Can't believe our journey is almost over. We head to New York on Tuesday for 10 days and then we fly home. It feels like everything has gone so quickly and it truly has been a great trip experiencing some of what America has to offer has been awesome. It is a huge place and really although we have travelled over 8,000 kilometres in our car we have still only ventured into the three states of California, Arizona & Nevada. There is still so much more to see.
Since our last journal entry we have been to a major motor cross event in Sacramento with around 20,000+ people attending. The sport is absolutely huge over here. It was a 4 day event and we spent a good 2 days there all day in the hot sun but it was cool to see such a big event - Jase was in heaven. I managed to get my photo taken with the best motor cross riders in the world which was pretty cool. That was my highlight of the motor cross. We did spend 4 days in Sacramento however it is such a huge city we did not manage to do much there. One of the main freeways had been closed down for 6 weeks so it made traffic a bit of a nightmare into the downtown area so we tried to stay away from that. Sacramento did not feel as safe as some of the other places we had travelled to but Jase managed to find some great motor bike stores and continued his shopping streak. Each time he comes back from the shops he has a huge smile on his face and a lot of bags. We still have the added joy of finding out how much we are going to get stung for excess baggage on the way home.............On Monday we are off to get 2 more suitcases for the journey home and just for the record that makes it 4 for Jase and 2 for me! Still can't believe he has out shopped me!
After the motor cross we headed to Lake Tahoe for a couple of days. Lake Tahoe is a beautiful place, with lots of character buildings and just beautiful scenery. We really relaxed there but unfortunately did not get to see it in all it's glory as the best times to visit there are with the snow where you spend most of your time skiing or snowboarding or full on summer with all the watersports. We did manage to get around the town on both the Nevada and California side, visit the casinos, and view some spectacular views of the lake and it was a beautiful place.
Next we headed to Santa Cruz - a small beachy town which also has lots of character with an amusement park on the waterfront and a very cute main street, lot's of surfers and just very relaxed. We took a day trip out to Gilroy and did some shopping and again just really chilled out. This shopping and travelling in the car all day can really tire you out. Not sure how I will cope with a full days work when I return home, I might need an afternoon nap! At the moment we are staying in Santa Clara which has great weather and is not far from San Francisco.
We need to be in San Francisco on Monday to return our little rental car and we will stay there for the night and then fly out the next morning to New York. (It is about a 6 hour flight) New York's times are different yet again being 3 hours behind California. Our trip home starts on Friday 20th of June at about 5am where we head to NY airport for a 6 hour flight back to San Francisco. We arrive there about lunchtime and then we need to pick up our other luggage from storage and we fly out of San Francisco to NZ at about 9 pm that night and get to Auckland at about 5am Sunday morning NZ time......Going to be a rough day but will be great to get home and see our families and friends and our cat!
Will load some more photos soon!
Rosie & Jase
Did you check out what the overweight baggage charges are? By the time you fly to NYC and back again, and then to NZ, they might be much more than just shipping your stuff!
Cheers,
Gene