Many the miles...

The trip continues! Let's just get right into it to try to avoid long updates like last time :) Day 9 of our road trip seems like a lifetime ago, as we left Las Vegas behind and made our way to Death Valley. Although Las Vegas was desert already as well, Death Valley brought it to another level. There was really nothing out there that seemed even remotely alive. Just arid rocks and salt lakes everywhere you looked. It was a strange kind of beautiful. Death Valley has the hottest and lowest place in America, it can get up to 56 degrees in the sun. Luckily when we were there it was 'only', pushing 40 degrees, cooling down to a 'nice' 30 degrees at night.

The contrast couldn't have been bigger with Mammoth Lakes though, where we spent the next night. The landscape was constantly changing on our way there, and at Mammoth Lakes we were surrounded by beautiful lakes and forest and mountains and apparently also plenty of bears. Not only that, it was also freezing at night at our campground. Literally freezing. We heard the next morning that it had gotten around -2 that night!

From Mammoth Lakes we drove only a short distance to Yosemite National Park, which would be our final national park of the trip. And what a park it was to finish that part of our trip! Much like Mammoth Lakes, Yosemite Park was filled with pretty lakes and gorgeous scenic lookouts over mountains and forest. Just driving through it was already awesome, let alone having two days to explore the park a bit more :) We were also still in bear country, making the two nights we spent in the park just a bit more exciting, because imagine we crossed paths with a live bear! Unfortunately we didn't get lucky enough to spot one, although we did see plenty of squirrels and deer. Maybe it was Rick's campfires that scared them away...

Next up was San Francisco, where we spent five nights. The trip in was quite interesting, as Rick had typed the address wrong in our TomTom, which we only realised as we were already led into downtown SF. So picture this: a big city with busy traffic, us not really knowing where we're going, and the roads as wide as our RV and not an inch more. Besides that, San Fran is known for its steep streets, which we experienced first hand too. I was glad I wasn't the one driving, haha. But eventually we made it to our RV park without a scratch, so it's all good :)

The next couple of days in and around SF were filled with sightseeing and being lazy at the campground pool. We walked through China town, walked up to the Coit tower, saw the aquarium at Pier 39, relaxed in Golden Gate park and hired bikes one day to bike up to the Golden Gate bridge. We unfortunately didn't make it across the bridge, as we had to catch a boat to Alcatraz, which was an interesting place to walk around. We also went to Berkeley one night to meet up with my cousin Matthijs, and we met up with him in the city another night, which was nice :) Also went into wine country just a bit north of SF one night, where we had such an awesome dinner at this cute little restaurant in Sonoma Valley. Lovely :) Apart from being a huge grumpy bum one of the days in San Francisco (cold weather, little sleep the night before and frustrating bike-rides got to me big time... I felt kind of sorry for the guys for having to put up with me that day!) I really loved the city. Very relaxed atmosphere and beautiful city, and I'm sure I could have stayed longer without getting bored :)

But we had to move on, because we had less than one week left to get back down to LA. So from San Francisco we got onto the famous Hwy 1, also known as the Pacific Coast Highway. The road took us past gorgeous lookouts over the pacific ocean and it was an awesome road to drive :) We stopped at several beaches for the night along the way, even two nights near Santa Barbara to walk around that city for a bit too. But the best spot where we stayed was by no doubt the place where we woke up this morning at Malibu beach. We chose a site with an ocean view, and what an ocean view it was. We could see dolphins swimming right from our RV! There was no better place to end our roadtrip :)

So this morning we drove the final few miles to the RV rental place to drop off our big beast after 23 days of loyal service to us, bringing the number of miles driven to a staggering total of 3175 miles, which is roughly equivalent to 5110 km. Crazy! Tomorrow afternoon we fly back to Amsterdam again after an amazing month of travelling through the US. It’s been so much fun road tripping with the boys and we’ve seen and done so much, you just had to be there yourself to really understand it all. I mean, does anyone know what I mean by ‘tukkurrdurr’ ? Exactly :) My love to all of you, one more time from the American continent!
xx Carine

PS. There's plenty new photos for those who haven't seen them yet on my facebook. They can be found on: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=68024&id=1069079796&l=6ad00554e4 and http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=81006&id=1069079796&l=2ca16c5a0c