The experience of a lifetime: coast to coast in the US

Hello Everyone! Today, I’d like to tell you about the trip of a lifetime – which I did in August 2010 : COAST TO COAST in the USA. This trip was organized in cooperation with my travel mates, comparing our ideas and places we’d like to see – keeping it as close as possible to the original Route 66. “The Mother Road” is currently out of use for many of its parts, but we followed the highway which replaced it during the years. Whether possible, we drove through the original road. This trip was one month long, from New York to Los Angeles. Our flight landed in NYC on 31/7/2010, I can remember all my feelings since I had been desiring to do be there since a lot of time. In a first place, NY did not impress me a lot…. But when arrived to the central districts, I couldn’t help it look above – the skyscrapers are beautiful, but at the same time gave me a sense of claustrophobia! Having visited the main attractions in NYC (which almost everyone knows, but will be detailed in a dedicated post) – it is time for us to move to the next stop: Washington DC, to pick up our car and start the real journey! Indeed, Washington DC was added as a stop to pick up our car : since I was 24 then (lucky me!) I was not old enough to rent a car in the State of New York. From Washington DC, we started our journey to north, direction Niagara Falls and we faced the first inconvenience: we had a puncture! We replaced our tyre, and by the time this was done it was night. We drove up to Niagara Falls through Pennsylvania and met some Amish People on the road: this was interesting and even if it was late it was a great experience to see the place they live, with no electricity and with no cars around. After dinner in a local diner, we finally got to destination at night. Niagara Falls can be discovered from both US and Canadian sides. The Canadian one is the most scenic one, so decided to cross the border and catch the famous “Maid of the Mist” to explore the falls directly from the river. This was awesome! In the meanwhile, our car was resting at the BB’s parking, but we got another flat tyre and so we needed to buy two new ones. The day after and problems with the tyres solved, we headed to Chicago – to visit the city and finally start the famous Route 66. After some days in the elegant Chicago, we crossed Illinois and got to the “pulsating heart” of the United States. We crossed the country in 5 days, visiting St Louis, Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Santa Fe, the National Parks of Grand Canyon, Zion, Death Valley, Monument Valley. Once reached California, we headed to San Francisco and stayed there some days, to recover from the log days of travel by car. We walked across Golden Gate Bridge and the main districts, we had also a night-time guided tour to Alcatraz Penitentiary. Some days later, we drove south to San Diego for some days with the Ocean-view  Our journey ended in LA, many many pics and videos later…

This was my first post, dedicated to the most incredible and desired journey of my life (by now): since it’s been quite a long one, I’ll write most detailed posts about it – describing the best places visited during it.

See ya! Camilla