This is the End

Welcome to the conclusion. The beginning is sadly way at the bottom, due to the terrible formatting blogger insists on. It is a format that works well for essays and typical blogs, with the most relevant at top, but is not ideal for a continuous story. Nevertheless, this is the format they insist on so here ends the blog. I must first take this moment to congratulate myself, having not done a dissertation this is the longest thing I have ever written, and I never really believed I would finish it. The journey finished for me on July 4th, American Independence Day. And just over a year later the blog is finished, just as momentous an occasion.

Of course, plenty more happened after Ed left, I was in California until September. There was a world cup final, a tour of California, a visit to vineyards, to a Budweiser factory, shooting in the mountains, local San Diego bars with 75 cent beer, two days of door to door marketing, another car crash and the eventual return to the UK. However, this blog was simply about the journey across the country. On July 4th 2010, I returned the rental car early in the morning, sold my uncle's parking spaces for an exorbitant fee to revellers with cars and watched the fireworks.

The trip certainly had it's problems. The breakdown in Texas, the England vs USA football match, Ed's shoes, car crashes, all that crazy stuff you know happened in Las Vegas and plenty more. However, it was still an amazing trip and I hope I can make a similar journey in the future. Hopefully, with less time on the bus. So I shall end by saying thank you to the people that offered us hospitality and friendship, thank you to these United States of America for having this beautiful and diverse country and finally, a thank you to the Greyhound Bus. While far from perfect, the bus offered us the only affordable way across these lands, we could not have done it without you.

California Here We Come

After Vegas I drove us to Orange County. I was much more confident behind the wheel after eight hours driving experience the previous day. Although there was still a dangerous incident while leaving Las Vegas. Not seeing the first set of lights, I had slowed down to stop the car at a light that had just turned red. I had run a yellow that I hadn't seen. This would have been all right if I had kept going, but I stopped. In the middle of an intersection. Luckily, the car behind me had seen the problem and left enough space for me to reverse back into an almost legal position. I reversed and sat there calmly waiting for the light to change, when a car pulled up beside us. He called through the window "Hey buddy, you know you're still in reverse?" Other than that near calamity, the trip to O.C. was without incident.

My notes end around here so the rest of the OC trip will be summarised. We didn't do anything particularly exciting over our 4 days here, we went to Laguna Beach, watched some films, watched more World Cup action, met Ed's family friends, had some theological discussions from our host who has, over a lifetime, gone from atheism to Hinduism to Christianity. I was too scared to drive into LA, so Ed left by shuttle for LAX and flew back to England.

Of course, before he left we had to visit Disneyland. A tiring day indeed. At the end of the day we went through a tunnel filled with dolls with the song "it's a small world after all" playing. I found it horrifying. The song was supposed to be about inclusiveness, we are all in this world together. But most of the puppets were white, and the few black ones were semi naked dolls living amongst the doll lions. The Asian ones were just the white dolls in Asian dress. But to it's credit, there is a large number of good looking women roaming around the lands of Disney, something for everyone.