After 365 days of travelling and nearly 70,000 miles, we have finally made it back home to England! We landed back at London Gatwick Airport to an emotional welcome home from our parents, who had come to meet us at the airport and it was so great to see them after such a long time away. We were soon back at Elaine’s Mum & Dad’s house, drinking our first cup of English tea for a long time, and enjoying a good bacon sandwich again to wake us up after our long flight across the pond! We’ve been back a few days [View Full Entry]

---

---

Our trip was nearly coming to an end, but we had one more state to visit first. Our flight home was booked to depart from Tampa, but we had a week to visit Florida beforehand, so we headed to Miami first and stopped a few days at Miami Beach. As it is now past summer a lot of the hotels have cheap deals so we managed to get a nice hotel right on Miami Beach, just a mile or so north from the Art Deco district. It turned out to be a great location, as we could enjoy some quiet relaxing [View Full Entry]

---

---

Philadelphia was the only place we were going to on our round the world trip that we had already been to before. Our friends live just outside Philadelphia in a town called Plymouth Meeting, and as we were driving in, Elaine started to remember places she had been many times and it was all a kind of coming home feeling! We spent a long weekend in Plymouth Meeting, enjoying spending time with our friends talking about our adventures so far. It was great to be in a home again, and simple things like enjoying a home cooked meal and watching the [View Full Entry]

---

---

We left the stunning Yellowstone National Park behind and continued our long drive east. We headed out of the east side of the park, up and over the Sylvan Pass through part of the Rocky Mountains. This road was supposed to be the most scenic entrance into the park, but is often closed due to snow fall and avalanches. Luckily that did not affect us and it certainly was pretty spectacular, going through the pass and hugging the side of the mountains as we wound our way back down again. The only dampener was the fact that we again saw signs [View Full Entry]

---

---

We stayed in the town of Jackson, just south of Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. It was a great little town, very much set-up for the tourist and we could easily imagine it covered in snow in the peak of the ski season. We had an awesome drive in, coming up and over the mountains, from Teton Pass, with a great view of the town from the top. We didn't have a great deal of time in the town, as we spent most of it in Grand Teton National Park, but we got some time in the evening to look [View Full Entry]

---

---

We left California and started the long journey east. We were planning to go to Yellowstone, so decided on a route that took us through Oregon and Idaho so we could see a couple more national parks that had caught our interest, namely Crater Lake in Oregon and Craters of the Moon in Idaho. The pictures of Crater Lake that we had seen were absolutely stunning, a fantastic deep blue lake surrounded by the steep walls of a massive crater. The weather was not fantastic when we left California, so we were hoping it would clear up so we could see [View Full Entry]

---

---

After leaving Yosemite, we decided to head back towards the coast of California to the area known as the Redwood Coast. This is home to some of the last remaining forests of the huge Redwood trees, and as it was pretty stunning walking through the Giant Sequoias in Yosemite, we thought we'd pay them a visit. It was a pretty long drive to get there in one day, so we stopped at a town called Redding for the night and the next day we continued our journey, but as we got out of Redding, we noticed an electronic board saying the [View Full Entry]

---

---

We were really looking forward to Yosemite as it is one of the iconic national parks of the United States, and probably the most popular in the whole country, about 4 million people visit this park a year. The accommodation in the park gets booked up really early, and it is really expensive, so we decided to stay outside the park which meant about an hours drive each day... but it was certainly worth it! Unlike the other parks we had been to it was covered with pine trees and really green, which was such a contrast to the deserts we [View Full Entry]

---

---

We left the mad world of LA behind us and headed up the coast, hoping for some great weather and some gorgeous scenery. As we drove out of Santa Monica and joined the famous Highway 1, we passed Malibu and other typical Californian beach scenes on the way up to our first stop in Santa Barbara. The real spectacular section of Highway 1 was further up the coast, but Santa Barbara was supposed to be a picture perfect coastal town so seemed like the ideal place to stop. We soon found out it was also one of the best places to [View Full Entry]

---

---

We headed back to LA after the delights of the canyons to travel up the coast on the famous Highway 1, but neither of us were really sure of spending much time in LA but thought we might as well see the city as we were here. It would have been a long journey to go direct from Grand Canyon so we stopped off a night to break up the journey, and as we had already been to Las Vegas, thought we would stop someone else... so we headed along a small part of the historic Route 66 and stayed in [View Full Entry]

---

---