NE USA ... an Exploration of Fall

In no particular order, here are some of the things we learnt on our journey to the US. The US is expensive, especially when it comes to food. Admittedly the current state of the Australian dollar does not help, but even without that dining out is not for the faint-hearted. Americans are lovely. We encountered some truly lovely people on this trip. Helpful, friendly and welcoming. We have seen very little animosity, rather folks wanting to help us out … whether it be in providing directions, patiently explaining the menu or how to tackle an automated machine (especially the coffee machines). America is full of contrasts. This could be said of every country, but as we travelled across the US we saw different landscapes, different house styles, different foods, different opinions, different levels of well-being, … America is not scary. So many people asked me if we were worried about violence or guns … the answer was no, but of course were cautious and alert. We encountered nothing to fe...

Jacqui has done a phenomenal job on the blog for the past 21 days, so today I thought I would give her a well-earned break. Today … nothing happened. I mean NOTHING. Having left LA about 9.30pm on Tuesday night, flying through time zones, heading towards the International Date Line, my rough calculations suggest that our Wednesday 25 October lasted for less than 60 minutes. And then we crossed into Thursday. So not much to report as we slept through the entire day! Today’s tally … Photos 0 Steps 0 Km walked 0.00 AdLabs 0 Meals 0 Everything else 0

Today we finished our journey on the Southwest Chief. I woke early as people were disembarking the train at various stations (and some folks don’t know how to be quiet!) but sitting looking out the window at 5.00 am … with the moon shining across the darkness and then lights appearing as you pull into stations was pretty peaceful. I woke Ian so that we could go to breakfast as the dining car had a very short window for breakfast as they needed to clean down and pack up before the train arrived into LA. We enjoyed our final breakfast, then headed back to get organised to leave the train. Our train was only delayed by about 45 minutes so we arrived into LA with almost a full day ahead of us. We went to check our bags into storage for the day but the very delightful lady at the counter told us that because we had come in on a sleeper we could actually store our luggage in the Amtrak Lounge for free. So we headed up to the lounge, grabbed a free snack and a toilet stop and then went out ad...