It's all downhill (and uphill) from here...

Another month has passed since the last update... and we're ever more sure that we made the right decision to curtail the trip! We had thought that maybe if we changed our plans we'd find ourselves regretting it later, and wish we hadn't, but that's definitely not the case. This is going to be the last post from the USA, though not the last one of the trip, so it ought to be quite a reflective one... it's been an amazing six months and we've seen so much of this country (and a fair bit of Canada too!) but it has felt a lot like this:

(Actually it was fun watching that and trying to identify parts of it - some of which we definitely did drive ourselves, other parts just look familiar)

We have certainly become expert at driving on American roads - we know what to expect, how to interpret the signs and lines - I even know when it's my turn to go at a four-way stop! Our rental cars have been impressive... we've done over 18,500 miles, 15,000 of which have been in the US, most of which was done in Hyundais, which never skipped a beat whether hammering down interstates, winding through desert highways or climbing over high mountain passes. When we were planning the trip we considered the option of buying a second-hand car but rightly decided against it - there's absolutely no way we would have such comfort and reliability! There have been plenty of roads on which a breakdown would have been deeply unpleasant, verging on actually dangerous, so we've been very grateful for our cars humming smoothly along giving us no problems! (I feel safe enough saying this without tempting fate as we've only got to get to LA from the coast - famous last words?)

Picking up where I left off, we'd got back to Seattle after an unpleasant ferry ride but we were met by friends of Kate's family who whisked us off to leisurely American retirement life - a lovely, spacious home on the shore of a lake, where we sat on the deck with a drink in our hand observing the boats cruising up and down. We visited Mt Rainier only to get stormed on while up on the shoulder of the mountain, leading to a rather unnerving descent in pouring rain! From there we drove to the Olympic Peninsula (passing through the dismal home town of Kurt Cobain) where we stayed for a few days in a very relaxed beachside resort, doing very little except jigsaws. I did manage to stir myself to drive up the coast to the more photogenic parts of the National Park at sunset, which will hopefully lead to some good photos being posted (for reference, I'm not going to tweak and upload my photos until I get back to my more capable desktop machine - this tablet's really not up to it!)

While there we had found and booked our Colorado cabin - we'd decided that it had been our favourite state, particularly the Boulder area, and we wanted to spend our month 'off' there. Airbnb came up trumps with a very cosy little cabin in the (actually rather exclusive) hills above the town of Golden. We now had a few days to get there, so we zoomed down and across Washington state, dropping in on Mt St Helens, before a brief flirtation with Oregon (avoiding contamination with the hipster infestation in Portland) and southern Idaho, before dropping down into Utah and a few days in Park City - somewhere I'd been before but in the winter, for snowboarding. In summer it was much quieter, with the bonus that large ski-hotel suites were available at very reasonable rates! They are a very outdoorsy population at any time of year so I booked a guided mountain bike ride while I was there, to check out their impressive trail network. It almost did me in - just not used to the altitude and having spent many months mostly sat down... fortunately my guide was very understanding.

From there it was a quick skip across to Colorado, and I had innocently chosen the route to Estes Park and then Golden that passed through Rocky Mountain National Park, thinking the scenery would be nice. It was, but there was the small problem (from Kate's perspective, and she was driving) that it was Trail Ridge Road, the highest paved continuous road in the US... and boy was it high. And twisty. And mostly without any guard rails. This is not the kind of road that Kate likes to drive, and in the end I had to swap seats with her at the top and drive us down the other side - not that she likes being my passenger on roads like this either! Still, it was an experience...

What was a much more Kate-approved experience was our time in the cabin. We basically spent four weeks doing very little - we'd get up, go for a run, have some lunch, read, write, have some dinner and a drink or two, then rinse and repeat! The running was interesting - the cabin was at 7000ft so to begin with we were limited to one-minute runs followed by one-minute walks for our total half an hour, but by the end we were running for five minutes at a time and barely needed the walks (except after the uphill segments, which were killers regardless...) We explored all the nearby roads, which wound prettily through the hills, dotted with expensive 'log-cabin style' mansions, and we watched the local wildlife, mostly elk, which would come right up to our windows. Later on I spotted a bobcat on one of our longer walks. Setting our own hours and cooking and eating our own food was the best - no more having to get up for motel breakfasts, trying to track down a diner for lunch or resigning ourselves to we've-given-up-trying junk food dinners.

Lookout Mountain - a foothill of the Rockies proper - is also where Buffalo Bill chose to be buried, and we could see why. It's a lovely place with a fantastic view out over the plains, Denver now sprawled underneath it, and with mountains marching off north and south. One (early) morning I drove back up to Rocky Mountain NP (though not over Trail Ridge again) to attempt to catch the dawn light - only to miss it by about 20 minutes! Beautiful drive though. We also met up with Kate's author friend again and her husband, and traded Sunday lunches, which was really nice - we'll definitely go back there.

Even after near a month we weren't bored of it, and we were very reluctant to leave... but leave we did, heading down through southern Colorado, admiring the gorgeous yellow-gold leaves on the aspens, dropping in on Great Sand Dunes National Park for another dawn raid for which I contrived to leave my proper camera at the hotel and had to use my little pocket one! There were two other comical incidents on the way there, driving on the longest stretch of straight road we'd ever seen - 42 miles dead straight (we counted). The first one was when a woman driver caught up with us and, despite the most perfect overtaking conditions you could imagine (miles of visibility, no oncoming traffic) refused to pass and instead tailgated us, even flashing her lights to encourage us to speed up, before eventually passing only when Kate refused to accelerate and slowed right down. Bizarre, yet not all that surprising in our experience of American driving! The second one was, on reaching the end of the straight section, a bend in the road that was literally only a couple of degrees was highlighted with warning arrows - in case drivers, numbed by three quarters of an hour of unsteering monotony, would fail to spot the tiny deviation and plough slowly off the edge of the road! This would also not have been terribly surprising.

Finally we were heading back to the coast, with our seventh and last crossing of the Continental Divide to negotiate before we dropped in on Mesa Verde for a quick visit, and another observation on American behaviour when a couple began debating if the effort required to walk half a mile on a paved path to see one of the famous ruined pueblos was too much. To be fair, we were at high altitude again and not everyone had been training for four weeks! After that we were retracing our steps through northern Arizona and southern Utah, which was a strange experience seeing the same places again when we hadn't expected to visit them again.

Another strange experience was our first brush with the law - Kate failed to come to a complete halt at a stop sign (in her defence, the road was empty of traffic and visibility was good in all directions) and the local state trooper was quick to pounce... We half-expected him to waive everything when he found we were from the UK but he did issue the citation - and promptly told us we could choose not to pay and instead skip the country if we wanted!

Later in Utah we - or rather, I - encountered the dreaded bed-bugs, but the hotel's response was nothing like it had been the first time it happened, which was back in June. At that time the hotel had immediately been apologetic, sympathetic and generous in compensation. Not so in the Super 8 in Hurricane... at first they denied it (implicitly accusing me of lying) then when confronted with the evidence (me stripped to the waist in their lobby!) they reluctantly took details and promised to look into it and respond the next day. They utterly failed to do so, so a week later I complained to the parent company and slated them for their response on Booking.com and TripAdvisor! Well... you do what you can...

After that delight it was time for Nevada - even worse than Arizona for MMFD (Miles and Miles of F'ing Desert). The scenery was even more desolate than before, lacking even the dramatic escarpments and mesas, and the rich fiery colours, degenerating into dull grey desert. The only thing I wanted to see was the Hoover Dam, a fine piece of civil engineering I'd been interested in seeing for a while (Kate saw it from a coach in 1997, back when the highway went across the top). First up we went to the overlook on the new bridge - a fantastically sparse and elegant concrete arch design, incredibly slim for such a huge span - and then down on to the dam itself. It was ferociously hot - 100F or more - but there was a powerful wind blowing, a kind of forced ventilation that kept you tolerably warm at the cost of being blasted by the air.

We drove around Las Vegas, as it's really not the place for us at all, and then on to California! First stop was Death Valley - not the mental image of California that the adverts would have you believe! Although we'd missed the 120F heights of mid-summer, it was still hot and, of course, very very dry. I gave in to Kate's nagging and we took *a lot* of iced water - and we were glad of it! The scenery was unforgiving, stark rather than beautiful, although there were photogenic bits, particularly Badwater Basin, Zabriskie Point and the bizarre colours at Artist's Palette. The clouds were rolling in after lunch, so we set off over the mountain ranges that separate it from the sea and keep it so parched. As we drove we saw another petrol station, expecting to find prices reduced away from the Death Valley honeypot, only to find they were charging an eye-watering $5.98 per gallon! When Brits find your fuel prices excessive, you need to have a word with yourself... fortunately we were still well supplied and were able to keep going, winding up the steep mountain roads (again Kate was driving, which she wasn't thrilled about - but I swear it just happens that way, I actually *like* driving the twisty bits and yet it nearly always seems to be her turn when we hit them!) After an unexpectedly excellent steak dinner in Lone Pine, plus most of a bottle of rather good Californian merlot and a creme brulee, Kate's mood was much improved...

We stopped near Mono Lake where I did another dawn photography raid - this time remembering everything I needed - before we drove over the Sierra Nevada and into Yosemite (this time I was at the wheel, after we traded slots). The drive was good fun, but rather sadly by the time we were in Yosemite Valley - by anyone's standards, one of the most breathtaking landscapes in the world - we were once again suffering from burnout.

We'd hoped that the month in Colorado would recharge our batteries, drain our saturated senses and generally give us another chunk of appreciation for where we were - but it seemed it had only lasted a week or so and we were done again. Naturally we're not looking for sympathy here - just trying to explain ourselves. As we sat in the carpark at the visitor centre we decided to scrap our plan for an exploration of the California coast from Sausalito to San Diego, push for the coast and stay for our last week somewhere by a beach.

So that's what we did - we drove west to Santa Cruz and then along the famous Highway 1 to Cayucos, where we are now. Airbnb provided us with a home, and we're enjoying unseasonably warm weather and once again doing not a lot. I've pretty much finished our remaining bookings, most of which were sorted out while in the Colorado cabin, so we've got a week in Hawaii with a little island-hopping to do, then a month in Australia after that - then we go home! It feels pretty weird to see the blank space at the end of the travel plan spreadsheet, which previously seemed to stretch on, unending. I definitely won't miss all that time I've spent juggling between that spreadsheet, Google Maps, Priceline and TripAdvisor, working out where to go, for how long, trying to drive a bargain on accommodation without booking us into miserable flea-pits... I like to think (and Kate agrees!) I've done pretty well, not making any significant scheduling errors or choosing any disastrous locations, but boy will I be glad to be staying in one place for the foreseeable future once we are finally back and installed somewhere!