From LA we started yet another road trip with the intention of visiting some western cities and checking out the national parks. Our first stop was Joshua Tree National Park where we spent two days attempting to hike just about the whole thing in the near 40°C blazing sun. The park actually had a surprisingly diverse range of landscapes ranging from desert expanses filled with Joshua Trees that looked like they came straight out of Dr. Suess books to huge rounde...

We arrived in Newport Beach at the end of a full day of travelling in two busses to get to LA, walking to the car hire office and then driving down the coast. When we arrived we met our new couch surfing hosts, Felix and Rey, and their two other couch surfers, in their unit a few minutes' walk from the beach. Felix and Rey are avid surfers (the kind where you actually catch waves, not couches) and health food fanatics who were great fun to hang out with. While ...

Well where do we start? We got to Vegas on Sonja's birthday and tried to fit as much into our first day as we could. Instantly we were thrown, after seven months of travel this was the first time we have been completely out of our usual habits and schedules and just went with the flow. Time passes at an unknown speed as you walk through casinos filled with flashing lights, free drinks, scantily clad dancers, drunken partiers, high stakes poker games and no window...

Washington DC, the capitol of the United States of America, was very good at being exactly that. The National Mall is a large, open, clean and neat area filled with huge monuments, memorials, museums and galleries to name a few. We couldn't possibly see everything in the short time we had and found we were quickly overwhelmed by the huge amount of information in the excellent, free Smithsonian Museums so we only managed to go through two of them, the National Air...

What hasn't already been said about New York? Truly multicultural, our impression is that it's a taste of the entire world in one place. Our accommodation was a hostel, just on the Brooklyn side of the Williamsburg bridge. We attempted to couch surf in but had no luck since there are few people willing to host, and those that do are generally inundated with requests. Having good proximity to Manhattan we spent our time seeing the famous sights over two and ...