conclusion

Here we are at the airplane going back to Sweden and Landvetter after an amazing month in the enormous USA.  We started off in the “starcity” of Los Angeles, where we picked up our housecar that we rented from a Swedish webpage, and what can we say… Los Angeles was great. The best of Los Angeles to me was that you got to see the real city of LA and not the one you read about in the newspapers about Hollywood and all the superstars living there in luxury. You actually got to see some normal people with normal lifes and you really realized that they are not that different from us in the rest of the world even though media shows us them from a certain side. We think that the best thing about LA was to take pictures of ourselves and the Hollywoodsign. It’s something we always have wanted and it will be just a memory for life.

One thing we really thought about is that you hear a lot that everyone in USA is fat and they eat all this greasy food and fastfood but it’s not what many people actually eat. And sure they might be the “fattest” nation in the world but they are also one of the biggest, so why shouldn’t it be more fat people there? As far as we know we didn’t see an insane amount of fat people in USA compared to home in Sweden and I think that the feeling we get that USA is so fat and everything is from our Hamburger dressing which is called “American hamburger dressing” and that most of the fastfood companies are from USA. But many Americans are not fat and they eat pretty much the same things as we do. But of course they don’t eat the same thing in the north as they do in the south because they get really influenced from the surrounding place for example in the south they eat a bit more South American than in the north.

But enough of the food and back to the trip!

So after we’ve were in LA we headed to THE city of USA, viva Las Vegas in our awesome housecar that was really small. So in Las Vegas we just did what all the other tourists do, of course gamble at the casinos and we actually stayed a night at a hotel, the MGM grand. But the best thing about Las Vegas was the helicopter night tour we took. It was just amazing to fly high in the air and see Las Vegas at night, truly a remarkable sight and this is something we really recommend to all of you that are thinking of going to the Las Vegas because it will be a memory for life to see all the hotels and all the amazing building and everything in the city of party! Oh, and we almost forgot… We saw an amazing show at the MGM grand of David Copperfield and it was a really good show, so that as well is something we recommend.

After all the partying in Vegas it was time to go to the city of Albuquerque in New Mexico and as we all can hear it will be kind of Spanish in Albuquerque since it’s in New Mexico and Mexico is kind of Spanish :D When we arrived to Albuquerque we noticed that it didn’t look like very Spanish but that it were much more South Americans living here so there were many Mexican restaurants, shops etc. and you noticed that they spoke a lot more Spanish or “South Americanish” here than in the other places we’ve been to.

Following up was Dallas in the state of Texas, and since we’re going to Texas we all thought that we would got to see some cool cowboys but unfortunately we didn’t see a single one L But we quickly noticed that football was the thing in Dallas and we later found out that the stadium to the Dallas Cowboys wasn’t in Dallas but in Arlington just outside. We got to talk to the coach of the Cowboys (don’t ask how) and he said that the Cowboys is the world’s second biggest sports franchise just after Manchester United and that the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders is really famous in USA and that they not only cheer at the games but they travel around in the USA and give shows to people, one of them is the US Army. So they have things to do at all time, the cheerleaders.

Now we headed first to the Mississippi river and then to the city of New Orleans. At the Mississippi river we just stopped by and took some pictures, or at least we tried until I got pushed into the river and the camera got ruined (as we found out later) so the coast guard had to chase Linus down the river and then drag him up, which wasn’t so very fun. Then in the city of New Orleans, at first when we decided to go here we thought that it would be cool but it wasn’t. The city in our eyes were kind of dead, so we only stayed here for a night and took a tour through the city and we have to say that we are impressed of how they have rebuilt the city since the terrible storm a couple of years ago. So we at least found one good thing about New Orleans, apart from the beach then of course J

The final destination on our trip was not far away, which was Miami in Florida. Here I got to say that we were kind of lucky because when we came to Miami the Spring Break was everywhere! So there were parties and concerts all over the beaches lots of students everywhere and just felt that this would be a great stay. So the first few days we partied not only in Miami but we went to the city of Fort Lauderdale not far away and went to a concert on the beach there and it was nice. So after some Spring Break partying it was time to return the car and then was the plan to head back home. But we figured that we had quite a lot of money left and none of us had any work to go to so we thought, why not take a boat all the way to New York? So we went to the harbor and found this guy who needed someone to drive a really nice boat to his brother in New York and seemed like the perfect match. So the next day we were on a boat driving to New York! At the boat Farnam caught a dolphin and we just chilled and had a great time relaxing after all the partying in New York.

We arrived to New York harbor and then we just called the dude’s brother and headed downtown. In New York we just did what every normal tourist would do, visit all the famous places like the Empire state building, statue of Liberty, Central Park and of course we went out shopping with the little money we had left. And apart from the weather and all because obviously it’s not in the same place as Sweden. It felt a bit newer than here in Gothenburg, and I’m not talking about Beverly Hills or any “luxuryplace” now, just the ordinary USA. They pretty much talk about the same things as us, dresses the same way as us and worry about the same things as us. Of course they speak English and we Swedish but but :D But the USA is sooooo freaking big. Like you can fit like tons of Gothenburgs inside New York and the buildings are so tall, here in Sweden we rarely see building that tall but here they are everywhere! It feels quite overwhelming to be here in one of the world’s most powerful nations and I have to say that the big buildings makes it feel powerful!

And now we are almost at home! So to sum it up, we had really fun and we got to see almost the whole USA, shared some good and some bad times (mostly good). What more can we say, we recommend going to a road trip or any point of long trip during your life. It’s really fun and it’s something you will remember forever. So for the last time, 

over and out from Linus, Farnam and H to the ugo, Hugo

Finally New York

After a great time in miami we headed for the last state on our trip, it was New York!

In New York we wanted to buy souveneirs, go to the top of empire state building, take a walk in central park and place a candle at groud zero. We also wanted to do some shopping. However we first had to wait until the boat reached land.

At 10am we walked of the boat at the New York harbour and we was very hungry since we didn´t had any food on the boat. So the first thing we did after that we gave back the keeys to the strange guy´s brother was to take the buss to chinatown and buy a lot of cheap nudles from a chinese wagon. After a nice meal we parked our car on the nearest parking lot and we went for a walk around chinatown. It was a nice place with a lot of small shops selling to and so on. Farnam suddenly said: "We can buy tee to our grandmothers!!". It was a good idea so we bought some chinese tee. After the calm walk the clock was about 14am and we wanted to visit ground zero before dinner so we called: "TAXI" and instantly a yellow cab stopped just infront of us. That was very cool. When we arrived to ground zero we bought a candle in the nearest shop we could find. We looked a ground zero that now was a construction site, placed our candle and even took a silent minute thinking about the victims :(

Ground Zero

After we had visited ground zero we were kind of sad so we decided to go to the cinema watch a movie to cheer us up a little.Since we´re so cool we watched a movie called No Strings Attached!! It was really funny and hadn´t even had premier in Sweden yet. After the movie the clock was 8pm so we went to a motel, ate some dinner, took a shower and went out to see the night life of New York. The party at the night club got out of control and when we woke up next morning Linus was married...

Farnam and I think that Linus marrige problems isn´t intresting so we won´t mention it anymore.

The next morning we ate a classic American breakfast (pannkakes whit maple syrup) and then we went out for a walk in the central park. The park was bigger than we expected whit a lot of peoples jogging and walking dogs. It was beautiful weather so we took of our shirts and lay to rest under a nice cherry tree, we even ate some cherrys :) After our visit at the Central Park we took a cab to the Empire state building and took the elevator to the top. The view from the top of Empire state building is beyond imagination! We saw the whole city with all the scyscrapers and the view was amazing! I think we stood there on the top of the building for like 30minutes just admiring the view. We didn´t ate there thought since it was too expensive. When we got down to street again we found a kentucky fried chicken resturant which lead to that we two minutes later had a bucket of chicken each. One hour after we bought the food we were finally done and was just on our way to move out from the restaurant. However that didn´t happen... We were so filled up so we had to wait for one more hour until we finally could get up from the table.

Central Park

From empire state building!

We thought it was enought for one day so we went back to the same motel as the day before and went to bed. The next morning we had the clock set on 8am and we were going out shopping. We didn´t had very much money left but we still had enought to buy souvenirs and some clothes :) We all three bought a deck each with motivs of different places in the US. I also bought a pair of fancy socks, Linus bought a rose to his wife and Farnam bought a miniature of a flagpole with the american flagg. After our little shopping tour we decided that we wanted to visit the statue of liberity. We think it´s a really cool statue since it so big and we thought it was a very nice view from the crown. To get to the crown you got to walk up all the 354steps wich is very hard if you had ate like americans for the last month ;) As you might know the statue was a gift from the France as a sign of international friendship however it´s today a sign for freedom and democracy. After the visit of the statue of liberty and we wanted to see how it looked alike from the ocean. So we took the buss to a ferry called Staten Island Ferry wich is a ferry that is free to take and that´s giving you a good view of the statue of liberity and the harbours of New York.

The Statue of Liberity

After have the boat ride we all three got this very strong feeling that the chapter of our lives called the US was about to end. We think that it´s complete now and its time to stop writing. So this is our final goodbye from the three guys that had a wonderful time in the US.

Ps. Canada is nice, but USA is better!

we are on a boat

Miami and the Beach 

As we headed to the city andthe state we had  looked forward to the most. You could  easy tell that the trip so far had been exhausting for us and we didn't have the same enthusiasm about Miami we had in the beginning of the trip. We had our trip planned the way so when we arrived to Miami the spring break was at its highest level which we had looked forward a lot towards but now we didn't have the same feeling anymore. Of course is it nice to be in Miami on the spring break, the biggest party week in the whole USA with people from all around the USA just partying all day long for a whole week! The city of Miami as we non-American’s think about it with the long south beach or Miami beach is actually 2 cities, the city of Miami and the city of Miami Beach which we thought was kind of strange since the most of the cities in USA is really big and then someone decided to make this little island just outside Miami to a city of it own. We thought about Kalmar and Öland but our Swedish cities are nothing compared to the American cities in size so it was just a bit weird, but it's nothing you think about when being there, it's not like that you can't go to Miami Beach because it is a new city. Anyways, the main party area during the spring break is at the Miami Beach, Fort Lauderdale in the northern parts of Miami and in Key West which is another city in Florida also on an island a pretty long way out in the ocean.   

We thought about just find a spot on the South Beach where we saw some partying and just join in and park the car on the Beach pretty much. I mean, it is actually spring break (WIHO)! But we don't think we got the power to party everyday so some day or days we are just going to chill in the car or maybe drive and check something out in the city or just simple hang on the Beach tanning and bathing in the awesome Miami.   

So we arrived to the outskirts of Miami a sunny afternoon in the end of April after what felt like a really long drive from New Orleans so today we all agreed on just hang on the Beach, play some "beach games" and then buy food at a supermarket and maybe later tonight go out and find some party :P. So after a couple of hours down on the Beach and some nice food in our stomachs we decided to drive to Fort Lauderdale and party some. We quickly noticed a party going on at the Beach so we drove there and had a really nice time with music, dance and a lot of other people!  

The next day we woke up inside the car, surprisingly enough, at the Beach, it was one of those mornings when everything was perfect. If you stepped out of the car you could feel the sand between your toes and smell the salty sea 50 meters away.  Which gave such a satisfaction :D I mean, we are in Miami and we can stay here as long as we want (kind of) and do whatever we feel like. But anyways we figured we didn’t want to hang here in Fort Lauderdale during the day so we packed our stuff together and drove back to Miami. We stopped at a nice little restaurant who served some typical Florida food. Well, you can’t say that anything is typical for Miami and Florida because everything here is influenced by South America (Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico etc.) so I guess you can say we had lunch at a Latin place and of course was it really goooood.  

When we got close to Miami Farnam told us he recognized this place from somewhere else, me and Hugge kind of thought the same thing. Then it struck us, the city of Miami is very similar to the city of GTA: Vice City which everyone (!) have played. So it wasn’t hard to like find stuff in Miami or at least as hard as in the other cities around USA since we sort of knew this city so to speak.  

After the lunch we decided to park the car and then take a walk around the city. After a while we walked into the Miami museum of Science and we thought it looked a bit like Universeum here in Sweden and since we are “naturare” of course we took a tour in there. And it turned out to be really cool, a lot bigger than Universeum but with kind of the same things to do but just much more. It was really nice to look in their universe room where it felt like you actually was on a spaceflight! After the really fun and actually learning time at the museum we felt for some beach and we just walked to it, since the beach always is close here in Miami. 

At the evening we went to a concert at a beach (surpriseeee) with like a thousand other people and it was this awesome party all night long! We made friends with three other swedes which we had company with the other day. After the awesome concert we went, with our new friends, to a nightclub and just continued to party all night. But when we decided to go we didn't know where we parked the car so our friends, Margaretha, Kurt and Filippa said that we could stay at their hotelroom for the night. So we stayed at their hotelroom over the night, had some really great breakfast and then we went down to the beach where the concert were and started to look for our car. We couldn't find it anywhere so we went to the policestation and asked them if they had seen our car. The fat officer said that the car was in their possesion  since it was parked wrong and if we wanted it back we had to pay 100 dollars. Looking into our wallet we felt bad, because we didn'thave very much money left and we still had thoughts about renting a boat and go all the way to New york. But we had to return the housecar to the rentingstore so we had to pay the 100 dollars. After this we said goodbye to our beloved swedes and took the car to the rentingstore where we returned it, at the same time we asked them if they knew anyone who could rent us a boat. They didn't knew but we decided to go to the harbor and see if we could find someone who could rent us a boat to a fair price.  

We asked in the boatstores around there but noone was willing to rent us a boat that we could drive to New York. When we felt like we wouldn't find anything a man suddenly appear. He asked us if we would like to rent a boat and we said yes. But we want to drive it all the way to the big apple, no problem he said, i got contacts everywhere and on top of that io can offer you a really nice price. You know, i got this really big boat, and my brother in New York wants to have it for a few days so if I get 300 dollars you can take it all the way to New York and just drop it off at my brother's house. We of course said yes, we would love to take your boat to your brother. 

So the next day we were on a boat.  

We had all our things and everything on the boat and set course to New York along the east coast. Estimated travel time, 3 days 2 hours 11 minutes.  

Over and out from the guys on the boat

Why you shouldn´t take a bath in the Mississippi River!

After a nice and interesting time in Texas we got out on the road again and we were heading for Mississippi. In Mississippi we only wanted to make a quick stop and we thought that it would be nice to see the famous Mississippi river. The river starts at a lake called Lake Itasca and is 3730 kilometers long. The river, just like many other rivers, is sometimes flooded even though it´s usually prevented. The trip to Mississippi went smooth and easy and we arrived to the Mississippi River Bridge at noon. When we came to the bride we were a little bit amazed over the big construction so we just had to stop and take a picture. We found a parking next to the end of the bridge so we parked our car and began to look for a nice place to take a picture. When we had come down to the water Linus pulled up his camera and took a picture. Farnam thought it would be funny to shove Linus down into the river so that’s what he did. Linus just fell down to the river whit camera and everything. However it wasn´t really as funny as Farnam thought it would be since it was very much stream at this place of the river and Linus hadn´t any chance to get to land again. We ran after Linus that disappeared down the river and at the same time I dialed 911. I told the emergency services what was going on and they said that they would go out whit two rescue boats to first pick me and Farnam up so that we could show the way to Linus. After just two minutes we heard the sound of boat engines and two rescue boats showed up upstream. I and Farnam jumped in to a boat each and we went at top speed down the river. I was really worried about Linus!!! However we saw Linus floating in the water after just five minutes and he seemed to have it kind of nice in the water splashing around. After we had picked up Linus we was driven back to our housecar we just bought a hot dog at the hot dog stand on the parking and then we chilled for the rest of the day at our housecar.

That’s all from us here at the Mississippi river! Peace out!

Some pictures from our adventure and the river:

Coast Guard on their way home :) Cool guns and cool fast boat!

Just after Linus fell into the river

The bridge in daylight

Visiting New Orleans

Our visit to New Orleans

After our visit to wet visit in Mississippi, we took our housecar and drove to New Orleans. New Orleans is a beautiful city near the Mississippi river. It is a pretty warm city with hot, humid summers and mild winters. We arrived in New Orleans early in the morning and drove to a restaurant named Antoine’s. Antoine’s is a classical restaurant located in the French quarter of New Orleans. The restaurant serves Louisiana Creole cuisine which is mixed French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, African and Asian cuisine. When we got into the restaurant, we ordered a nice breakfast called Grits and grillades which is made of egg and bacon and sometimes is pork, beef and vegetables added to it. With the breakfast we drank coffee.

Antoine’s restaurant was founded in 1840 by Antoine Alciatore and had been owned by his family ever since then. The restaurant is known for that it have been visited by prominent presidents and by Pope John Paul II.

Some of Antoine’s restaurant was destroyed after the Hurricane Katrina disaster but was later repaired.

When we went out of the restaurant, we decided that this wasn't the city for us and we just felt that we wanted to go to Miami instead of hanging around here. So we simply went to Miami.

Picture of the resturant

goodbye from us to you

dallas cowboys cheerleaders! :D

DALLAS TEXAS

After a rather quick, nice and fun time in New Mexico, meeting a bear and everything, we are now going to the ”cowboy state” of Texas! We were really excited to see some cowboys on our way to the city of Dallas, but I guess you don’t just see them by the road because we didn’t see any at all L.

After have been driving through Texas for a few hours we haven’t seen anything special, just desert and some small villages along the way. As far as we have seen this state looks like nothing exciting at all. On top of this boring-looking state our GPS had no battery time left when we were about an hour from Dallas. So we drove past the big city of Dallas (don’t ask how…) and ended up in Arlington just outside Dallas. We didn’t knew where we were so we stopped at a 7eleven and asked for directions to central Dallas. The man told us that Dallas was straight west from here, he also told us that if we wanted to see the famous Dallas Cowboys, the football team of Dallas, we didn’t need to go to Dallas since they had their Arena here in Arlington. We asked him when the next game is and where the arena is so we can drive there and buy some tickets. The game was in two days so we had plenty of time to find a place to park our car over the nights, take a good look on downtown Dallas and maybe just rest some. We decided to not go to central Dallas today so we drove around in Arlington in search for a nice place to stay over the night. It didn’t look bright for us so we stopped at a local supermarket and bought some food before continuing our search. It felt like days when we drove around in Arlington constantly looking for a place to park the goddamn car. We found one after what felt like an eternity.

The next day we decided to leave our perfect spot and go to central Dallas! Hugo wanted to go to the Elm Street because this was the place former president John F. Kennedy was murdered 1963. We quickly found this really big street in the middle of Dallas. Hugo kind of convinced us to go to the Sixth Floor Museum just nearby the street at the Dealey Plaza. It’s a museum about the JFK murder in -63. The museum didn’t have any guided tours but they had personal you could ask if you wondered anything special. I can tell you that this is truly a place to visit if you are going to Dallas because there is so much knowledge in here not just about the assassination itself but about JFK himself and other things, but mainly about JFK.

So after an informative and entertaining time at the museum it was time for lunch. We didn’t have anything special just some premade sandwiches and we bought ourselves a drink each. We still didn’t know what to do this afternoon so we decided to go back to the car and maybe drive out in the desert and camp for the night. So that night we slept beneath the stars out in the open (inside the car). We got to see a really nice view of Dallas at night from there.

The next day it was back to business! We read in the local newspaper there was going to be a Wind Festival today at the Trinity River, this is free and made by the city of Dallas. We didn’t know what to expect so we went there and it was a kite festival. There were some really cool kites and a lot of families with their children there. It was a really great time because you always had a great time talking to the Americans or just watching some off the spectacular show kites, it was really nice food there aswell!

The next day we got up early cause it was a Sunday game and it started 3.15 pm so we had to make our way to the stadium and find a parking spot for the car. Linus told us that Dallas Cowboys are the second most valuable sports franchise in the world, valued at about 1.5 billion dollars. Only Manchester United is worth more at 1.8 billion dollars. Dallas Cowboys also have a very famous cheerleaders squad called none the less than Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders :P We found out that they had some like fitness/training videos on youtube.com that you could take a look at and get some nice training the cheerleading way! The cheerleading squads all around USA often perform at charity events and not only the footballgames of their team. They are popular and respected in USA and we kind of thought and began to wonder why we don’t have any kind of cheerleading back home in Sweden.

Oh, well. Maybe we will in a near future or maybe we don’t.

Over and out from the guys in Dallas.

the show in Vegas!!!

Some tricks we got to see at the show, we forgot about them back then :( but here they come!