Leaving paradise is always a hard thing to do. In three hours, I will be leaving the Cook Islands and head for North America, the land of the free (or so). I had a lovely time again at Coco-Putt, in the cinema (Brave), swimming and hiking. And I had to take some time off for gathering some more information for the time in the US.
14,000 photos in eight months, more than 217 GB of data — slowly exceeding the capacity of my external harddrive and my encrypted laptop partition. The day count for my travels is overflowing eight bits. Also, my brain seems to be overflowing from all the countries (13) and places I’ve seen. Although the pace in the last two weeks was slow, I seem slightly exhausted from all that travelling. Memory full.
I’ve started writing down a list of Top Moments and every time I think about the journey, it gets longer and longer. So I can’t present it to you right now without missing a lot of those moments.
I tore my short trousers in Tahiti at an unfortunate spot and left them there. Same happened later on some more trekking trousers on the Cooks and threw them away (they also refused come back completely clean from the laundry every time). Looks like I also lost my thermal long johns somewhere (not that I think that I would be needing them…). Time to replace some more clothes in Los Angeles. And a new iPod. And a mobile phone (which is not so easy given the fact that the US uses some obscure and obsolete CDMA technology for many telecom carriers).
Couch Surfing didn’t work for me so far, but in L.A. it will be a premiere. In two or three nights I hopefully will have completed my plans to see where I will be going and how.
I’m also thinking about sending back some stuff, like my underwater case for my camera, or Axel’s “Point It!” picture book (that I gladly didn’t need in South America, but it was a GREAT gift nonetheless). But you know how it is: The moment it’s gone you will need it.
Some might have already noticed that on “The Route(TM)” blog, there is a new “Bonus Level” entry. I might be extending my travels AFTER having returned to Munich for a day or two for another three weeks. Courtesy of Lothar, I might be joining him on a three weeks vacation in Madagascar — sounds absolutely great and I might end up in Africa after all. Now if he just would send me the link… pretty please.
But first, I will have the pleasure to travel together with Andrea from Rosenheim for three weeks in mid of August on the way from Las Vegas back to Los Angeles. I’m really looking forward to it. And there also might be a surprise friend joining me for the east coast… I’d love to make it happen. Travelling together is much better than being stranded on a lonely island on your own.
