Heading back downtown after our trip past the Statue of Liberty we decided time was getting on and we should head towards the Empire State Building where we were to meet Annie and Paul. On the way I was starting to feel a bit grouchy which usually means I am hungry (poor old Kim had got used to my hungry grouchy turns by now). We stopped at a vendor and decided to try one of the Giant pretzels on the way to keep me going!! We finally reached the Empire State worried that we would be late and that we would have a huge queue in front of us. It was now evening and our plan was to catch the sunset at the top and stay there until it got dark so we could see the ... read more

Boston, well what can we say. Arrived in Boston with a strange sense of home, mainly due to the fact that it was pissing it down with rain. in fact there had been floods in the state due to the weather over the previous days. Arrived at the hostel to find it being renovated, in fact the hostel wasn’t even open, we didn’t realise that there was now a different hostel a few doors down that was open instead. When we got there we also found it being renovated but at least it was open. There wasn't even a toaster, though that was probably a good thing as we had been living on peanut butter on toast for a while already and a change would be nice!! It was a bit cold in their but we ... read more

We got to Chicago after a non-eventful train journey (thank God). We arrived at the hostel, a bit out of town but there's 24 hour metro so was great, and promptly got chucked out! Only for a couple of hours though, lock out hostels suck, but they do make you get out of bed even with the most serverest hangover (poor Trev!). We went into the city the next day, heading for the Library for free internet. Chicago is the city in the States we,ve been to so far that looks and feels like home. The architecture is very european and feels like theres a lot of history around. The Library building was beautiful itself, it was a shame that when we used the computers we all slowly noticed that over half of the people there ... read more

Im going to start this entry by giving the run down on the state of New Orleans so i don't have to mention it again. During the train ride into New Orleans we could see all the places made famous on TV like the still damaged superdome. From stepping in the station we could already see the damage, broken lockers, boarded up windows and signs still hanging off buildings. This is eight months later in practically the richest most powerful country in the world, but we hadn't seen anything yet. This was in the main city downtown area. On the way to the Hostel as we moved further out of town the devastation really started to hit us. The streets were lined with practically the insides of peoples houses in huge piles next to ruined cars ... read more

On 27th we left vegas with Gary and Nic in their huge rental SUV heading for Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon. The drive was fairly straightforward but held many suprises we did not expect. I was riding shotgun and giving directions from our pretty basic map. However looking closer at the map I realised that the road to flagstaff through Arizona took us directly past the Hoover Dam. I didn't realise that route 93 actualy also took us over the damn as it was passable to cars. On approaching the damn we decided to pull over ending up in a restricted area. As soon as we got out of the car a loud yank shouted at the top of his lung "your in a restricted area!" so we hightailed it and managed to find another spot ... read more