USA

Hi and welcome to the last part of our trip - the States! Well we finally made it to the U.S. after a fun journey from Fiji. Departing Fiji airport was interesting as you all know security when flying to the U.S. is tight. Therefore we had to be split into two seperate queues based on gender, then each searched as well as our hand luggage, this being in addition to the normal search undertaken after going through the metal detector. Overall this was not too bad as the queue went in much quicker than anticipated. At last it was time to board the plane. We thought we had a bit of luck as the plane wasn't full, so we ended up with 4 seats between the 2 of us, but 15 mins after the plane was due to leave we realised something was wrong. The pilot confirmed our fears by advising that something was wrong with the one of the engines and was awaiting the engineers to check it. Turns out part of one of the engine components had blown and needed replaced which luckily could be done in the hour so we had to remain in our seats (thats all you want - an extra hour on a 10 hour flight!). Somehow we managed to make up our time so arrived in L.A. safe and sound. Although it was hard to forget the fact that an engine component had blown just before we were due to fly, especially in the middle of the morning when we experienced some bad turbulence. It certainly makes you more paranoid! lol!

Plans So Far

We managed to do a lot of research on the U.S. while in Fiji. So we had already booked 2 nights in an L.A downtown hotel, as well as 3 nights in a Vegas hotel followed by 3 nights in a San Francisco hotel. We also researched transport and decided that our best mode of transport would be bus as this decision was based on it being the cheapest as well as having a much wider range of routes than the train. We decided to get the 60 day Greyhound pass which only cost $500 (£300) for unlimited travel all over the U.S. It also includes some places in Mexico as well as most of Canada! We also spent a lot of time looking at maps of the U.S. and decided to travel down the West Coast along the South and up the East. The cities we have decided to try and visit on our route are as follows:

L.A. > Las Vegas > San Francisco > San Diego > Phoenix > San Antonio > Austin > Houston > Dallas > Memphis > New Orleans > Miami > Orlando > Washington D.C. > Philadelphia > Chicago > Detroit > Maybe into Canada > New York

Accomodation in the U.S will be a bit unusual as hostels seem to be a new idea here and every city we have looked at they are twice the price of anywhere else we have been. Therefore we are going to be staying in hotels most of the way so will hopefully have a bit of luxury! We are already used to having our own bathroom so don't think we could go back to hostels!!

On doing some research on the U.S we found out that we really know nothing about the history of the country and learned a lot of interesting facts that we thought we would copy and paste from the Gapyear website to save retyping! It's up to you if you can be bothered reading it.

Due to the vastness of their own country, and due to the fact that many of the neighbouring countries did not require U.S. citizens to have them, fewer than a third of Americans have passports, although this number is expected to increase greatly. Recently, with the requirement of a passport to travel to its neighbouring countries, Canada and Mexico, as well as to nearby Caribbean countries, there has been a surge in demand for passports.

America was once populated by people who migrated there from northeast Asia. In the United States those that remain are known as Native Americans, or American Indians. With populations once in the tens of millions, most led tribal, hunter-gatherer lifestyles, although some developed political enclaves based on agriculture.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, various parts of the region were colonized by several European nations and/or their religious missionaries, including Spain, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Russia. The British colonies in Virginia and Massachusetts were the kernel of what we now know as the United States of America. By the early 18th century, 13 colonies ranged along the Atlantic coast from Georgia to present-day Maine. Their growth drove the displacement the Native American population westward and the extinction of many others, as well as the end of the embryonic Dutch and Swedish footholds.

The southern areas, because of a longer growing season, had richer agricultural prospects, especially for cotton and tobacco. Large plantations developed with most of the labour being provided by African slaves, as was typical of most of Central and South America. The Northern colonies developed as mercantile societies modeled after the "home" country, Britain.

In the late 18th century, colonial revolutionaries declared independence from Great Britain on July 4, 1776, eventually realized by a bloody Revolutionary War. The colonies formed a federal government, with its Constitution inspired by Enlightenment-era ideas about government and human rights. In the late 18th and early 19th century, this government established itself and expanded westward, under a "Manifest Destiny" for the nation to expand to the Pacific Ocean. Territories in the Midwest were added as new states, and the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 gave the United States nominal control of former French territory along the Mississippi River. Florida was purchased in 1813 from the Spanish; American settlers in Texas rebelled against the Mexican government, setting up a republic that was absorbed into the union.

The Mexican-American War of the 1840s won the northern territories of Mexico, including such states as California, Arizona, and New Mexico, giving the continental US the rough outlines it has today.

The marginalization of the Native Americans, and their concentration in the west by treaty, military force, and by the inadvertent spread of European diseases, continued apace.

By the mid-19th century the differences between North and South had become severe. Though slavery was not the only issue between the two, it was an important one. By the 1860s, the Southern states decided to secede from the Union and the American Civil War broke out. It was one of the bloodiest conflicts in history, costing hundreds of thousands of lives. With the victory of the North a single country was maintained. While slavery was abolished, the former slaves by and large remained an economic and social underclass in the South.

The late 19th century saw the U.S. cementing its power on the continent and making tentative expansions abroad. Alaska was purchased from the Russians in 1867, and Hawaii was annexed in 1898. The Spanish-American War gained the first "colonial" territories: the Philippines (later granted independence) and Puerto Rico (which remains by choice a US territory). In the Eastern cities of the United States, an immigration boom had begun. Southern and Eastern Europeans, especially Italians, and Slavs, including many Jews fleeing Russian pogroms, joined Irish refugees to become a cheap labor force for the country's growing industrialization. Many Southern African-Americans fled rural poverty for the relative security of industrial jobs in the North. Other immigrants, including many Scandinavians and Germans, moved to the now-opened territories in the West and Midwest, where land was available for free to anyone who would develop it. A network of railroads crisscrossed the country, allowing faster movement of people and materials, and thus accelerating development.

With its entrance into World War I near the end of the conflict, the United States established itself as a world power. The creation of real wealth grew rapidly in this period. In the Roaring 20s stock speculation created an immense "bubble" which, when it burst in October of 1929, contributed to economic havoc, known as the Great Depression, across the country and around the world. This crisis exacerbated the disaffection among the working classes in the United States and around the world and led to a rise in socialist thinking that was to have a large effect on the rest of the century, particularly the mid-century. At the end of 1941 the United States entered World War II. In Alliance with the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, the U.S. helped defeat the fascist regimes in Italy, Germany, and Japan. At the end of this war of unprecedented scale, the United States, which had been mostly spared from fighting on its own soil, became the dominant economic power in the world, responsible for nearly half of the world's production. It stood as the primary opposing power to the Soviet Union, a former ally which was attempting to recover from devastation and ensure its security by asserting its influence with military backing, giving rise to what is now known as the Cold War. Also at the end of WWII, African Americans, who had long suffered de facto disenfranchisement, demanded equal rights, with widespread demonstrations. This, and the status of women and other "overdue" societal changes that had been contained by the effort of the war, flowered into a virtual revolution. The unpopular war in Vietnam, a by-product of the Cold War, added to the social strife. Taken together these changes led to significant change in the country: the economic and political conditions for African Americans substantially improved; a majority of women entered the workplace, and this had a powerful effect on homelife, the workplace and the economy.