We finally arrived in North America on the 2nd of October. Our only plans were to meet up with Vanessa’s friends and family in the USA and Canada before heading home from Vancouver, but after almost two weeks it felt as if we’d arrived here too early and we were just waiting to go home.
The reality is that we arrived here with the wrong frame of mind.
Our moderate obsession with arriving in the USA at the time of a hugely polarising election and the possibility of experiencing any of the unpleasantness that might be associated with that, left us ill prepared for our visit. I must admit that we have had a very relaxing time both here in Virginia and the San Fernando Valley. Although we have travelled into Washington DC and have organised a trip into NYC for the weekend, it suddenly dawned upon us that we cannot just spend two whole months sitting around waiting to go home. What were we to do?
We decided that we needed to hire a car, at the very least to take us to Canada. Then we had to think about a route there. We had just flown from the West Coast of America to the East Coast, and now we had to make our way all the way back across to the East Coast and Vancouver.
The most sensible thing seemed to be to travel up into Eastern Canada and make our way back west across Canada, but the encroaching winter made us opt for a more southerly route. Although we ultimately wanted to get to Seattle to fly to Vancouver, we looked at a route to San Francisco first. That presented us with two options: the northerly Route 80 via Salt Lake City and a more southerly Route 40 through Oklahoma, Texas and Arizona. Even although it will be over a week before we will start out, the ‘Severe Weather’ warning on the northern route made us gravitate towards the south.
The first thing we noticed were all those familiar names: Nashville, Memphis, Oklahoma and Amarillo. Not that we had thought of visiting any of those places, but they certainly had a nice ring to them. Then there was the fact these were all part of the old Route 66. Not that we were looking to get any ‘kicks’ on this trip, not the kind the song talks about anyway. It was as we browsed further along the route into Arizona and California that we saw even more magical names and places along this route: the National Parks and Preserves - Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, Mojave, Death Valley, Sequoia & Kings Canyon, Redwood, Yosemite… Bloody hell! We hadn’t arrived in America too early - we had arrived too late!
We won’t get to visit all of those places, but we now have an adventure on our hands again, so down to work.
