Saturday, October 18

We're back in the United States and we're loving it!
After 8 months of basics, we're indulging ourselves now in bad, but delicious (fast)food, went shopping in factory outlets and love to drive around in our own car instead of sitting in warm and smelling buses. We even take the car to go to the other side of the street to get a drive-through Starbucks coffee! But besides those luxuries, we're still (and again) amazed by the beautiful nature, even after everything we've seen in the last couple of months.

We first visited our friends Walt and Sharon at Lake Tahoe, north-east California, and had a great time. After that, we visited the old mining town Virginia City. For the US, this is history; the buildings are more than 100 years old and still original. By now, it's a tourist place filled with small museums, bars and souvenir shops.

Our original plan was to drive up to Yellowstone National Park because we hadn't been there yet. It would be a long 11-hour drive and even more back down to Las Vegas, but we wanted to try it. Then the weathernews reported a lot of snow and freezing temperatures up in Yellowstone and we quickly abondoned our plan. At Lake Tahoe we already had a bit of snow and below 0C degrees temperatures and we didn't have the right car for that weather.

So we decided to go south to Kings Canyon & Sequoia National Park, where the giant sequoia trees grow. It was a good choice: the weather was chilly but sunny, the nature amazing (we saw the biggest tree in the world) and we saw 5 bears up close!
After this park, we wanted to see the Grand Canyon once again. We'd seen it 5 years ago, but then the views were very unclear and hazy and the colours not very pretty. This time we had more luck; the weather was clear and the colours very nice.

Right now, we're in Page, Arizona, ready for a visit tomorrow to another beautiful canyon and then off to ... Las Vegas! We'll let you know when we've won our trip back and stay away for another 6 months :-))