Hello everyone,

Well, another day, another time zone. For people who are missing the phone calls, we've tried for the last two days in a row to call home. Although the 'cell' phone was slow to take off over here it's now king and as a result Chicago has no public payphones left, well we found one in an hour of searching but it didn't work.

Payphones were going to form part of a new regular feature 'What's wrong with America' but I've been told my blogs focus on the negative so I'll save them for a book deal. For those who were interested the list would include; Greyhound buses, driving on the wrong side of the road, no payphones, people not looking you in the eye when they speak to you, a refusal to admit roundabouts are a good idea no matter how complicated traffic lights get, an inability to say please or thank you, L.A., assuming that everyone has a car, lack of coins bigger than a quarter, Republicans and well . . public transport in general.

On the plus side, we've really got into Baseball (Steph's starting to second guess the umpires), our Trek America trip was amazing, Chicago and San Francisco are really cool cities and we're in Canada now!

Chicago was a really nice city. There's a huge complex of parks right in the centre of town with lots of puclic art works (not the poncy kind), fountains and a large concert stage where the City Orchestra hold open rehersals everyday during the summer. The food even got better, well we haven't found any salad yet but the burgers got better. Our hostel was around the corner from 'Patio Beef', a real old school burger joint that is regularly voted the best in Chicago, as one newspaper review they had on the wall put it "Patio Beef is a Cathederal to Chicago's 4 food groups; Bread, Beef, Cheese and Potato".

We caught the over night bus to Toronto, well 4pm to 5am, and we're now in our 11th and last country. It's nice to see the Queen on the money again and it'll be even nicer to spend her on some breakfast in a second. Just so people know the plan for the last two weeks is Toronto, Niagra, Buffalo, Boston, Washington and NYC.

Just a quick note on the photos before I go. We normally spend a bit of time sifting through the photos so we only post ones people might be interested in and not our entire collection. With the Trek photos we've just dumped the entire collection on because it was a big group and we're all sharing photos. Rather than deciding which ones people might want to take we just uploaded the lot so it might take a while to look through them!

Off to explore Toronto now, we're both looking forward very much to coming home, will phone asap.

Lots of Love

Greg and Steph
xxxxxx