After almost two weeks at sea, our cruise ship pulled into Ft Lauderdale, Florida and we planted our feet firmly in the USA for the final 10 weeks of our trip. Following an overnight stay in sunny Ft Lauderdale we boarded a flight to Boston to begin in earnest the US leg of our trip.

Boston turned out to be the ideal first stop - a big city but not too big and hectic, and a place to catch up with friends old and new. The old friend was a girl named Rosie, whom we had met whilst she was studying in Australia a few years back. Rosie generously picked us up from the airport and became our self-appointed tour guide and chaperone during our stay in Boston. Rosie took us through the most historic parts of Boston - the Italian quarters of the city (Boston's North End and the city's oldest residential community), the Quincy Markets and Faneuil Hall. She even took us for a drive out to Salem - site of the (in)famous witch trials of 1692. Driving through Salem on a cold night, and so close to Halloween, gave the town an extra creepy vibe.

Speaking of Halloween, it was in Boston with Rosie and her friends that Jess and I experienced our first Halloween on US soil. Halloween is only recently starting to take off in Australia and our generation never really got to partake in the whole dressing up and trick or treating as kids. So we were sure to make up for missed opportunities this year. Jess dressed up as a lady bug and got a kick out of watching all the cute kiddies running around trick or treating local shops and houses. As for me, well I got to live out a nerd's ultimate fantasy: I dressed up as Deadpool. If somebody would have come to me as a pimply faced 12 year old who spent his weekends in comic book stores and told me that, as an adult I could dress up as Deadpool and my hot fiancé would be cool with it, well I would've assumed it was April 1st or somebody had just come back from the methadone clinic. And yet here I was at 29 years of age in a Deadpool mask with a hot ladybug under my arm! Life could be worse… As for Rosie, she did an awesome impression of Mary Poppins and received heaps of praise from punters at the local bar for her efforts.

As well as catching up with Rosie, we also caught up with our new friends, Walter and Linda. Remember them? If you're an avid reader of this blog, you'll know that Walter and Linda were the lovely Bostonian couple with whom we shared a train ride from Milan to Zurich a few weeks (and blogs) back. Walter and Linda took us out for dinner and spoiled us rotten. It was a real pleasure to spend more time with them and confirm everything we suspected about them from our train ride: that they were just some of the sweetest, most genuine people we had met. And they could more than match our ability to talk under water! I reckon there were no more than 10 breaths drawn that night as the conversation effortlessly flowed from one topic to another. It was as if we had known them for years. Walter and Linda became our American mum and dad in the absence of our real ones and made us feel like we were at home on the other side of the world.


Next stop: New York City.