As always when we leave a country it is a little sad and after spending six mounths touring around North America it was very sad. We had met so many great people and made so many friends, it was starting to feel like home!

Just a couple of stats before I go on; This year we visited 24 states of the US and three provences of Canada, giving us a total of 35 states and 7 provences. We clocked up 40,000Km this year, giving us a total of nearly 53,000Km in North America. This year we dropped the bike three times, once in sand in a campground, once because I failed to deploy the side stand and once we were blown over! Number of bad people we met and number of times we felt in danger, ZERO.

America is a lot of things, but it is also not like we are lead to believe, like the news stories or movies would have us believe. We found Americans to be very friendly, courtious, helpful and generous. On the road though, like in many countries, we didn't feel so safe, some states were worse than others. We thouroughly enjoyed the scenery and landscapes in North America, some of it was truly breath taking and we saw so much wildlife that was unique too, it was fantastic.

For us, what we didn't like was the built up areas, there are just so many people in the US and for us these large numbers of people and the associated issues that go along with large populations is not what we like to see. Talking to some of the people we met, it looks as if the US is trying hard to lessen these issues, while for others we spoke to, it isn't happening fast enough and for others, there are no issues.

I need to add in a note here that isn't related to North America, it is about our blogs: While in California I found out that people have been subscribing to our blog so that they know when we have updated it. This only works when I update via a PC, while we are on the road I use our iPad, so we are sorry about that and there is little we can do about it.

All things going well, our bike will arrive in Auckland at the end of October and we will arrive shortly after to spend two month touring New Zealand, which we are really looking forward to. A highlight will come in late December when our daughter and son-in-law will join us along with our granddaughter for two weeks over Christmas.