Road Trip Here We Come!

Sometimes you just have to let the wind take you, and luckily that's just what we're doing. (Luckily?)

It reminds me of when we were 18 and one night, late at night while we were hanging out with friends, we got a wild hair and decided to take a really long drive to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to visit a man we had a long-time crush on, and surprise him for lunch. We had gone to Senior prom with him (now is probably a great time for you to find that out, hey Dad? Sorry for not telling you, sorry we lied and said we went alone), he was much older than us, in his early 30's and worked with us at our building center job. We had a huge irrational crush on him. Nothing sexual ever happened between, before, during or after prom, he only accompanied us to the dance portion of the night after we had had dinner alone with our friends who had gone as couples.
Long story short he lied to us for as long as we knew him. We thought he was straight. He made us believe he was straight. He was not. We were clearly naive (people we worked with even told us he was gay...we refused to believe them because he always mentioned women he dated). That's a longer story for another day...another story of deception and a broken heart. No wonder some of us can't trust people.

So, all through our life (going on 15 adult years) many of us have acted on impulse, moved across county having had no prior thoughts of moving the week before only to find us in states and cities we knew nothing about. Sometimes we wonder if we'll ever change. Sometimes we hope we don't. Some of try to make those of us with wanderlust to change. It causes arguments.

Much to some of our surprise (and to some, displeasure...hello, mental breakdown sobbing all over the house for all sorts of irrational things today...she's better now)...we find ourselves planning a month long road trip adventure.

The Northeastern USA tour.

What started out a week ago with a 5 day trip to Chicago to introduce James to the city, and look at neighbourhoods for potential real estate to invest in (after over four months our house sale finally made the last leap and the funds should be in our account by Saturday at the latest) for the day we can finally settle in the United States (the immigration lawyer says it could be a year and half before he's allowed to even come back...we'll see).

Then at the start of the week we got a Tweetup, in Detroit, added to the agenda. Our very first big tweetup! We haven't met any American Twitter people yet, only British ones (@Serentiy_X and @KerryStott) We're even giving artist and funny man @Nick_Twist a lift to Detroit because he's finding himself in Chicago at the same time. NICK TWIST! :-) He has been our pal on Twitter (we've had a Skype with him once) for over a year now. Some of us are super pumped and excited about this event.

Then for reasons involving high crime rates in Chicago (1/3 higher rates than New York), some of us decided maybe James would like to see Cleveland as an option for our future home...and a quick peek at the distance from New York (we've ALWAYS wanted to go there) showed it to be less than a days drive...and then, and then...and now...NOW we are camping and hoteling our way around the Northeast portion of the United States as our very first leg of the aforementioned 2012 Stabbing Tour.

It's not exactly how we envisioned it when we first wrote about it, [we don't get our van and a year to live in it :-( ], and we didn't think we were going to be able to start it until we return from Europe next time, but we can sometimes force each other to be flexible when needed, like a giant lunatic pretzel. (even though it can causes slight..issues...).

Also, we can't just sit in this small city, living in The Mothers basement, playing on Twitter until August, that would be...dangerous to our mental health. It already is.

Since we have to leave the country (have to if we want to remain with James) at the beginning of August, and this time we could be gone for over a year (*pouts*). We decided between now and then we have some roadtrips to take. James needs to see the United States...we need him to find something to love about the country we call home. The country he will eventually call home.

And hey, why not test the strength of our relationship after living in cheap hotels for the last month in England with almost no funds, only feet away from each other at all times..., now we get to see how well we can navigate the roads together and set up campsites, and find our way around cities we've never been to. Adventure!

So, we leave on Saturday sometime. The car is getting a tune-up tomorrow, we pulled the camping gear out of storage today...

The top stops are (not including stopping to have dinner with The Father and spending a night in the city where we graduated high school): Chicago - Detroit - Cleveland - Boston - New York - Philadelphia - Cincinnati - Minneapolis

With a tentative return date to "home base" on June 18th. About a month.

A lot of what is travel related will be written on our travelouge, as it was before; things like pictures, restaurant reviews, campground and hotel reviews, and any interesting things we experience travel related.

Come join us on Twitter, in our blogs, we'll be Tweeting and writing our way across the country, and meeting a few people from Twitter along the way.