The last leg of our American journey

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With the main part of our travels pretty much over in North America, we're both now looking forward to flying out from chicago to Singapore and starting the next big part of our trip.

Since Cleveland however we have managed to visit a few more places along the way before we ended up in Mattoon, Illinois, where we decided to chill out and spend some time with some of my family who live over this way, it just means aswel we don't have to worry about where we are staying every three to four days!

So anyway, from cleveland we got yet another Greyhound bus down to Indianapolis in Indiana, where we stayed for three days, we ended up staying just outside of the main city, in what seemed like someone elses house. It probably was at some point as we were in a nice little neighbourhood, but only about 20 minutes by bus to Downtown. I didn't think the hostel was that bad......but jade didn't seem to think the same as it did have a slight smell of damp where we were in the dorm, which happened to be in the basement, but i suppose not every place we stay at is going to be amazing!

The next few days were spent exploring the city and seeing what it had to offer, the city's got a lot of war memorials/museums for wars from the past, which were quite interesting, however with there being so much history from the east coast such as Boston and Washington, we've started looking for something a little bit different now. With my family living only about a two hour drive away from Indianapolis, we managed to get my brother and his girlfriend down for one of the evenings and had a drink in one of the bars, which was great, as we hadn't seen eachother for around two years so that ended up being a really good evening. That night we had decided to go to a nearby street we had heard about, Broad ripple Avenue, which is a really good location, full of sports bars and restaurants and so this seems to be the place to come to if you want the nightlife.

After 3 days of being in Indianapolis it was time to move off again to our final city before heading to my dads in Illionois, and we had always said from when we first planed to go backpacking that we should visit Chicago, as we had heard from so many people that it was a really cool place with lots of stuff happening, and it definately lived up to what we had been told! We ended up staying just outside of the main downtown area which seemed to remind us slightly of Camden back home, it had plenty of bars, restaurants and a variety of different shops, and ended up being a really good place to spend the evenings with many of the bars having special offers on food and drinks, all on different evenings so there was always somewhere to go where we didnt have to spend much money!.......and yes we did get a Chicago Deep Pan Pizza one of the evenings which we just felt we had to do while we were in town, and it was amazing! As we were there over the weekend there was also a small concert put on, where they had closed one of the streets and a stage was put up in the road, all of the music seemed to be heavy metal so we didn't end up staying for too long.

Chicago was definately worth the visit though! the Downtown area was only a 20 minute train ride from where we were staying which was handy, theres plenty to see including the millenium Park which is quite famouse for the huge bean that you see in all the pictures of Chicago and we did find a small zoo which was free to get into, even though it was free it ended up being pretty good, with everything from a polar bear and Kangaroos. This was located just on the outskirts of Chicago so the walk back was good as you got to see the beaches and the city skyline from a distance which looked pretty impressive. Jade seemed happy aswel as we managed to get to see the Magnificent Mile........a mile long street with every shop you could want so a bit of time was spent walking up and down window shopping (as we can't actually afford to buy anything but this seemed to make her happy anyway!). Chicago is deffinately a place we will probably end up going back to just because it's so close to where my dad lives and so we cant wait for the next time! We ended up staying here for four days before we then headed to Union Station and boarding the Amtrak to Mattoon where we had planed to stay for around 3 weeks......just to chill out a bit and save a bit of money before we fly out to Singapore on the 15th July to start our travels in Asia, we're also hoping that we can spend a lot longer out in SE Asia as no where can be more expensive than what North America has been! So at the moment we are hoping we can end up staying until atleast the end of this year/begining of next year! But time will tell!

Meanwhile, the 3 weeks spent in Mattoon were still quite busy. Even with it only being a small town compared to other places we have visited along the way, there was still plenty of things to do. Most days were spent with my younger brothers, taking them swimming and just generally spending time with them. And of course we did manage to fit in a few nights at some of the local bars, one of which, The Castle, gets pretty busy on a saturday night, with Kareoke provided aswel (Jade managed to get a song in with my brother and his girlfriend, so i think she's geting ready for asia, as i have heard a lot that suggests kareoke is taken pretty seriously that side of the world!) One of the evenings was spent with around 30 bikers who just randomly turned up aswel.....many of them didn't look very friendly either and we were just waiting for something to happen as a few of them seemed as if they were looking for a fight.....but thankfully nothing happened and it turned out to be a good night, a few of them even turned out to be quite good singers!

After our second week here we had a fairly busy weekend, we travelled down to St Louis, which only turned out to be around a 2 hour drive, where we visited one of the largest zoos in America so a very hot day was spent here, Jade even managed to go in and touch some Stingrays and baby sharks which she seemed to enjoy a lot and gave her a new experience to remember of our time in the US......this was followed by an evening at the local race track where they hold Stock Car racing, Jade hadn't been to this before in America so again in turned out to be another good night out which everyone thoroughly enjoyed. A lot of cookouts were had aswel during our stay so we got to see many old friends and met plenty of new people too........but now it's come to the time where we have once again packed up our bags and have made ourselves ready for our next adventure to Asia.....Which neither of us can wait for, as i myself have never been before and Jade has been on a number of occasions so she is very excited to go and explore some of the places not yet visited. (Even though i don't think either of us are looking forward to the journey there which is a very long plane ride to Singapore, and i'm sure we shall both be suffering from jet lag very shortly!)

All in all, North Ameica has been an amazing journey, and definately an eye opener! But both of us have had a really good time and it is definately a place we will come back to in the future to visit some other places which we missed out this time around.

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Photos

This whole trip we have both had issues with people understanding our names!