John down under: USA and Canada

USA and Canada

In the US I met up with study friends and friends from back home, so no backpacking per se. I was spoiled in the US, private guide, nice housing, traveling with one of my best friends and his family, universal studios, checking out old ghost towns, drinking good beer, witnessed two of my best friends getting married to each other, met a lot of crazy Polish people before I went to Canada for another friends wedding! Good times! Traveled to San Francisco, Santa Cruz, LA, Vegas (and a bunch of other places), shooting a .50 cal, Thompson and a P90. Oh, one of the coolest things, met a former inmate of Alcatraz!

San Francisco

My first stop in the US was in San Francisco where I crashed at Allison's place, a damn cool girl I studied with in Australia, yay for international friends! The days in San Francisco was spent exploring and drinking beer! Also a thanks to Jeremy for letting me crash at his place!

This is from Golden Gate park quite a lot of animal life there, ducks, squirrels and earth gophers, or whatever it is :)

Apparently homeless people in Golden Gate Park, some of these where young people that just enjoy the lifestyle, it boggles my mind. And the area I stayed at in San Francisco is nick named Hippie Town. A lot of cool shops etc, and it smells like weed everywhere.

San Francisco also has a metric shit ton of antique shops etc, and yeah I'm a bit of a sucker for that, everything here as you can imagine was obviously way beyond any rational thought when it came to price, or maybe I just need to become rich.

A cruise out to see Golden gate bridge and Alcatraz.

View of San Francisco

I also took a trip down to Santa Cruz and meeting up with a couple that I met the previous summer when they stumbled into the local pub in my hometown. When I said I was going to SF they invited me to stay at their place in Santa Cruz so I took them up on their offer, and they showed me a really good time! Thank you so much Rose and Keith! I guess a thanks to Gavin and Nathaniel is in order as well, thanks for taking me out surfing, I suck.

They took me out sailing, and at the pier the sea lions gathered.

This is from the local park where they have the redwood trees.

I remember this is a kid, we would fold them over and make "bombs", gunpowder strips was a lot of fun!

Here is a cut from one of the larger redwood trees, quite old if you look at the years engraved into the brass plaques!

They were renting out a space of land, and the tenants had put of a "tent", one of the cozier homes I've seen:) Back home though, you would freeze your ass off.

Back in SF, see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

A trip to SF is not complete without a trip to... The Rock, queue music!

Alcatraz is really a cool place and worth visiting, I'm just going to let these pictures speak for themselves.

I didn't know this at the time when I arrived, but this is Bill Baker, a former inmate of Alcatraz, he was signing his book, so I bought one and got a picture, cool dude! I asked him what was the first thing he did when he got out, he looked at me and said: "What do you think?" I answered fair enough, I guess it was quite obvious :)

I guess a trip to SF is not complete without a pictures of these bad boys.

Los Angeles

Santa Monica pier, the end of route 66.

The crazy is everywhere, they got a recruitment center right on the main street. So yeah, these guys believe an alien overlord named Xenu colonized earth etc. Did I mention that the founder of Scientology is a scifi writer? Go figure.

Talking about scifi, this guy here, plays one of the best roles in scifi history in my opinion. "This is the commander. action stations, action stations, set condition one throughout the ship!" If you don't get it, do yourself a favour and watch the tv show called Battlestar Galactica (the new one)

Universal studios, this was awesome!

A show based on the movie Waterworld, the show is really good, the movie not so much.

Some famous cars :)

So here they have a Mexican town where they can turn on the faucet to rate a flood!

The plane from war of the worlds with Tom Cruise.

The balcony of where Michael Jackson lived.

The house of Iron Man!

After LA we drove to Vegas, and did a few stops on the way. Here is Oatman where burritos or, donkeys was released into the wild after the gold rush, so they're roaming the streets!

Inside one of the local establishments almost everything is covered with one dollar bills with greetings from all over the world on the,.

These two weren't shy at all :)

Grand Canyon, holy crap. Looks so unreal, it is quite... grand!

We also stopped and checked out the Hoover dam, quite large!

Las Vegas

This is fucked up, 'Murica!

What kind of name is this for a hotel? Oh yeah, prostitution, sorry I mean escort services are legal in Vegas.

Aquarium in the pool at a hotel, the water slide goes through the aquarium

The Bellagio and the Venice

I found a really cool art gallery, I could not take any pictures of the paintings, but I could take of these large sculptures, price? 90000 US dollars.

Bellagio by night

The show outside here at night is quite nice, when I uploaded it to YouTube I got a copyright infringement notice since the video contained the song Time to say goodbye. So instead of fixing that I'm just going to link to another video where that didn't happen. Check it out, it is cool!

Pawn stars in Vegas.

That's a mine sweeper over there in the case.

We went to a shooting range called Battlefield Las Vegas, and we tried a few different weapons each, I tried the Thompson submachine gun from the second world war, P90 submachine gun and the .50 Cal sniper rifle, holy cow.

Shooting the Thompson submachine gun WW2 model.

Shooting with the P90 submachine gun

So yeah, I can't shoot for shit. Well, too many misses, but yeah, you try go full auto with a P90 and a shitty scope.

Here the Barret M82 sniper rifle, jeeeez. IT WAS AWESOME! It weighs about 14kg. One shot was 29 dollars, so yeah you know....

Almost bulls eye, this was from like 5 meters mind you, so, yeah, still suck.

View from the Stratoshpere we did took the Spaceshot on the top, scary as fuck.

Ghost town after the silver rush

Local firetruck

House mad of glass bottles

This is how silver ore looks like if you ever wondered, the small black spots in the stone.

Red bananas, wut?

Chicago

In Chicago I attended the wedding of two of my best friends, also just chilled out and explored for a few day, cool city, absolutely worth going. I also met up with two more girls I studied with in Australia, Shapiro and Nicole, it was an absolute blast seeing them again. Other than that it was basically hanging out at a local tavern drinking beer, talking shit and playing board games. Oh, also eating hot wings with a sauce called "Atomic Saucer" quite spicy to say the least.

We went to the Natural History museum, and saw this from Charles Darwin and different types of meteorites and minerals.

Chicago by day.

Chicago by night!

Me and Stephanie!

The bean in millennium park!

Ready for the wedding! Many tears were shed!

The already wed couple doing the white wedding!

The happy married couple, and me! Ps. thanks for inviting me, I truly appreciate it :)

Canada

When I was in the US a friend of mine from the military contacted me and said that h was getting married a week after our mutual friend. So he asked since I was in the neighborhood if I wanted to drop by, and yeah, why not? So I took the trip up to Edmonton for a few days!

So what happened in Canada? Well, Steven Tyler ran past us on the street and photobombed the bride. The picture you can see here

We managed to lock ourselves out from the pool so we had to walk around and up to find a way back in. We found a lady working at the hostel and explained the situation. She takes us through a hall being prepared for a wedding, people are like wtf?, why are there two dudes in swim trunks walking through here, the lady leading us simply said, this is the eye candy! We said, we are the entertainment. She tried to take us through the kitchen, but with no luck so we walked through the hotel lobby in just the swim trunks. When we checked out later on the lady behind the counter said "Oh, I didn't recognize you with your clothes on" good times!

Also, getting our eight-ball stolen when playing pool from someone in a bachelorette party. At the same time though, another bachelorette party was around and we added "kiss a Norwegian" to some dare cards they could score points on, worked surprisingly well. Got offered cocaine on the dance floor. The night ended by a random Canadian dude ordering us an über free of charge. So yeah Canada, holy shit, you are awesome. I don't know what you do, but the girls there are spectacularly beautiful , and people are actually so polite they are given credit for.

Only place in the world you'll see a sign for curling I guess.

The groom being kidnapped! Taped, gagged and of course the horse mask, off to paintball!

A small break in between with snack, me as rambo!

I managed to score a perfect nut shot on one of my friends, it was glorious!

SO yeah, I like art, so I found some really cool art in one of the shops here, and I was actually allowed to take pictures, some cool stuff here, only 10000 dollar for some of the pieces.