Nearing the end....

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Hey Y'all,

Well its been some time since we last wrote and we have been up to lots, as always! Since leaving Phoenix, Arizona, we arrived in Wyoming to stay with family. Since we have been here we have travelled around and spent time in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Montanna and South Dakota. During this time we have been camping american style, played in a mud volleyball tournament, been to a baseball match, hiked in the rocky mountains, been to a water park, toured the Budweiser factory, went to a rodeo, attended a family reunion (that wasnt either of our families!), taken a 2000+ mile road trip, had a free outdoor pancake breakfast (after queueing for an hour), visited Yellowstone and seen a bear and went to Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse! So, its been a busy few weeks!

So, as you can tell we have kept up the pace and have been doing it USA style to the full recently! The rodeo we went to is here in Cheyenne, a.k.a. the wild west cowboy country and couldnt have been more typically american! We watched bull riding, steer roping and calf wrestling....yep, they actually chase a baby cow on horse back and leap off, and onto the steer to wrestle it to the ground! We also took in an american breakfast for the best price....free! However, we did deserve it as we woke up at 6am and queue'd around the blocks of downtown for nearly an hour to receive our yummy stack of pancakes, syrup and bacon!

Camping American style, as you can imagine did not involve any kind of tent, instead we rocked up to a huge lake in a luxury motorhome, complete with hot water, bathroom, kitchen and double beds and chilled out for the weekend! We water skiied, tube'd, swam in the lake and celebrated the 4th of July (when we Brits let the Americans have their independance!). It was all going smoothly until Alice took once again to the tube (a giant inflateable inner tube which is dragged behind the speedboat around the lake!) and she had a slightly too close for comfort run in with a fiberglass buoy when she hit it full frontal and left her mark by smashing a hole in the side!.....she lived to tube another day though!

We also went to another baseball match (and this time saw the home team win!!) which was fun, and I (Ally) played in a mud volleyball tournament where I represented the British in a down and dirty game of mud slinging that vaguely represented volleyball....we finished about 9th out of 22 so it was a decent effort! And were then rinsed down by the fire department once it was over!

In the spirit of doing all things American, we visited the Budweiser factory where we had a tour of the plant and then free beer tasting at the end! And as most of you will know, Im not much of a beer drinker but free is free, so I managed to take one (or three) for the team and again, represent for the Brits!

Then up to Yellowstone it was! We "camped" in an RV park and toured the National Park during the day! It is a beautiful place with steaming geysers all around, streams that look like they are smoking, multi coloured pools, bubbling mud pots, buffalo on the road, Elk and we even saw Yogi, a Grizzly bear too! We spent two days here taking it all in before moving on to South Dakota to see the presidents heads at Mount Rushmore. We took a route through Sturgis, home of the bikers rally which was just a few days away so we saw plenty of bearded, bellied, tattood bikers in leather chaps (yep they actually wear them!) on our travels!

We are now less than two weeks away from being home again and looking back it seems to have gone incredibly fast, but we are looking forward to the last couple of weeks of our trip as we will be heading towards Indianna, on to Toronto and back down to the Big Apple to fly home!

We will be in touch again shortly with our last chapter and hope you are all well and enjoying the summer back home!

Stay in touch and we look forward to hearing from you,
Ally and Alice xx

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