This blog tries to capture our amazement with America.  This is not a blog about food or selfies.  This is a blog about experiences and insights, musings and marvels.

So for the busy or bored, here is a taste of some of the interesting things journaled within…

Our brushes with fame

We spent Independence Day with the Veep and Miss America. Sat down with the cast of The Simpsons for a script read. Toured the streets of Harlem and the Bronx with hip-hop pioneer Grandmaster Caz. Attended a gospel service at Al Green’s church in Memphis. Broke bread with Australian and American country singers in Nashville and went on a RV tour with Breaking Bad actors in Albuquerque.  Along the way, we encountered many extraordinary Americans with great stories to tell.

I can’t believe they invented that here 

So many things that we take for granted had their origin in this country.  Some we knew but many we didn’t.  We visited the birthplaces of fast food, the supermarket, the hot dog, the amusement park, popular music, jazz, hip hop, country music, rockabilly, the light bulb, the record player, organised research and development, cultural tourism, chain stores, Monopoly, la crosse, hipster culture, hippy culture, tabloid journalism and the many tech firsts of Silicon Valley.  Bizarrely, we also visited the birthplace of Australia’s first environmental laws.

Once in a lifetime experiences

We got a rare tour inside the Pentagon and followed the revolutionary history of America – from Boston through Philadelphia to Washington and then along the stain of slavery in the South.  We followed the pioneers and headed West along Route 66 where almost every town is name-checked in a popular song. When we weren’t relentlessly moving, we settled in urban areas such as the fortnight we spent in a tenement exploring the wonders of New York  – from the Bronx down to Coney Island.  Not a single day was boring or sedentary.

Oh say, did we see…

We saw a rocket launch from Cape Canaveral and hover-crafted past wild alligators in the nearby swamps.  We saw nature at its best in the eye-popping spectacle of the Grand Canyon and nature at its worst in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.  I swam through a bloom of jellyfish in Honduras and walked with wild iguanas in a Mayan fort in Mexico. We sipped mint julips on the mighty Mississippi and walked in the warm Texas evening while the ground was alive with grasshoppers and scuttling bugs. Texas is also where Michelle got a 50th birthday car-d spray-painted on a Cadillac and VW beetle near Amarillo.  We also saw the world’s best-preserved meteor crater near a town called Two Guns which has the reputation of being the most cursed place in America and where, in the middle of the dry Arizona Summer, it freakishly rained on our arrival.

Here we are now, entertain us

We attended America’s largest outdoor concert in Philadelphia, three Broadway shows, two Las Vegas spectaculars, The Grand Ole Opry, The Hollywood Bowl, Preservation Hall, Citi Field stadium, Madison Square Gardens and countless small venues in out-of-the-way places such as the donkey-ridden town of Oatman.

And finally, our brushes with death

We survived a drug-deal shooting, faced the fury of Hurricane Bertha and narrowly avoided being hit by an out-of-control semi-trailer.

All in all, it was one hell of a trip.