USA

After Tampa and Busch Gardens we flew to Las Vegas and it was paradise! The strip is amazing and glitzy and baking hot! It was around 100 degrees for our whole stay there but there was so much to do I didn't really get a chance to sun bathe!

We took at tour out the Grand Canyon which rocked and we drove through the desert to get there and it was so huge and dry (obvious I know but I’d never really seen anything like it)! It is a rather spectacular hole in the ground and we took a stupid amount of pictures (about 200 I think - thank god for digital cameras)! It was a really long day though...took about 17 hours round trip and we had to be up a 5.30am and I am really NOT a morning person...AND my ipod went crazy half way there so I had nothing to listen to either! (Thankfully my ipod is now fixed and I'm happy again)!

We got the nerve up to play a table game on the second or third night...I can't remember which. We got $30 in chips and played Craps (the one with the dice) - Thank god for A-Level statistics as I was actually able to understand the odds and with Andrew as the "hot shooter" (he got to throw the dice - and he actually threw them at the casino employee and on the floor before he got them on the table but the boy did good)! We came away from the table with $68 which was a rather healthy profit! It was such a total rush and I can see how these guys were spending all night at the table! I can't wait to go back again when we actually have a disposable income to waste!!

We found a brilliant way of getting free food from one of the casino chains by signing up to their players cards so we didn't pay for any food the entire time we were out there and by some crazy stroke of luck, we also won $150 from free draws in the free food casinos too! (I won $125 of that I'd like to point out)! All in all we walked away from Vegas about $20 in profit (not including accommodation unfortunately) so we felt it was well worth the visit! We are so desperate to go back and I think that's the first thing I'll be saving up for when we get home!

We did the Greyhound thang overnight (17hours on a coach) to San Francisco via LA bus station (not recommended - smelled like pee and was full of homeless people). We got to San Fran at about 9am completely exhausted and dying for a shower and had to walk through the gauntlet of bums to get to our hotel. At the time we assumed that it was just that street that may have been a place that the homeless hung out but as it turned out, the whole of San Francisco is infected.

It was probably my least favourite city as everywhere we went were accosted by homeless people which was a bit scary but mainly really sad. A lot were pretty truthful - they asked if we could spare money to by drugs and booze - so I sort of respected that but mainly they were just really pitiful. One of the crazier ones followed us down the street shouting that he hated us "white mother f****rs" - Nice huh?

Chinatown was good - it's the largest Chinese settlement outside of Asia according to the tour brochures - and we made it there on our first night and had an incredible meal! Two huge plates of noodles and beef in black bean sauce and two beers for $20 (about £12)! It was amazing - I haven't been that stuffed in a long time!

We stopped in an Irish bar on the way back to the hotel and didn't realise it was getting dark and then we accidentally walked back a slightly dodgy way- I get the feeling we were sort of lucky not to have been mugged or stabbed! After that we decided to be in before dark!

For the next few days we bought a City Pass which gives you access to loads of things for $50 - over two days we went to 2 art galleries, an aquarium, a science museum and took a cruise under the Golden Gate bridge and around Alcatraz. Plus we walked the whole of the bridge and back again - something like 1.2 miles each way (I can't remember but I needed to wee the whole way over so it seemed longer)! I'm really glad we did that before seeing xmen3 or I probably wouldn't have set foot on it!

It was a really lovely city in the daytime if you could avoid the bums - it's the hilliest city I've ever been to! Having lived in Norwich for so long, hills were a bit of a shock to the system! We got so much exercise walking up and down the hills all the time, it was brilliant!

We meant to leave on the Tuesday but we found out that the Arctic Monkeys supported by We Are Scientists were playing Wednesday night and decided that if we could buy cheap tickets on eBay we would stay another night. As luck would have it we managed to pick up 2 tickets at the last second for 99 cents (that's about 52p!) so we stayed!!
The gig was amazing! We Are Scientists rocked and the Monkeys were brilliant (it was slightly like being back in HMV again listening to those same albums on repeat but I survived it)!

We left for LA the next morning and we're still here now for another 6 hours or so! We've been staying in a wicked little retro hostel which is stupid cheap! It's $50 a night for both of us and we have a private room, a private bathroom and our own kitchen! Its got a good atmosphere too - there was a courtyard party on Saturday night and we got a tad wasted and chatted to a couple of really cool people - one of whom we may meet up with in Melbourne in a month or so!

We've done quite a bit here in Hollywood (that's where we are - not in LA cos it's too scary) We saw Xmen 3 in Graumanns Chinese theatre where they have all the film premieres and has the hand and footprints outside it, we took a tour of the stars homes and saw the outside of Tom Cruises pad and Nic Cages cars and stuff - it wasn't brilliant cos we couldn't take any descent photos through the tinted windows The consolation was seeing a real life star though! We were on a walking tour of Hollywood Blvd and checking out film locations and learning the history when our tour guide says - "and there's a star now. Hello sir" - and who turns round and says hello to us but Alfred Molina!!! Doc Oc said hello to us!! I almost swooned! It was so cool!!

We also took a tour of the Kodak theatre where they hold the Oscars and got to ride in the lift the winners take when they have their Oscars and hang out in the VIP room which was cool too! I wanna work there!

To top it all off, last night we were invited to a test screening at Sony Studios! We watched a film called All The King's Men starring Sean Penn, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, James Gandolphni, Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Hopkins! It SUCKED! and we had to fill out comment cards afterwards (they didn't want to interview us as we weren't American so apparently our opinion doesn't count)! We all know how harsh I am so I wrote all over the paper all the things that were wrong with the film! It was so much fun! In the "would you recommend this film" box I wrote only if I hated the person and in the "was there anything you didn't understand" box I asked why so many good actors could make such a crummy film! I even filled up every available space where there were no questions with my own comments! I think it's safe to say I probably wont be welcomed back to Sony Studios again! But it was SO MUCH FUN!!! It would have been perfect if we could have found Adam Sandler’s car (we walked past Happy Madison’s production HQ) and we would have keyed it!! That would have been a perfect night!

Anyway, that brings us up to now and we're just waiting to get the bus to the airport to jet off to Fiji for a week...how tough, huh?!

I wasn't actually that far off the mark when I joked about them not having the Internet in the States. Of course they do, but in most places, its stupidly expensive (e.g. $15 per hour in Orlando) or in a really incovenvient place (such as the two mile walk in Tampa!). Before we left the UK we'd managed to book most of our hotels and travel arrangements for the majority of our stay in the US. This however did not include San Francisco and Los Angeles - we figured we'd easily find internet cafes to do it as we went along. Due to this lack of access however, we found ourselves scrambling around for accommodation just days before we were due to arrive. Cutting it far too close with San Francisco, and not being able to check the reviews out on the Net prior to our stay, we thought enough was enough and bought a computer. Practically every hotel we'd stayed in previously offered free Internet access if you had your own laptop, so we guessed it would be the same for most of the rest of the world..maybe. We hope anyway.. but at just under $600, it was a pretty good buy

Anyway, we will attempt to make up for the massive backlog that has now materialised due to our previous lack of access, but it still may seem a bit rushed.. afterall there is around 4 weeks of stuff to catch up on! For now, I'll just list the places we've been since our last update, so you might find entries for them soon!

CHICAGO (3 days)
ORLANDO (13 days)
TAMPA (5 days)
LAS VEGAS (+ Grand Canyon) (5 days)
SAN FRANCISCO (5 days)
HOLLYWOOD (LOS ANGELES) (7 days)

Oh, we'll also bung up a load of photos soon too!

Andy.

(This is a postdated update of the time we were in Chicago at the beginning of May - K)

I apologise that the beginning of this entry is all about one journey but we think you will all sympathise (or possible die laughing) at all the craziness we had to endure on this one!

It all began innocently enough at 6.15 am on the morning of the 1st of May (yes, I am capable of getting up that early mum!)... We braved the Toronto streetcar fully loaded with our backpacks to the point where it was hit and miss whether we'd actually make it through the streets car door. Thanking God for the American/Canadian grid system, we counted the blocks, which unfortunately acted like sheep and made me sleepy again, until we arrived at the bus station. Like all bus stations we have endured all over the North American continent, the whole building had a distinctive musk that smelled like the bathroom of Andrew's early student house (ah, Lubbock Close - interesting side note, every theme park attraction that was trying to smell faux-damp like ET at Universal, also smelled like Lubbock. Go figure!).

Boarding the Greyhound was simple enough, it was on time and actually surprizingly comfortable so we were able to catch a little shut eye before getting off back in Niagara Falls again. I know it seems a little odd to backtrack on ourselves but with all their resources and money the US only has ONE train route which connects the East coast to Chicago and there was no direct route from Canada so it sort of made sense at the time. Plus as it was overnight we saved ourselves a nights accomodation and Chicago is very expensive!

Getting off the Greyhound we consulted the map of Niagara I had rather intelligently kept out and saw there was a bridge to cross into America only a few mins walk away so we set of. It was a cool day but anyone with experience of heavy backpacks knows you get sweaty quickly so by the time we reached the bridge we were exhausted. We were slightly confused to see a huge gate across the road and as we tried to walk towards it we were curtly informed that this bridge was for goverment workers only and we would have to go another couple of miles up the road to use another one. Feeling a tad dejected and even more soggy, we treked back towards the centre on Niagara to find the "Rainbow Bridge". Now, just so you aren't mislead in any way, the Rainbow Bridge is not actually a rainbow, it's not even painted like a rainbow, it's a huge, grey, concrete bridge - I only mention this so if you ever come here you aren't disappointed the way I was.

Phase 3 begins - we walk across the border, geting the customary grunts from the guards and little else and start to look for public transport to the train station. Perhaps we expected too much having lived in places were cars are not an essential part of daily life but the fact that no one in the tourist office, the Hard Rock Cafe or any hotels even knew that their town HAD a train station was disconcerting to say the least. In the end we asked a hotel receptionist to get us a cab and spent 20mins with an odd Indian man asking us what it's like to have a King in England(!)

Arriving at the station which is basically just a track with a shack next to it, we were glad to be rid of our heavy packs temporarily but our glee was short lived (this is getting tragic, isn't it). A freight train had derailed between Niagara and the next train station and while it was ok to drive over, US law says the train isn't allowed to drive over it with passengers. We weren't too worried really, they had put on quite nice buses which we got on and waited for the train to drop of the passengers who had been on the train from an earlier stop. W waited...and waited...and waited. The train had come in to the stop but because it had come from Canada, US customs had to inspect everyone and there must have been some non-Causicans on there because it took them an hour and a half!

Eventually we were underway and this bus dropped us at Buffalo where we had to wait yet another hour for our train to catch up with us, by this time 3hours delayed. We weren't too fussed as we had a 7hour gap between trains at the next stop so we enjoyed the sunshine on the platform and listened to our ipods!

Once we got on this train we were ushered to 1st class which was rather nice while all the people who had been searched at Niagara had to stay in their original coach seats - the Americans (rather mouthy as a nation) did not seem to like this and I did feel sorry for the poor conductors! We exited the train at Rochester and left our bags there in seach of food (it had been a long time since breakfast!)

If you ever come to Rochester in up state New York you might want to bring a packed lunch...there were no restaurants or even fast food anywhere! We had to search for half an hour and eventually discovered a slightly skanky Burger King inside a bus terminal. We settled in for the long haul (we had 5 hours to kill and they do unlimited drink refills) when a giant of a man who could only have been called Bubba, tells us they're about to close and we have to leave! So we dejectedly traipsed back to the station and played poker for many, many hours once we ran out our ipod batteries watching 24 (season 3)!

Finally (you're all thinking - I know I ramble), we made it to the train which would take us non-stop-over-night-sleep-in-your-seat straight to Chicago! It was delayed by an hour when it arrived and was almost full but we were lucky enough to get the last two seats together. I think I would have freaked if I'd have had to sleep next to a stranger (Andrew is bad enough!). The seats where quite big and I started to think this would be an ok way to spend the night...until we started moving! Oh dear God, it was the bumpiest journey ever! The route is mainly used for freight and I guess the tracks must take a pounding so we practically bounced half way across America! Add to that a soundtrack of babies crying, conductors shouting stops and two old ladies taking about Jesus and it was possibly the most awful way to spend a night ever! We managed about 2 hours of broken sleep all night! But we made it to the Windy City and now all we needed to do was locate our hotel!

Once again I feel the need to word-up the grid system. This is the only place in the world where even I can't seem to get hopelessly lost! It only took us about 30mins to located the Howard Johnson we were staying in and the receptionist took pity on the two tierd, dishevelled and lets face it, slightly pongy kids in front of her and let us check in early (it was 10.30am local time and we'd been up for 29hours at that point)! At that point we both gave in! We showered (after it took me about ten mins to peel my sweaty socks off!) and crashed until mid afternoon!

For anyone thinking of visiting Chicago we must share a little secret with you...one word...PORTILLOS! Is it fast food? Is it a restaurant? Who knows! It's a big building which is decorated like a Hard Rock Cafe but lower budget and it does cheap but oh-so-good food! You can go with fresh sandwiches, burgers or what we had...fresh pasta! About $8 gets you a massive bowl plus garlic bread and a drink - just what you need after such a long trip. I couldn't even finish mine it was that huge! It's a chain but seemingly only in Illinois which we were so gutted by! If you come here you have to try it!

We decided just to wander round and explore for the day as we were still a bit train lagged... we went to a park which had some nice fountains and some strange sculptures and then visited a bar on the way back to the hotel meeting a lovely man called Rick who worked for Fedex and seemed slightly intoxicated but was a very nice man all the same. Unlike most Americans, he had actually travelled around to some of the places we were going to so we swapped stories and got some great tips from him! The bar also had Sam Adams seasonal on tap so we had a pint and then went back to the hojo and crashed once again!

Day 2 and now we get more cultural! Due to crazy time spent travelling and being wiped out on our first day we had to pack as much into this one day as humanly possible but we actually found there wasn't that much we wanted to do.

We started at the Nave Pier with hot chocolate and cookies in McDonalds - we braved eating it outside and, believe it or not, it was a tad breezy! The pier gives you some beautiful views back onto the city and out on to lake Michigan and we decided (or rather Andrew decided and I got dragged along) to see it all from a huge ferris wheel (yes, I am scared of heights). Despite my hanging on to the seat the entire time, the views were very pretty and it was quite a unique experience!

We spent some of the day posting things home to England as we were becoming bogged down with ticket stubs and leaflets and fridge magnets (we appear to have started a collection) and then we gave in to our instincts and went off to find a cinema!

Laughing was in order so we saw Silent Hill (for mum and dad's benefit, that's a trashy horror film). The film was quite rubbish but what made it the American man in front of us who kept yelling things at the screen! His favourite phrase whenever things were getting tough for the leading lady was "Hell NO!" (Just like Will Smith in every one of his movies!) It was hilarious! Anyone who worked with me in UCI knows I usually throw people out for so much as sneezing but this guy really made the whole film enjoyable! To top of a wonderful film experience, our large combo was unlimited refills! Take that Odeon! We love AMCs!

We had intended to eat at the Rainforest Cafe but due to stuffing ourselves silly on popcorn we decided not to. So when the munchies called at about 10pm we trundled over to Portillos again where Andrew got a burger but I needed ice cream so I made him come to Maccy Ds too. You know when you really want something particular...I had that...I was craving a whippy icecream in a cone, but when I asked for one the Mexican woman behind the till couldn't understand what I wanted. So she called over her Mexican supervisor who was equally unschooled in English and despite the fact that we could SEE the cones and we were POINTING to the cones I did not get a cone that night Instead I had to settle for chicken nuggets and they didn't even give me any ketchup - Damn McDonalds!

So that was Chicago...any questions?

Internet access isn't as easy to get as you might think in the States. Or if it is there - usually in a hotel lobby - it is stupidly expensive. $9.95 for 15 minutes was the going rate in one hotel! But, thanks to everyone's favourite Greek and his line of practical, affordable, gaudily-coloured ventures, we are currently sat in an Easy Internet Cafe by Time Square in New York. At $5 for 4 straight hours, you really can't go wrong!

Anyway, we do have a crazy backlog of blogging to catch up on. We'll try and add more detailed descriptions of each of the places we've been to over the last week and a half, but just in case we don't get the chance, I'll sum up our activities as briefly as possible...given this will probably turn into a 5000 word epic, but I'll try my best!

We left a dull and rainy Heathrow at approximately 4.15pm on April 11th on Virgin Atlantic. The flight was fantastic! The in-flight entertainment was incredible. We had the choice of about 50 movies, 20 or 30 TV shows, a load of full CD albums, plus network gaming! You could start the movies when you wanted, pause, fast-forward or whatever you wanted. Same with the TV and the audio. We watched Good Night, and Good Luck which was great, and Derailed, which was turd. Kate didn't vomit once during the flight, even during the worse bits of dialogue by Jennifer Aniston.

When we landed, our first encounter with any US lifeforms was with the customs sniffer-dog thrusting its nose toward my crotch. The American authorities shouted at us with all the aplome you would expect and we were ever so slightly worried that we had arrived in some kind of boot camp but that was quickly over with and we set off to see if our bags had been lost in trasit or some such thing. (Bear in mind we have spent the whole of the last two years watching American Airline religiously in ITV2 and it seemed fair to assume that something went wrong on everybody's flight!) In fact we only waited about twenty minutes or so for our bags after which we had to make the dreaded walk to customs to see if they would actually let us stay...

Kate was a little paranoid having, through no fault of her own, watched the end of the Terminal the previos week (thanks Mum!) and was panicing that perhaps England had been bombed into little pieces during our flight and we would have to make a life in the airport with Mr Hanks - this was not a pleasing prospect as Kate rather hates him! This said, customs was stupidly easy to walk through and we needn't have wasted sweat over it, the nice man at the counter just scanned our fingers (it seemed odd to me too) and we were on our way into the USA!

We eventually managed to find out from a Mexican sounding voice who answered our hotels phone, that we could get a free shuttle out to the HoJo (that's street for Howard Johnson) we were staying at so we waited, watching all the people with more money than us getting into Hilton and Marriott hotel shuttles until eventually we boarded a semi-working minivan which would take us out to New Jersey.

Newark was uneventful - we only stayed the night as our flight was a late night and our journey into Pennsylvania was a slightly long one to be attempting at 9pm! The next day we tried to collect our Amtrak passes, which were rather essential to the whole "travelling" thing and which we had been assured we could get at any manned station, only it turns out that wasn't entirely true...instead we ended up getting a bus to the airport, a monorail to the station (where they didn't have the right paper to give us our tickets or something), thn the monorail back to the station, then a bus to New Jersey , then Penn Station where they did have paper (hooray!)and we had to get the train through where we were intially! All without getting lost too!

We need to rush along a little now as Kate is rambling too much and I can't keep writing this much so we are going to have summerise from days 2 - 14 and fill in the gaps when we can! I'm going to stick a load of bullet points of things we've seen and done, and maybe elaborate when we get the time...

PENNSYLVANIA
- Imposed ourselves on my over generous aunt and uncle (Lynne and Michael) in Collegeville, PA...about 45mins out of Phildelphia.
- Visited Boulder Field in a National Park... was amazing!
- Saw a real US college campus at Bloomsberg University, and even saw an authentic frat-house!
- Lynne drove us out into the sticks to see lots of geniune Amish people in a place called Intercourse (where the film Witness with Harrison Ford was filmed!) We chased them with cameras...it was fun!
- Did midnight bowling with my cousins Emma and Greg plus the crazy locals, and got ID'd buying beer (they even sent a spy out to watch us drink because we had minors with us!)
- Went to Philadelphia and had a Phili-Cheese Steak (Well I hate cheese, so Kate did...I just had it without the cheese)
- Saw Valley Forge, which is basically a place where the yanks were trained to kill British in some war we had a while back, when we decided we didn't want their country afterall..
- Visited the King of Prussia Mall (Yeah, we thought the name was silly too!) Apparently its the second largest mall in the States.
- To Lynne & Michael: Thanks again for having us... you are far too generous! We had a wonderful time and a great introduction to the American way of life!

WASHINGTON DC
- Ate pizza and drank beer on our first night. Getting ID'd was already getting tiresome. And Kate wasn't too impressed by the Mexican who served her Guiness in the 'Irish' 'pub' round the corner from our hotel.
- Saw all of the awesome monuments and constantly amused ourselves by renaming the Washington Monument (that big pointy one) the Clinton Monument out of respect for Futurama.
- Saw the FBI Building as featured in many X-files cuts.
- Went in the Ford Theater (sic) where Lincoln got shot.
- Attempted the walk around the outside of the Pentagon, but got accosted by armed guards half way around side 4, who forced us to retrace our steps in the burning heat (around 30C!)
- Got sunburnt!

BOSTON
- Spent 8 hours on a train getting there...longer than our trans-Atlantic flight!
- Got screwed around at the hotel...our booking didn't exist. Luckily the nice guys at the Midtown Hotel let us stay the night while they investigated - turns out you should never use Unpackaged Holidays (.com) unless you like companys who change your bookings to other hotels without telling you! A small amount of almost-shouting sorted it out, and we moved ourselves to another hotel round the corner.
- Walked the Freedom Trail, ending at Bunker Hill - a nice monument to killing the British...except we actually won the battle...but they Americans claimed a 'moral victory'. Yeah right.
- Saw Scary Movie 4 - our first US movie-theater experience! Was fun.
- Circled the outside of Fenway Park and visited their over-priced and over-merchandised gift shop. You can get Boston Redsox golf balls, lamps, piggy banks and ornate rugs to name a few silly articles.
- Did the Sam Adams brewery tour. Everyone must try this beer as it rocks! Its an American beer that doesn't taste like wee, and should be tried purely for this novelty value. We got free samples but had to 'continue our sampling' at an Irish pub down the road...this one even had a real drunken Irishman in it who even said the word
'bejesus'. Fab.

NEW YORK

(Kate is taking over the writing for a second as Andrew's fingers are dropping off! And before you think it....not from leprosy)

- Took us 4hrs on the train to get to New York from Boston and it rained from the moment we got off the train until our second day here! And not piddly little April showers...full on drenching rain!
- Walked around Time Square at night, finding our mecca (a huge Virgin Megastore!) and eating Japanese fast food (odd, I know)!
- We visited the UN and had a guided tour. Thought about making amusing terrorist related comments but realised we'd probably be deported which might not be a good start.
- Saw the Chrysler building (tall) & Grand Central station (pretty)
- Met up with Andrew's friend Mark who lives in New York and went out for drinks in Greenwich Village (where the ponces live) - Mark knew a cheap bar there...$7.50 for 3 pints! that's less than 5 quid..IN NEW YORK!
-Wanted to go up Empire State building but crappy weather meant zero visability so we decided to do it next time (!)
- Took a boat to Liberty and Ellis Islands...saw the Statue of Liberty and where they vetted immigrants until 1934 or some such time. Weather cleared up in time for about 5 good pics and then got cloudy again!
- Saw Wall Street and the financial district
- Visited Ground Zero which was surprisingly moving (even for me!)
- Met Andrew's uncle Michael who took us out for a Mexican meal in Brooklyn and showed us the amazing view of Manhattan from over the river! It was truly breathtaking.
- Wrote this weblog.

Sorry for the lack of pictures but we've not managed to find somewhere to upload them! Hopefully they'll follow soon!

Bye for now,

K&A