The End!

Well, New Orleans was our last stop before making it all the way back round to Florida, where we started last April.  As I type this, I'm sitting in the blazing sunshine of the Florida Keys (Key Largo to be exact).  We've been here for about a week and have been snorkeling and kayaking through the mangroves, which has been nice.

But before anyone starts sending me hatemail, we also have an unimaginable amount of boring, practical stuff to sort out.  We're working on getting the RV ready to sell and trying to figure out the logistics of how we're going to make everything happen at the right time to ensure we get it sold before heading home, but without leaving us prematurely homeless!  Our current prevailing plan is to sell it at the end of this month and move into some kind of vacation rental (yep, an actual house / apartment without wheels!) for the remainder of our time out here.

When we've figured all that out, there's the small matter of what the hell we're going to do with our lives when we return home!  So basically the plan is to deal with all the logistical stuff as quickly as possible, then find somewhere to settle and chill for whatever time we have left, have some more fun and plan for the future.

We still have quite a while left of our trip and we have a few places in Florida that we're going to try and visit, like the Everglades and Miami, but we may not have time to write blog posts on those places with everything else that will be going on, so I guess we'll wrap the blog up here!

Here's how our completed route looks, taken straight from GPS.  Absolutely mental, basically.  If you squint, it looks like some kind of demented duck/giraffe hybrid.

We covered 25000 miles and visited 32 states in the US, 5 provinces of Canada and 1 Mexican state.  We expected to do 20000 miles, so there's 5000 miles of wrong turns, driving aimlessly around looking for camping opportunities and who knows what else in there somewhere!

It's been an adventure from start to finish, a rollercoaster of challenge and reward.  We feel like we've learned a lot by making it happen, proud that we've accomplished it together and infinitely privileged to have seen some of the best bits of an entire continent on this huge planet of ours.

We're also happy that so many people took an interest in following our travels on this blog.  When we started it, the main purpose was to keep a record of our journey to look back on in the future and ensure we didn't forget anything.  We had no idea so many people would be keeping tabs on our antics and looking forward to hearing what we got up to next.  A few people have even said we've inspired them to do something similar, which is even better!

No doubt it will be traumatizing when the time finally comes to head home - I mean, how hard is that final morning of a holiday, when you have to head to the airport and the hangover you've been immune to all week finally kicks in because reality has started drilling its way into your skull again!  I guess we need to be prepared for that, multiplied by about 50.

But we also have plenty to look forward to when we come home, including planning a wedding!  Other than that, here's my top 5 things:

1. Seeing friends and family again
2. Proper bacon
3. Proper beer
4. Mildly annoying people by shoe-horning the phrase "when we were in America" into every other sentence, and/or saying the occasional word in a broad American accent
5. Not having to listen to country music any more

Thank you all again for reading and sharing this experience with us, it's truly been a blast!