80 Days in America

After a couple of relaxed days, today was a nice exciting day again. In the morning Steve helped me with finding a nice rental car. He did a good job, because less than two hours later I was the proud owner of a nice minivan for the next couple of weeks. It’s a nice, very luxe car with a lot of space in it. Normally you have to pay a lot extra when you’re under 25 years old, but Steve did all the talking and it turned out that they don’t gonna charge me for being not 25 yet, so that safes a lot of money. Still it’s quite expensive here, I’m just happy with the current dollar currency. I found out that this journey is really going to exceed the planned budget, so I’ll have to work hard again when I’m back home. I’ll just try to keep in mind that this is a one time change and that I better enjoy it…

It’s really exciting, the next couple of weeks I’m going to do a road trip through about nine states and I’m going to see a lot of the beautiful nature of Amerika. First I’m going to the coast and follow that for a long time up to Oregon or Washington State and then I’m heading east in the direction of Montana, which I heard is going to be very beautiful. I really enjoyed my stay here with Dawn and Steve, but right now I’m also looking forward to some new adventures. I can’t exactly tell what the feeling is, it’s just really exciting. Not knowing where exactly to go and who you’ll meet, a real adventure. I hope I’ll find some Starbucks and Mc Donalds places with wifi on the road to be able to update the blog from time to time. I’ll write down every day anyway.

The afternoon today was also quite exciting. Steve is a shooting instructor, so he took me to a shooting range and tought me how to shoot with a real gun. I have to say that it was a strange experience to put real bullets in a gun and actually shoot with it. Realizing that people kill each other with these things made it more strange. Maybe that sounds weird to you, but wait to you have a real gun in your hands and start shooting with it. It’s quite different than videogames. I find it completely rediculous that almost everyone here can just buy a gun and start practizing with it. In my perspective that’s just asking for problems. But it’s the second Amendment to the United States Constitution, so it’s the right of Americans to bear arms. :S I don’t think I do this soon again, but for now it was an interesting experience.

In the night we picked up Dawn from her work, it was my first longer ride with the minivan. I can tell you already: Americans ride cars like crazy: changing lines withouth signals, tailgating (nl: bumperkleven) and things like that are completely normal here. I wonder how easy it is to get your driving license here, apperently it’s not so hard. I think I’ll just need some time to get used to this crazy style of trafic. Fortunately we came back home safe. Earlier in the night I made brownies, so we enjoyed those the rest of the night 🙂