Road trip USA

20 Nov 2008 19:12 - Nederland

Hello again,

It's been a while since my last update, I've actually had to work in order to go on a holiday again.
So when I finally did get enough money I was very excited to hear that my very best friend from New Zealand wanted to travel together once again.

Next we had to find a destination we both wanted to visit and with the Dollar being nice and weak, the USA seemed like a perfect choice. Naturally we agreed on visiting places that Hannah had never seen before so she would get to play tourist in her own country  :)

We met up in New York City where we did all the usual touristy things. We went to the Empire State Building, Central Park, the museum of natural history, Ellis Island and of course...the Statue of Liberty. We had a great time just wandering around the city, drinking lots of coffee and peering up a big French lady’s toga...

After three days it was time to leave the Big Apple and we took a plane to Phoenix, Arizona to pick up our camper (or RV as the Americans call it). She was a beauty, 15 feet of fiberglass craftsmanship. It had no rear window, but it did have a rear-view mirror and as a result of this we felt like we were being chased around the country by a toilet...
In stead of staying in our camper the first night we visited Hannah’s aunt Sheila who lives near Phoenix. Sheila and her partner Bruce took us to Margaritaville where we had a beautiful dinner and I tried my first ever (but certainly not my last) Margarita. The next day we said good bye and started our tour of national parks. We kicked off by visiting the Grand Canyon where we went on a hike, saw an endangered California Condor and did a helicopter tour of the canyon. It was an awesome experience, you just can’t grasp the scale of that place just by looking at pictures of it.

Next we drove to Mesa Verde in Colorado. This is a very interesting park full of ancient ruins that the Indians built on the cliffs in the park. Even though I think they did not mean to build ruins... The cliff dwellings were incredible and the rest of the park was very beautiful as well. Especially since it wasn’t as busy as the Grand Canyon (we had an entire camping loop to ourselves!). Our next destination was Death Valley. But getting there meant driving for 16 hours! We did see some interesting things along the way though... We went trough Sedona, Monument Valley, Las Vegas and several fast food places only to get to Death Valley and fall asleep :)

When we woke up we drove further into the park and discovered that Death Valley is an awesome place. There are wide open spaces, beautiful gorges and spectacularly colourful cliffs. Plus it wasn’t actually that hot (October seems to be the right time to visit). From Death Valley we drove around the Sierra Nevada range to Sequoia National Park which we liked even better than Mesa Verde. We were lucky enough to see five black bears in our first three hours in the park. The main attraction in Sequoia NP were the giant Sequoia trees (duh...) One of them, the General Sherman tree, is actually the largest living organism on the planet! During our stay in Sequoia, Hannah decided that I should try s’mores. Basically some toasted marsh mellows squished between two crackers and a piece of chocolate… It made a lovely, sticky, incredibly sweet mess... However, I did enjoy the camp fire and making pointy sticks for our marsh mellows.

Our next destination was Yosemite National Park where we had trouble finding a camping spot. I guess we got used to nice, quiet parks away from any major cities. Yosemite was beautiful though, we went on a very nice (though strenuous) hike. Because it was so busy we had to sleep on a parking lot for one night, which wasn’t much of a problem in our RV. But it was kind of exciting...

The next stop was San Francisco where we had to say goodbye to Bettina (that’s what we decided to call the RV).
We hadn’t originally planned to stay in San Fran very long but because we did not stay at the Grand Canyon and Yosemite for as long as we predicted we were able to see a bit more of this great city. We stayed in a nice hostel overlooking the Bay with Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge just across the water from us. San Francisco was great! We visited Alcatraz, walked to the Golden Gate Bridge, had dinner with some random people we met earlier that day, strolled around Fisherman’s Wharf and ate way too much seafood! It’s a very relaxed city and I like it even better than NYC.

We left San Fran for Harrisburg Pennsylvania where Hannah’s friend Mike picked us up and drove us to Hannah’s mom’s house in Lancaster. From there we took Hannah’s car and drove to Canada to see the Niagara Falls. This turned out to be  a bit of a disappointment not because of the falls themselves, but rather because the Canadian side of the falls is full of casinos, hotels and for some reason I don’t quite understand...haunted houses. We did have a good time though... We laughed at all the casinos and went on boat tour that took us right up to the base of the falls where we laughed at each other in our stylish little ponchos. That night Hannah bought me a lovely steak dinner and we got to see a skunk. I was chuffed to finally see one in the "wild", but I don’t think Hannah could have jumped out of the way quicker if I’d told her there was an angry rhinoceros storming towards her...
The next day we drove back "home" and I was surprised to find out that the ladies had bought me a cake for my birthday. Hmmm that chocolaty goodness... :) There would be no shortage of food from there on since we celebrated an early Thanksgiving the next day. It was a fantastic experience, a day full of family, friends and colossal quantities of very nice food!
Sadly though, this was to be my last experience in The States...for now...