On the road again...

My year in Canada was up. When I first started thinking about doing this whole Americas trip, I never really thought of Canada as being a real big part of my adventure, it was just a way for me to get to South America, to try living and working somewhere else and a good excuse to see the US too as I wanted to travel overland as much as possible from Canada to Latin America. I never even thought I'd spend a full year there... I think I was the last person to think I'd love it quite as much as I did (or do even!).

I reckon I must have travelled over 10,000 miles in that period, lived in two cities, stayed in 6 provinces and one territory, was enchanted by the ocean and the forests, walked up mountains, crash landed whilst skiing on mountains, gawped at the Northern Lights and absolutely adored the beauty, colour and randomness of its cities. Best of all, I made some amazing friends.

Again - more pictures and rambling from the rest of my time to come. Back to the point of this blog post tho'... I said farewell to dearest friends in Vancouver and hit the road again heading South.

A night at the Wise Lounge for beer and darts with friends got me to my first decision about the US bit of my journey. I would aim to get to New Orleans for Jazzfest which is on during the last weekend of April and first weekend of May.  I wanted to see if it was worth me getting a railpass as well as work out how much time I had and places I could see before getting to New Orleans so I made myself a spreadsheet... not really quite what I had in mind for my 'winging it' adventure but I reckon it was necessary.  I wanted to see bits of the US I hadn't seen before - more particularly, I wanted to go through the middle of it (despite being warned off the middle because "Americans there were crazier!" - That just made me want to go even more).  Anyway, I did buy a railpass and even figured out a route and I would book one leg at a time to allow for flexibility and a bit of 'winging' it ;o)

The route: Vancouver - Portland - San Francisco - Chicago - Detroit - St Louis - Memphis - New Orleans - Atlanta - Savannah - and then back West towards Texas before heading to Mexico at the end of May/beginning of June.

Because I love being on the road so much, whilst writing this post, I started thinking about songs I love about travelling and being on the road (or on tracks as I would be on trains quite a bit too).  Here's a few I've been listening to...

and this one I just found looking for the one above...