Hello!

The final leg of our American adventure has been really fun.

Upon entering the vast state of Texas, we headed south straight to Big Bend National Park. Here, in the impressive open wilderness, we embarked on a sunset horse ride with a real cowboy called "Cory". We had a great time riding through canyons, up and over steep rocky hills, and past old abandoned quicksilver mines now no more than ghost towns. Big Bend is an exceptionally dry place and it hasn't rained there for over three years. This made it incredibly hard to understand what was going through the person's head who decided to build a golf course outside one of the little towns just inside the park! Our cowboy wasn't impressed and described it's upkeep as an absurd waste of precious water. After the ride, Cory offered to show us his gun, then proceeded to rummage around in the back of his car for a few minutes before returning empty handed and claiming that his girlfriend must have "borrowed" it for the night.

After leaving big bend we headed north through Austin (which was a nightmare to drive around) and headed to Denton, a suburb of Dallas where we gave back our campervan. The next day we set out to explore the sprawling city of Dallas . After a couple of hours, a bus and a train later, we made it to the city centre. We wondered around the downtown area for a while and found it strangely quiet for such a big city. We headed to the sight where JFK was assassinated, now marked by a white "x" on the road, and saw the building where the shot was fired from. There was also a big memorial and fountain where we stopped and decided what to do next. It turns out that during the day there isn't that much to see or do in the centre of dallas and we ended up heading to uptown where we spent a couple of hours in a bar. The proprietor, "big Al" was very friendly and extremely intrigued by our travels, even though he struggled to distinguish Oman from Saudi Arabia. He gave us both free shots of tequila as a demonstration of Texas hospitality and invited us to visit his other bar in playa del Carmen, Mexico. That evening we met up for dinner with Olivia's friend Sarah, who happened to be visiting family in Dallas at the same time we were there. We had a lovely meal and it was great to catch up with events back home.

The next day we were up early to fly to Sarasota in Florida, where we had arranged to pick up a rental car. The good news was that, following our campervan experience, our car was a much more manageable, brand new, ford focus. The bad news was that the shysters at the rental company had added on a load of unseen extras to our bill which doubled the cost of the rental and which we only realised when we studied the receipt later.

We drove up to Orlando where we would be staying for the next few days at the hard rock hotel at universal studios, courtesy of Olivia's very generous uncle Andy. We met Andy, Lisa, and the two boys Alex and Eddie at lunchtime and, after a spot of lunch, spent an action packed afternoon at universal studios, enjoying rides such as the mummy returns, men in black and e.t. That evening we saw the Mardi gras parade which involved men dressed up in eccentric costumes on stilts and people on brightly decorated floats throwing coloured beads for people to catch. Despite not being entirely sure what was going on, we had a good time. On our second day we went to the second universal park, islands of adventure. Here, we spent the morning exploring the very realistic wizarding world of Harry potter, complete with a wand shop, pictures that came alive, and a number of rides. It was very well done and we had a fun morning. We spent the afternoon on some more rides; Jurassic park, spiderman and wet rafting, before returning to the hotel to spend a couple of hours enjoying the luxurious pool. Our final day in Orlando probably topped the lot. We went to aquatica waterpark and seaworld where we spent an amazing day on the exceptionally fun slides and attractions. We loved the rubber ring and racing mat slides and the rapids at aquatica and were awed by a killer whale show in the shamu stadium in seaworld. The day we left Orlando we said goodbye to Andy, Lisa and the boys over a breakfast of probably the biggest donuts in the world. Simon had the most, only a half, and felt quite queasy for the rest of the day as a consequence!

We headed south and spent the night in a small motel in homestead, which felt a million miles away from the hard rock hotel. Nevertheless, it was conveniently positioned on the edge of the Everglades which we set off to explore the next morning. The Everglades is a fantastic national park home to an abundance of exciting wildlife. During the 1 hour ranger led walk we went on, we saw turtles, lizards, a variety of birds and countless alligators. After lunch we went on a boat ride at the southern tip of the Everglades where we saw many, supposedly rare, American crocodiles, and lots of their babies too! As we disembarked the boat we were lucky enough to spot huge manatees happily floating in the marina. They are truly an impressive sight.

Finally, we drove into Miami and stayed close to the airport where we returned our hire car. Unfortunately, we then found out that our flight to Cancun had been changed and that we had to fly 3 hours out of the way to Mexico city first before catching a connecting flight back most of the way we came. The new arrangement would take us 8 hours to reach Cancun as opposed to the 2 hours originally slated. This, combined with the fact we had to wake up at 3am to get to the airport, meant we were not the happiest of people as we were leaving America.

Despite this negative ending, however, we really did have a fantastic time in the USA and hope to come back soon.