In the last two weeks our roadtrip has finally begun. I should mention that since leaving Tockwogh I've been staying with three folk from camp, just chilling in Delaware.

The car was packed; we were ready to leave and doing a checklist: phone? Yes. Money? Yes. Passports? Ah. Turns out that Chris doesn't have a valid passport and so we spent the next couple of days figuring out if he could get one within a few days. We couldn't.

And then there were three. We were aiming for Canada and stopped off in Ithaca, NY as a kind of midway point. Ithaca is beautiful, full of gorges and beautiful scenery- miles away from what springs to mind when you think of 'New York.' In fact their slogan is 'Ithaca is gorges.' I'm still not sure how I feel about that pun. Our one night there soon turned into three- we found out that the campsite we were staying at didn't check who was there so only had to pay for one night.

Our campsite was within the Buttermilk Falls state park, a beautiful place with a load of trails and gorges. We managed to wile away our time just wandering around Ithaca and stopping in fast food restaurants to connect to the internet. We did a few of the trails at Buttermilk, which showed us just how unfit we had become since leaving camp. We climbed uphill for a good thirty minutes until we eventually came to a lake. The lake was pretty but nothing all that special. I've seen better lakes. Plus it was all overcast which is never a good look. On the way back down we took the 'gorge trail' and, you guessed it, it took us past a load of gorges. On our way down it began to rain. Really rain. And we met three guys who were jumping off of the path into this deep gorge. We were already wet and KP was the first to follow their lead. Once Johnny had gone too I didn't have an excuse not too, despite still not liking the look of the rocks jutting out of the edge. My main plan was to jump out far enough so as to miss the aforementioned rocks. However, I didn't think about what to do after I'd cleared the rocks- resulting in a rather spectacular bellyflop.

After Ithaca we headed north and stopped at the US/ Canada border at Niagara Falls. Now I didn't realise that the Niagara Falls was in both countries, so was quite excited to see it from America. As with most of these postcard places, I was a little underwhelmed by it. It looks smaller and a lot more dangerous than I imagined. After taking a whole load of pictures (Johnny is a photographer so we got a load of good 'uns) it was back to the car to cross the bridge and head over to Canada!