride – you were nowhere near as relaxed as Robyn. She planned the ceremony and reception 4 days before the event –this included choosing the dress. She didn’t even know what her bridesmaid was wearing to the wedding.

The rest of the time in Vegas was spent recovering/relaxing, drifting around the huge, winding, lazy river at our hotel, checking out a few of the Vegas sights and other casinos, some light gambling and attempting to get some repairs done on the van to stop it running so roughly (which was pretty unsuccessful). I also got to catch up with my cousin Snehal, I hadn’t seen for something like 18 years and his long term girlfriend Amanda, who was an absolute blast!

From Vegas we headed towards Route 66 with Rob & Mary tagging along behind Beazley in their new hire car. We stopped at Hoover Dam along the way, where we went on the Hydro Power Plant tour. It was pretty cool to see, but unfortunately didn’t have anywhere near the amount of electrical / technical detail I was hoping for  :P

Route 66

Our first night on Route 66 was spent in a small town called Williams, where we stayed in a dodgy motel that felt like it was straight out of the movie Identity. Luckily we made it through the night alive and made it to the Grand Canyon, which was as impressive as expected…..not really sure what else to say. From the canyon, Rob & Mary left to go back towards California, while we continued on Route 66. It was pretty sad to say bye to them, since it was a proper goodbye this time, with no more future meetings scheduled.

We covered a whole lot of distance in a short amount of time over the next week or so, since we were on a pretty tight schedule to make it to Montreal in time for the Jazz festival. Route 66 definitely delivered what we expected – lots of small town America, old school diners and super unhealthy food, brew pubs and dodgy biker bars, some weird sights, kitschy memorabilia and almost constantly changing landscapes.

And what would another leg of the trip be without more drama from Beazley! I think it was just after we left Albuquerque that the air con decided to stop working. After pulling over to see if it was anything obvious, I managed to notice that the engine oil fill pipe had moved. On closer inspection, it was actually completely loose and unattached, so I managed to pull it out entirely! It was definitely worrying pulling out a big 1m pipe, but we decided to push on figuring it wasn’t a critical part and made it to Amarillo where we managed to get it fixed. It turned out the compressor was gone on the A/C as well, which was super annoying since we’d just spent the money getting the A/C serviced and recharged less than 2 weeks ago in San Francisco! It’s unluckily an expensive fix, so we’ve pushed on without the A/C, which has made the rest of the trip rather hot and sticky in the van, especially for the passenger in the back!

A couple of the more mentionworthy stops were towards the end of Route 66. The first one was St. Louis, where we did the touristy thing and went up the gateway arch, sampled a few of the local brews and then went to a live blues bar at night, which was really good and then got even better when whichever Cirque Du Soleil was in town came in and took over the bar, with their band totally rocking out the joint!

After that it was Springfield, where Abraham Lincoln grew up, so we took in a lot of the Abe Lincoln sites, sampled a few of the local brews and then went to see the movie Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, since it seemed like fate that we were in his hometown on opening night. As expected, it was one of the worst movies I’ve seen, but did seem to try to work in as many historically accurate points as possible, which was kind of cool since we’d just learned all about it that day.

Chicago

And then we made it to the end of Route 66 – Chicago! Since we had been rushing for the last week or so, it was definitely a nice change to be able to stop here for a few nights. We didn’t do too much touristy stuff while there, just the Science & Industry Museum and Millenium Park which were both excellent, but spent most of our time chilling out or checking out some of the many cool cafes, bars and restaurants. We both really liked Chicago and would have like to have stayed longer, but again we had to hit the road so we could make it to Montreal in time. This is also where we left Crossy, who had to fly back home to Perth and the real world. It was really great to have him on the trip for a few weeks, and get to catch up on a bit of news from back home.

After camping overnight in Michigan, we made it to Oakville, near Toronto, where we stayed with some old family friends Manher Uncle & Umi Auntie. It was originally supposed to be for 1 night only, but it turns out we calculated the number of nights we had left before we needed to get to Montreal, so it ended up being 2! It worked out well that they were also babysitting their grandkids for the week, so we got to meet them for the first time as well. The 2 night stay did work out in the end, since it gave us a chance to visit Niagara Falls in between – they were only an hour away. They were very impressive, however we may have gone in with expectations that were too high, become a bit blasé about big sights after seeing so much over the last few months and been a bit offput by the amount of tacky development around it, but we were a little underwhelmed. We did the Maid of the Mist tour and had a good day though – and it was good to tick off another sight :)

We didn’t manage to see any of Toronto in the end, so will probably have to make it back there at some stage. Anyway, from there it was on to Montreal, where we have 3 weeks to relax, catch up with our friend Saurabh from back home and try and decide where to go / what to do from there…..sell the ailing van, start applying for real jobs, continue road tripping, fly somewhere else for some different adventures…who knows?!?

Anyway, we’ll leave that for the next instalment, when we have hopefully figured something out and the adventure continues!

Love 

Megan and Chiraag

xxxxxxx

States we have been to:

Idaho

Washington

Oregon

California

Nevada

Arizona

New Mexico

Texas

Oklahoma

Missouri

Illinois

Indiana

Michigan

Ontario (Canada)

British Columbia (Canada)

Alberta (Canada)

Part Six - West Coast USA‏

Hi everyone!!!

This post pretty much covers mid May to mid June. 

And this time I’ve figured out the dot points a bit, so it’s not as long as the last couple. It is now lacking a bit of personality, but if we put in everything we thought about these places you’d be getting a novel.

But on to the story of...  USA… USA… USA!

Wenatchee 

Got into the USA across the BC-Idaho border, but did not stay in Idaho. Just drove through it. We did fill up petrol though cos it was cheap! Crossing the border was easier than I thought (after a few horror stories from Canadians) – they didn’t search the van; didn’t ask for proof I plan to leave America (I am, but I have no proof); and even gave us some advice on places to go! 

I had my first long stretch of driving that day… I was as terrible as Chiraag had ever thought I would be… the car was too heavy for me and pulled heaps to the right… in his words I could ‘hardly keep it on the road’. After a few hours of this I pointed out a sound I had been hearing for a while, but didn’t remember from yesterday. When we pulled over and had a look the outer wall of one of the back tyres had come away around almost a quarter of the wheel…. 

We were only 25 miles from Wenatchee so we decided to drive in slowly and deal with it when we got there. It was a pretty exciting first day in America.

We actually went to Wenatchee because it’s a wine region. The wines were nice.

Seattle

We had been hurrying since we left Whistler so that we could get to Seattle in time to see Rob and Mary again to give them their snowboard bags (they couldn’t carry them there and would have had to dump them otherwise).  About 2 hours out of Seattle I realised that we had actually messed up our days a bit and were getting there a whole day early! So we’d like to apologise to Rosemarie and Jon for rushing away (we’ll make up for it when we see you again), and to Rob and Mary for the bad things we thought about you for making other plans on ‘the one night we were going to see you’ :)

Seattle was great, especially seeing Rob and Mary and having them to give us tips on things to see and do. We went to the first ever Starbucks and on a boat cruise. We also had Chiraag’s birthday in Seattle (after Mary and Rob left). It was maybe not his best birthday – we locked the keys in the car and then were not let into our hostel before having to walk a mile back to the car to get our passports… It wasn’t all bad though – we went for a kayak around Union Lake and looked at the houseboats, saw a market festival, watched the Avengers movie and had a nice dinner and lunch (not to mention found out from the AAA man that our car is almost impossible to break into). We will try for a better 30th birthday next year though.

Mt Rainier National Park

USA’s 4th highest peak. 

So many waterfalls! Beautiful bush walks. Lots of people because it was a long weekend. Did not see the top of the mountain because there was so much cloud, but had a great time anyway.

Mt St Helens National Volcanic Monument

A volcano that erupted in 1980. It blew sideways, killing 57 people, creating 2 new lakes and changing the shape of a popular holiday destination…

We didn’t see it because it was too cloudy. We did go to the info centre and learn about it though. Very cool and very scary – for me anyway with my semi-phobia about volcanoes. 

Nearby is Ape cave – it’s a ‘lava tunnel’ – it was made by a much older eruption:  the lava flowed along, the outside stuff cooled and made a tunnel that the rest flowed inside of. The tunnel is still there. It’s like a mine tunnel, but never branches off. It’s so dark and long (we probably walked along at least 5km), and in some places we had to climb – up a ‘lava waterfall’ or because it was caved in. It was awesome.  

Portland

Went to biggest bookshop in America – it was so, so huge. They had the biggest range I’ve ever seen (including most university libraries). That was so much fun. I wanted to buy a bunch of really random ones. In the end I was sensible though. We got lunch from food carts which are apparently huge in Portland – there were so many and they made so many different kinds of food! It took us forever to choose. Went and sat by the river and watched the people go by. Went to a cool brew-pub and talked to a couple of really nice Americans.  It doesn’t sound that exciting, but it was a fantastic city. We didn’t stay in Portland long enough.

ASIDE – around here we got the fridge in the van fixed so we could eat things that didn’t come out of a can and bought a porta-loo so that when we just park on the side of a road or at a Walmart I don’t have to stop drinking fluids at 3pm. This has improved the van experience for me a lot!

Crater Lake

The deepest lake in America – it’s in the crater of a volcano and has a little island in the middle of it.

It wasn’t cloudy, so we did see it! Beautiful!! Still a bit early in the year to go – we couldn’t drive all the way around the rim of the crater – but so worth the detour. It was just stunning – I don’t know what else to say.

Redwood Forests

Drove down through these over a few days – stopping regularly to walk around a grove (group of very big, old trees) or along a path. The trees are so huge I couldn’t grasp it the whole first day. On the second day it hit me that these trees were taller than any I have ever seen before – many over 100m. Again, an absolutely stunning place. I can’t describe how beautiful it is. It’s like the forests they describe in children’s books, but bigger, and real. I loved it.

Sonoma and Napa Valleys (and around)

More wine tasting!

We have been stopping in a number of wine regions on our travels… it turns out we’re wine snobs.  We went to Napa and a few regions very close by because they’re so famous (and we don’t like buying wine we haven’t tasted before – it’s so often bad). We bought some very nice bottles. In Napa itself most places charge $15-$25 per tasting. Didn’t get quite so much there.

San Francisco

We drove into San Francisco over the Golden Gate bridge – it was huge!!  We stayed the first two nights in San Fran with Nick (Pelly) and Alicia in ‘Silicon Valley’. There were still rose petals on their front lawn from his proposal to her – so it would have been understandable if they had said now was not a good time to visit… but instead they were lovely and welcoming. I want a house just like theirs when we stop travelling..

Pelly gave us a tour of Google (where he works), which was very cool. We had a free lunch and checked out the nerdy artwork, arcade games, beach volleyball ground and lap pools with lifeguard… We also got a bit of Google history from Pelly. It sounds like a great place to work – it reminded me of a university, except people get paid well…  When he’d gone back to work Chiraag and I stole a couple of free bikes the staff use to get around the huge campus – there are like 20 buildings – and rode around for a bit like we were supposed to be there :) 

We also spent hours at the computer history museum.

We spent the next two days in San Francisco city – where we acquired Crossy. We were going to do the touristy things with him – like riding across the Golden Gate bridge, and going into a WWII submarine… but we would have been riding against a lot of wind, and we were all feeling pretty unenthusiastic about it all… so we went to an arcade game museum and spent ages playing 25c arcade games. It was a highlight of the trip so far – they had games there from like the 1900s. It was friken awesome and definitely the highlight of San Francisco. Megan has not been expressing how cool it was. 

We did ride a cable car, and go to the most windy road in the world, and find both the Full House house and the Mrs, Doubtfire house though. And we spent a lot of time walking up and down giant hills – waiting for a police chase with cars getting air and bottoming out :) – all that is touristy…

ASIDE – In San Fran we put the car in to have the air conditioning fixed and while it was there we got the radiator replaced – heading into the desert we were worried about it overheating again and the guy said it was leaking and ‘blocked up’…

Yosemite National Park

Every Californian who heard we were going to Yosemite told us it’s the best place to go… I don’t know if I thought it was that much better than the Redwoods, but it was amazing. 

Apparently everyone in the world goes to Yosemite for their weekends, so there were heaps of people everywhere – the campsites were more packed than I have ever seen a campsite be. Luckily the landscape was so amazing that we didn’t mind. Too much. 

I didn’t know what to expect from the park, but it would have been better than I had expected even if I had… The bit we saw had a huge HUGE canyon with sheer cliffs on either side. In the valley there were rivers, meadows, forest and huge waterfalls (including the tallest in America). On top of the canyon was dry and rocky – quite volcanic looking – with breathtaking views out over the canyon.

As I said – maybe not way way better than the other national parks we’ve seen, but it was still an amazing place to go.

Manzanar

Between Yosemite and Death Valley

This place probably doesn’t need it’s own section – but I really found it interesting… During the second world war (after Pearl Harbour) America declared the whole west coast a military zone or  something and to keep it secure moved all of the Japanese American’s out of those three states. Most of them were put in internment camps in remote locations – one between Yosemite and Death Valley. Two thirds of these people were born in America. None of them were ever proved to be involved in the war. Unless they had trusted American friends to leave them with - they had to sell all of their property, businesses and belongings within a few days (at a great loss usually). They lived in what was basically a concentration camp – in barracks with armed soldiers in watch towers with barbed wire for 3 years. This area was stinking hot when we were there in Summer and is snows in Winter. It would be the most horrible place to live like that. I found it so sad.

Death Valley

We didn’t really know what Death Valley was going to be like – but we assumed it would be hot… and the name is so cool we just had to go :)

We were right – it was SO hot. When we got out of Beazley to look at things the engine was hotter after sitting off in the sun than it was when we were driving. I’ve never seen that before. It was a beautiful place despite the heat though. The landscape seemed to change completely every 10 minutes – black rocks all over flat ground – to red and white canyons made of marble – to sand dunes that somehow stay in a small area without being blown to spread out – to bright yellow hills and valleys – to salt flats – and even a little oasis of greenery…

It felt like we were on another planet. But it was so hot!

From here it was a short drive to Las Vegas for Robyn and Adam’s wedding – but you’ll have to wait for the next instalment to hear all about that!

We miss you all – even though we are doing so much and having fun. 

Love 

Megan and Chiraag

xxxxxxx

States we have been to:

Idaho

Washington

Oregon

California

British Columbia (Canada)

Alberta (Canada)