Question: Why is America broke and a vast proprtion of its population overweight (Claude & Zack excluded)?
Answer: Because walking is not a word in the American vocabulary...or so we have found to date! In fact it has been replaces quite convieniently with 'Taxi'!

Anyway, since our last blog update in LA we were joined by Chris's parents for a fantastic 10 days travelling down the west coast to San Diego, which was a beautiful city. We then drove up to Vegas for a good fews days gambling (no major losses, but no major wins either boo!). We did a road trip to teh Hoover Dam which was interesting and brought back GCSE Geography...not a pleasant thought! Whilst in Vegas we all decided to go and see a vegas show so with the hundreds on offer, we eventually settled on Cirque Du Soleil - Mystere. Now these shows are very expensive, however we were offered 4 show tickets for a bargainess price if we attended a timeshare presentation that would "only last 2 hours"....we agreed and after 4 hours we eventually left the timeshare presentation (without being pressured into purchase unlike so many...). We had managed to point out some pretty huge flaws with their apparently incredible offers and had managed to negotiate the price from $39,000 to $5,800 - Amazing! Anyway after this painful experience we happily got our tickets to teh show and had a great evening at the circus which was worth every penny.

At the end of February we left Vegas and the two us flew to Miami where we spent 4 days on South beach. We had chosen this area for its sunny warm climate but our luck has it that we arrived in the coldest winter/ Spring they have had in about 50 years and so we wandered along the beach in thermals! Nice! Not quite the image of Florida we had in mind! Our stay in Miami was far from ideal as we stayed in dorm accommodation and the first night was like a night from teh asylum! We had 6 other guys/animals in the room with us, is stank of BO and one of the guys repeatedly spoke to himself in two different voices in the shower! One guy snored like a demented pig the entire night and another one insisted on peeing with the bathroom door open all the time which our bunk convieniently faced! Nice! That was the end of dorms stays for us - NEVER again! eww.

Next stop along our east coast route was Orlando - here we visited Downtown Disney and then hit the Universal Theme parks which were immense! We had great fun on the rollercoastes including their new Rockit Rollercoaster where you got to choose your own personal music as you went round on the road...this was however, drowned out by Jues high pitched screaming/ whaling as we wurled upside down ever few seconds! Ah and here is where our rant begins... after finsihing in the park, we asked one of teh Universal workers whether it was easy to walk to our hotel on International drive from here. His response was "yes, but you can walk to California- it will take at least 2 hours, you should get a taxi!"...we decided we would ignore him and attempt to walk it and 20 minutes later we arrived at our hotel! Now this is not an isolated event, and it appears that Americans do not like to walk very far at all, that is not if there is a taxi rank in a 3 mile radius!

AFter Orlando we got the American greyhound to Savannah - an interesting experience as it appears Greyhound USA is not at all like Greyhound Australia in that rather than being filled with backpackers all doing the same thing it is instead full of very poor people and convicts...literally... we watched the State Prison Vans drop the men off and wave them onto our bus all dressed in matching cream trousers and white shirts with a pillow case with their worldly goods in... yikes!

Savannah was gorgeous and we had a fantastic time staying with my Granny Claude here. She showed us all the sites and we visited Charleston and did a trolley tour of down town Savannah which was really pretty.

We are now on our last stage of our travels and have quick stops left in Niagara, Toronto, Boston and New York and will be returning home to see you all on the 31st March! Cant believe a year has gone so quickly!

Hope you have all enjoyed reading our blog and we cant wait to catch up with everyone when we are home.

xx