Old Timer Garage

I think that it is easy to understand from what I wrote here that I loved this trip. I can say without exaggerating that these two and a half weeks were the best holidays of my life.

The scenery was absolutely splendid, we went through desert places even more beautiful than what I was imagining.

In total about 3500 miles across Arizona, Utah, Nevada and California. We slept in the same bed two nights in a row only three time during the entire trip which enabled us to see as many things as humanly possible.
The program was pretty loaded but rather well organized too I think because we did everything we wanted to do without having to take things off what we had planned initially. I had prepared before this trip a detailed planning almost to the hour of what we were going to do which allowed me to get a good idea of the time we would have once on site to visit what we wanted to visit.
I had also planned the drives between places so that we wouldn’t have to spend hours on end sat in the car. So apart from the leg from Death Valley to Los Angeles, we drove a maximum of 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours at night every day.
This also enabled us to decrease the price we had to pay in hotels because we were able to drive away from the most touristic places to spend the night.

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About the meals, we ate in restaurants from time to time but we saved a lot of money by buying in Walmart and making our own sandwiches pretty much on a daily basis. With a good cool box (mandatory to keep water cool) it was easy enough.
Every hotel had a small fridge in the room too so we were freezing our ice packs every night to keep the cool box cold during the day.

If some of you are interested in the planning I made for this trip, I can provide a copy of it.

I am trying to find a few negatives to this trip so that you don’t think that everything was perfect but to be completely honest, I can’t think of anything. The only thing I could say maybe is that we had planned to do and see so many things that after a few days at this pace, I would feel almost overwhelmed by all these different things that we had to digest. But the fact that we had planned a few quieter days in between busier days allowed us to rest before going back to the fast pace. Generally speaking, it was a perfect holiday.

In terms of finance, we shared equally the expenses between the four of us apart from the flights that each one of us paid for. We were lucky enough not to have to rent a car since my brother took his and the 4 of us shared the same hotel room which contributed to reduce the expenses too.
Everything put together, the entire trip cost us just under 2000 dollars per person (flights included).

It is of course not a small sum of money but if you consider everything that we did and saw during these two and a half weeks, it is rather a decent amount of money to pay.
And 2000 dollars represent around 1700 euros. It took me 10 years to be able to do this trip but to be completely honest, it is possible to do it much faster. If you wanted for example to organize a trip like this in say, 2 years, it would mean that you would need to save 71 euros per month to get there which is decent. It is pretty much only a fuel tank a month to save.

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After coming back from the US last year, I had to find a way to go back there.
To clarify a little the way I think, it might help to know that I have been to a certain number of countries in my life but rarely as a tourist. Each time I tried to find a job there to make some money and live there for a while. I started in Spain for a 3 month internship when I was still a student, then in Colombia the year after for another 6 month internship. I then worked in the UK, Germany on and off, Italy, Serbia… at the end of the day, the only countries I visited as a tourist are Ireland, Turkey and the US.

So in my mind, if I go back to the US, I want to be able to work so that I have time to spend a few years there and discover more in depth how things are over there.
I know how hard it is to get a work visa for the US but the months that followed this first trip allowed me to learn a lot on all these procedures and brought me interesting opportunities.

If you are interested to read about all this, keep reading and I will share this here too.

To be continued… here: 19- First try to go and live in the US

 

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