Goodbye phone service – hello real world. What a peaceful place to spend Christmas. We arrived on the 24th, which is when we celebrate Christmas in Germany. After exploring most of the park, the Joshua trees, the cactuses and beautiful huge rocks, we found a place to celebrate Christmas completly off and away from society.

Christmas is the time of love and peace and I couldn‘t think of a more peaceful place to spend it.

At this time, I think I am just going to let the pictures below speak to itself.

Let us know how you spent Christmas and where… 🙂

P.s. We highly recommend this place!!!

We simply want to thank each and everyone of you, for your support and love you show towards us. We‘re just at the beginning of our Journey and we love to see how many of you are following along…

Have a lovely Christmastime and stay warm. 😉

Getting to San Francisco was: FOGGY haha. That was definetly our first impression. We got there on the 13th, spend one night close to the airport, picked up my families camper and surprised them with it at the airport. By the way, this thing is HUGE… and made Marvin realize he doesn‘t want that big of a camper anymore. He always talked about something bigger than this, where you don‘t transition the bed anymore, but after driving it (he used to be a professional truck driver) we agreed, that a smaller van seems to make our life (especially out of the US) a lot easier.

In San Francisco we mainly did tourist things, like the Golden Gate Bridge, the Cable Cars, Twin Peaks, the Upper Market, Fort Baker and Carmel Beach. Since my family is only here for three weeks, we didn‘t jump into the local acitivities too much. For us, it definetly had a HUGE spanish touch. You can see all the pictures below. 🙂

We also went to a game of the SF49ers, which was super cool!

Driving to LA, we were all expecting something „fancy“ since it is the place to be for the STARS and famiur people. For us it turned iut, that Ragged Point (the sea elephant beach) was way more exciting. Unfortunately we did get there when the sun was already mostly gone and we couldn‘t see them by daylight. You can see a video below with the funny noises they make.

Getting into LA, we were almost disappointed. Even though we got to spend the night right by the beach, we expected something more fancy. So did we about Malibu. Of course there are ginormous neighborhoods, and houses and it is super cool to see that, but for us, it is simply not a place that we enjoyed too much.

Once again, we didn‘t have enough time to explore the locals life, so it might just take a second visit too see some different views and get to know the locals and what they enjoy to do.

Now we‘re off to see the Joshua Tree Park and the Grand Canyon. Expect us to be offline for a couple of days. 😉

At this point, we also want to say THANK YOU for all the cookies, that we pretty much inhaled.

After we left Upstate New York, we went down to Manhattan to see the Thanksgiving Parade, which was super cool! One night before it started a police officer told us we had to be on the streets by 3am in order to be in the front row before Macy‘s. Even though I am up for a lot of early mornings, we decided no. We got out of the car at 8am, when the streets, were still, not even close to crowded. We went to Macy‘s where it turns out to only be accessible to people with tickets. THANKS police officer! Good thing we didn‘t get up at 3am 😀 Our original plan was to watch it out of our bed or the top of the car, but the police didn‘t think that‘s fun and decided to keep telling us we need to move the car. At the end we just watched it like any other „tourist“ haha. When people ask me if it‘s fun, I have to say „Yes“ simply because it is an experience. Either way you do stand there for the longest time ever and the groups are pulled apart very far, probably so they don‘t have to wait so long in front of the Macy‘s buidling. But that‘s just a guess.

After staying in Manhattan for quiet some time again, we actually took the ferry to see the Statue of Liberty and went up the One World Observatory, which was pretty cool. Meaning this time we were tourists. 😀

Once we left Manhattan, we visited our friends in Pennsylvania and took some time to relax again. They live in the middle of pure nature and it is dimply beautiful to spend some time with them and at their house… if only April would understand nothing was that bad, that she had to bark as much as she did haha.

Saturday, December 1st the ride started. We took off to go to Wichita, Kansas, because my parents are visiting us in San Francisco and we had the choice to either go above Kansas or below and we said we‘d take some time off and visit all my friends and hostfamily and that was really fun!

That also seemed like enough time off. We‘re on our way to San Francisco now, where my family is arriving. We do have quiet a few miles / kilometers to go, but right now we‘e driving throzgh the Rocky Mountains, and that is absolutely besutiful! When I was an exchange student I remember skiing in Colorado, but I am not too sure if we went to the Rocky Mountains.

We‘re planning to be in California tomorrow evening and then we‘re excited to welcome my family there. <3

San Francisco we‘re on our way!!!