WOW...! Is the only word needed for the Big Apple, New York New York...amazing. We were no longer backpackers in this city, nope, we were flashpackers as we checked into our 5* Marriott Hotel in the middle of Times Square...for free!! Yep, on the rewards that dave won last year, we decided to treat ourselves on our last few nights travelling - even having the all day breakfast ($60) included as well! Check in did take a little longer as usual as the receptioni...

After a quick 1 night stop over in LA we drove into the Nevada desert, through hours of nothing we came over the hill and there in the distance was Las Vegas! We pulled up to the Luxor, which is a huge pyramid shaped hotel at the bottom of the strip. We dropped our bags in our room and made our way out to enjoy the next few days experiencing the highs and lows of Sin City! Las Vegas is big, flashy, classy, tacky, sleazy, rich and poor - and we loved it! Walking...

Not wanting to arrive in a huge city at night we set off on our 6 hour drive up to San Fran pretty hasty. It wasn't long as usual before Claire was dozing and it wasn't soon after that, when Dave woke Claire up to the flashing lights of a police car that had pulled him over for speeding! He was extremely lucky and didn't even get a ticket! We arrived at our motel but settled down for the night as we were up early to visit The Rock AKA Alcatraz. Dave being his ni...

At 4.30 am we got our wake up call on arriving to the airport we said our goodbyes to Claire and Reidy. After a 5 hour flight we landed in LA and went to pick up our hire car - the cheapest one we could find online. We were told that we could choose ANY car from section 9 which was as expected full of small old cars. We slowly started walking down the row of cars trying to pick out the least embarassing when at the end we saw something stand out. It was a brand ...