In Lifestyle, Travelling
August 5, 2017 -
As many you already know, we´ve returned to our home sweet home in the middle of the mountains in Andorra. It´s awesome to be back home, since there was a lot of travelling during the last month.
All in all, the road trip was awesome, a bit too long, and a bit too expensive. Since we like to give points to all our trips I would give this trip an 8 out of 10.
Here´s some facts from the road trip:
- In total, we drove over 6 000 km, from Los Angeles to New York, through Chicago, Niagara Falls and Washington DC
- Experienced 17 different states of USA
- Changed time zone 4 times
- Spend around 3-5 hours a day in the car when we were on the road
- Suffered from a top temperature of 50 degrees Celsius
- Slept in some really random motels on the way
I can’t even go through all the things we experienced, since I doubt nobody would have patience to read the whole blogpost at that point.
I will make a short recap of the road trip day by day, and I´ll try to make it as short as possible.
Day 1 & 2 – Los Angeles and Hollywood
Not anything impressive, to be honest, Hollywood was a big disappointment for all of us. We visited Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Universial Studios, Los Angeles center, Beverly Hills and the beach area with the famous beaches: Venice Beach, Santa Monica and the Muscle Beach.
Day 3, 4 & 5 – Las Vegas
Las Vegas, a big amusement park for the adults, and I loved it! I hope I can go back soon! We visited endless amount of casinos and had a lot of fun during the 2 nights that we spend there. It was also a big plus that we stayed in the world-famous hotel: Bellagio, which was really fabulous.
Day 6 & 7 – Grand Canyon and WigWam Motel
Grand Canyon was awesome, incredibly big and beautiful, something you need to experience in real life. It was way too hot though, in the helicopter tour we reached over 50 degrees Celsius! After Grand Canyon, we drove to the real route 66 road, and stopped in the famous Route 66 motel: WigWam. It was separated tent looking – rooms with everything we needed after the sweaty Grand Canyon, meaning a shower and a bed.
Day 8 Albuquerque
Albuquerque is basically a big town that got famous because of the Breaking Bad tv-series. So we obviously had to stop at all the famous places from the series: Mr Whites house, the octopus car wash, Los Pollos Hermanos and Pinkmans house.
Day 9 Santa Rosa, Tucumcari, Erick & Amarillo
Probably one of the longest and heaviest days during the tour, in total we probably spend like 12 hours in the car. But it was also one of the best days in the road trip, it was a very unique experience since we drove through a lot of small towns with a lot of personality. We started the day by visiting the Route 66 car museum, but we pretty quickly headed to the next stop in the planning, which was Tucumcari. Tucumcari is a town full of Route 66 graffiti art and also the midpoint of the whole Route 66. Erick was the town where the famous Route 66 collector Harley lives and we were lucky enough so he invited us to his house to check all his cool things. He entertained us for almost 2 hours, he was so funny, even so funny that we all added him on Facebook as friends. Let´s see if we maybe meet one day again.
Finally was Amarillo where we visited the Cadillac ranch and the Famous “Big Texan” steak restaurant. Although we were tired we decided to drive all the way to Oklahoma to sleep in a motel.
Day 10 Oklahoma, Catoosa, Galena & Springfield (1)
For me, Oklahoma was just as any other big city in US. Only thing that they had “special” was some small green colored canals in the middle of the city with some bars around.
In the same day we drove through Catoosa to check a blue whale that is a Route 66 attraction, Galena that has the famous cars from the movie “Cars” and in the end we decided to stop at Springfield (the smaller Springfield).
Day 11 Shopping in St Louis outlet
I don´t think I need to add any comments here. Let´s just say the day ended up in the most expensive roof top in St. Louis with Jägermeister shots.
Day 12 St. Louis, Springfield (2), Atlanta, Wilmington
This day was actually the day that we finished the Route 66, since we drove all the way from St. Louis to Chicago. We did some small stops on the way on some famous Route 66 attractions.
Day 13, 14 & 15 Chicago
So, we finished Route 66 in under two weeks, including even Las Vegas & Grand Canyon that isn´t on the route. Arriving to Chicago was nice, we enjoyed the city a lot. A beautiful city with a lot of skyscrapers and some nice rivers crossing the city. We spend 2 nights and around 3 days walking around Chicago, where we also decided that we have some extra days so that we can visit Niagara Falls.
Day 16 Cleveland
Around 6 hours driving from Chicago, we stopped in Cleveland. Since we arrived in the afternoon and happened to drive past another outlet… Well you can guess what we did the rest of the day. No Photos needed.
Day 17 Niagara Falls
This was as I already before mentioned, a super random idea we just came up with during the tour: “Hey Let´s go to Niagara Falls – It´s just 1 day extra and endless amount of kilometers extra” pffff. Anyway, I think it was totally worth it. From Cleveland, we drove up to Niagara Falls and spend the day there. It´s a beautiful place, but man how much tourists. Before this we had also made another random decision, let´s drive to Washington DC. So, after visiting Niagara Falls we started driving south and we stopped in a super controversial motel in the middle of nowhere between Niagara Falls and Washington DC.
Day 18 & 19 Philipsburg & Washington DC
We spend the morning in a natural park next to the motel after we headed to Washington DC. We said hi to Trump and prepared for the next and also last day in the car so we could finally arrive to the final destination: New York.
Day 20 – 28 The big Apple: New York
Last but certainly not least, we spend around one week in New York. We were very lucky to be able to stay at our friend’s place, so big thank you to: Tort, Sandra & the cat Freddy that had the patience to keep up with us for one week.
New York for me was, well, dirty to start with. It´s a cool city, a lot of things to do and see, but way too dirty, expensive and too much people. It´s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn´t live there for example. We had time to visit basically most of the important things such as the Naked Cowboy, Brooklyn Bridge, different neighborhoods outside of the city (Harlem, Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn), bicycling through central park, went to a baseball game, Statue of Liberty, checked New York from the Top of the Rock, 9/11 memorial, and all the areas of Manhattan. In addition to some more shopping of course.
It ended up being a pretty long post, but I mean, after all it was almost a 1-month road trip, visiting a lot of things and places.
And the travelling doesn´t end here for me and Jammu, since we´re going to do an awesome trip to Iceland on Tuesday. My sister lives there so we have the privilege to stay at the husband’s family apartment in the center of Reykjavik. We´ve planned a lot of awesome things to do, but I think the coolest will be the 6 days hiking tour: Laugavegur, which is one of the most beautiful hiking / trekking routes in all the world. We need to carry basically everything with us, the food, tent, sleeping bags, clothes etc. It will be a nice experience after spending all the last month in the busy and stressful USA.
I will be uploading some blogposts from Iceland as soon as we´ve arrived – So remember to follow me on Instagram: nina.sparv to keep updated on our travel adventures!
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I´m Nina, a 33 year old Finnish girl currently living in Andorra. A lover of life and living my life to the fullest.
I totally enjoyed your pictures of our beautiful country! I live in Ohio, not far from Cleveland>
Hi .I read all your story it was really awesome.Can you tell wht you choose for your trip>
And how much costs ?