Angela & Martin - On The Road

USA & Canada - A long overdue blog entry

21.08.2010 - 04.10.2010

Mount Rushmore

First of all, thanks to everyone for their congratulations on our engagement! Secondly, apologies for the delay with this blog entry, we got a bit caught up having fun and didn’t get a chance to write.

We left the Oregon coast and headed to Portland and then spent a few days camping by a lake just outside in Seattle. This was a great chance to explore Seattle and we took the opportunity to tour the Boeing factory. The tour was actually really cool (even though it was all about planes) as their manufacturing set up is vast and absolutely spectacular. We saw the new 787 Dreamliners coming off the production line. Martin bought a ‘Boeing’ T-Shirt so now people think he works for Boeing (a misunderstanding which he seems quite slow to correct).

After Seattle we finally arranged for me to be added to the van insurance so I took the helm as we headed north into Canada. Our first stop was Vancouver and from there we took the road to Jasper and on to Edmonton. There was an exciting reason for making the journey up to Edmonton as a talented friend of mine invited us to the launch of his first book. This was a great chance to catch up with an old friend and head out for some drinks in Edmonton. It was a rather heavy night and we met a few very interesting locals at one of Martin’s old hang outs.

After we recovered from the night out (this actually took two days and a very heavy dose of KFC in Red Deer) we crossed the US border and headed into Yellowstone National Park. This was a fantastic few days camping in an amazing location with Bison, Bears and the iconic Old Faithful. By the time we arrived here winter was on the way, one night the temperature hit -5 and it actually snowed! After so many months of extreme heat, walking through a snow storm to brush our teeth was a bit of a shock!

Snow in Yellowstone National Park

We then drove east to Mt Rushmore. It is an amazing attraction but it really is in the middle of nowhere. We seemed to spend days driving there across Wyoming and then the flat plains of South Dakota. If you are interested seeing this, take my advice and fly!

It was then time to make our way back towards Florida to sell the Roadtrek. We stopped for a few days in Atlanta to get some minor mechanical work done before driving to Florida. The mechanic gave us a Prius courtesy car which after driving the Roadtrek was like cruising around in a space ship. We took the chance to blast down to downtown Atlanta to do the CNN Headquarters tour and then cruised back to pick up our ready to roll Roadtrek.

Angela and Martin - CNN desk

We arrived in northern Florida and found a buyer for our Van and it was here that we sadly parted ways. The pain was eased for Martin by the fact that we drove back to Miami in a Dodge Charger (‘Dukes of Hazard‘ fans will understand how excited Martin was about this).

After making it to Miami we caught our flight to New York City where we had a fantastic few days. We really took the chance to live it up and celebrate our engagement in style. This absolutely killed the budget but the phrase ‘you only get engaged once’ allowed us to excuse some extravagance.

Angela and Martin.....engaged!