I'm not sure how the time difference works out, but I left Seattle on the scariest bus ride of all time in the early hours of Monday morning and arrived in Tokyo very late on Tuesday night in a state that would put a George Romero zombie to shame. After a really good nights sleep and trying to work out how to use the toilet, I set off for a look around the neighbourhood. I'm staying in an area of Tokyo called Asakusa. There is a huge temple just up the road and it's surrounded by a market, a really cute [View Full Entry]

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Since arriving here on election night I've been feeling a bit lethargic, I don't now if I'm coming down with something or if it's just the previous six weeks catching up with me. The weather hasn't helped much either, it rained almost all day every day up until today. I've spent a lot of time just hanging around the hostel chatting to the other travellers, watching movies and sleeping, lots of sleeping. When I did venture out I found Seattle to be a really cool place where people can be themselves, it seems like every other person in the street is [View Full Entry]

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I’ve spent my first night in Seattle in a bar watching the election results come in. All the bars were full of Obama supporters screaming, cheering and applauding every result that came in the democrats favour. When the California result was called (only 10 minutes after the polls closed) the place erupted, there was singing and chanting and the bar owner pored everyone a glass of champagne. The atmosphere was pretty electric. After Obama made his victory speech a samba band came into the bar and gave 10 minutes of drumming and the bar emptied to follow a street procession down [View Full Entry]

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I’m not sure why, but instead of heading straight up to Seattle I decided to spend a couple of nights in Portland, Oregon. I’ve heard from a few people that it’s amazing this time of year and the people are friendly. Turns out they were right. I arrived on Sunday night around 8pm after a 24 hour train ride from San Francisco. I spent the journey sat next to a guy called Elijah who was from Seattle and had been hitchhiking his way around California for the past month and was on his way home now that his money had ran [View Full Entry]

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I arrived back in San Francisco after a 7 hour bus journey through the desert just in time to go on the pub crawl that the USA Hostel organise. They worked out a deal with each of the bars for half price drinks or 2for1's which to really took advantage of resulting in nasty hangovers for the next days sightseeing. I have been collecting points from a company called ipoints for a couple of years and I managed to pay for 2 tickets to Universal Studios and 2 Alcatraz/City tours with them. I think Alacatraz is probably the biggest tourist attraction [View Full Entry]

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I've been in LA for 4 days now and I haven't seen a single Blood,Crip, drive-by, car-jacking or any police brutality. I have seen a lot of wannabe actors and actresses with scary amounts of plastic surgery. After a nasty coach ride from Vegas, we arrived in around 8pm on Sunday night. I was too tired to do anything so just popped to the liquor store and burger place across the road for some beer and burger nastiness. Monday, we used the free tickets for Universal Studios I got from an internet points thing I've been saving for a couple of [View Full Entry]

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...and Canals, pyramids, cities and volcanoes I spent most of the last two days in San Francisco either watching movies in the Hostel TV Room or hanging around the park or Union Square reading. I did make a little geeky pilgrimage to the CNET building in the business district where a lot of the Tech podcast’s I listen to every day are recorded. I guess it’s a bit like a “normal” person going to the set of Coronation Street or something. The evenings on the other hand were a bit more lively, drinking in the basement party room of the hostel, [View Full Entry]

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I've been hanging out in San Francisco for the past few days, I'm enjoying the California sunshine and eating as many free pancakes as I can stuff myself with every morning. I'm sharing a room with a guy from Korea called Kym and have spent a couple of days doing the tourist thing with him. We went down to see the Sea Lions on Pier 39, they are all wild and apparently they like the bay because the water isn't salty enough for their predators(the great white shark and the killer whale). They are funny to watch, they seem to spend [View Full Entry]

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According to my geeky USA by Rail book, the California Zephyr is one of the world’s great train lines. It takes 2.5 days to cross the 2,438 miles (3,922km) from Chicago to San Francisco, spanning 3 time zones, passing through Omaha, Denver, Salt Lake City, Reno and Sacramento. You might think it’s a bit crazy to sit on a train for well over 50 hours when I could have flown in less than 10% of the time. But by far this has been the best train journey I’ve done in my life. The scenery is gorgeous and the trains not to [View Full Entry]

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Chicago is a clean friendly unpretentious New York. I’d choose Chicago over New York any day. After the parade (see previous post) I went to the Navy Pier which about a mile of funfair, theatres, restaurants and boat tour operators, unfortunately just as I got there everything was closing so I just had a nice quiet walk along the pier anyway. The following morning on the recommendation of one of hostel staff I headed down to the Millennium Park. Parts of the park are still being built, but the bits that are finished look really smart and modern. It has a [View Full Entry]

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