Goodbye to the Big Country!

This blog is brought to you by the transit lounge at Mexico City Airport, where we have spent most of our day. But if we're in transit, that can only mean one thing... we've left America! Indeed, we flew out of Texas this morning after 3 months travelling around, visiting old friends, making new friends, covering some serious distance and eating more burgers than we'd like to admit.

We have experienced so much in the last 90 days that it would be difficult to give it justice with anything less than an essay. So to save time we decided to share some signficant numbers and let the data speak for itself!

The Numbers:

29 - Different states visited
9,000 - Miles driven (that's 14,000 kilometres for our metric buddies)
0 - Times Jess had been called ma'am before coming to the America
5 - Pairs of (admittedly cheap) sunglasses bought and then accidentally broken by Jess
400 - Times people asked Jess to repeat her name
3 - Sleepless hours spent the first night in Yellowstone, worrying about the risk of a bear eating our faces off
1 - Actual bears seen in Yellowstone
200 - Metres from which above-mentioned bear was seen from...thank goodness!
7 - Times we opened our toiletry bags to find a bottle had popped open and spilt over all our stuff. Sigh.
1 - Bald eagles seen up close in the wild
100 - Percentage of how awesomely bad-ass Bald Eagles are
23 - Times we were told that New Zealanders had cool accents
1 - Times we were told that New Zealanders spoke good English

We've had huge highs and some exhausted lows, and truly loved staying with all the wonderful people who hosted us. There are places we'd love to visit again, like New York City and New Orleans, and there are places we would happily never see again (we're talking to you, Oklahoma City!). All in all, it has been an amazing time and we are bummed to be leaving!

Also, check out a few more photos (below) from the U.S. that we never had the opportunity to post. 

The next leg of our journey takes us to South America, where we have another three months to see Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina and Chile. It's going to be really daunting at times, cos we've undoubtedly taken the ease of communicating with everyone in English rather for granted! But you know what they say - a change is as good as a holiday ;)

We ate so many burgers that if you cut us, we'd bleed ketchup.

The Golden Gate Bridge - she's a beauty!

The attitude towards the military was different to anything we'd encountered before.

Making pumpkin pie! Overly excited.

Chris' eerily spot on interpretation of American fashion

Yusssss.

This guy...

Glad to see we aren't the only people who find squirrels constantly amusing!

Awkward moments abound when you try contra dancing for the first time.

A sunset in the Florida keys is nothing to scoff at!

Waiting with 200 others to watch some ducks waddle down a red carpet = a good day.

 Using graffiti'd roadside art to make a wedding gift for our friends

The Grand Canyon is super impressive