USA & Canada

After spending one year in a small town in Montana during high school in 2008, I fell in love with the USA. My dad was born in 1953, so when he turned 70 years young in April 2023, instead of throwing a big birthday party he invited us to come along on his first ever trip outside of Europe. For many, many years he wanted to visit the city of Vancouver and the surrounding area in British Columbia.

The plan: Not only visiting one of Canada's most beautiful cities, but also meeting my host family in Montana for the first time in 15 years. To make the departure from Germany especially challenging, due to strikes we had to fly out of Berlin early in the morning instead of Hamburg. After all, we successfully made it to our first stop: Seattle. We continued our journey to Vancouver where we not only celebrated my dad's big birthday but also picked up Fini who came along for the next week before returning to Germany early, making it a travel group of six for the time being. We headed further eastwards to Calgary to visit Banff National Park, where — to our surprise — we got snowed in. The next stop was Montana. As my host family used to be the owners of a small, local meat shop back in the day, we were lucky to enjoy some of the finest beef and barbecue in the state. To me, being in Montana always feels like coming home.

But the biggest stretch of our three and a half week road trip was still ahead of us. We kept driving south, paid a visit to Yellowstone National Park, before passing Las Vegas and racing all the way down to Los Angeles. Unfortunately, I was the first one to pick up some kind of norovirus still being in Montana, before infecting my mum and dad in Los Angeles. After spending some days in the city of angels, we kept driving north, stopping by in San Francisco and Redwood National Park. We finished this huge circle when returning to Seattle.

It was such a great and wild experience. Traveling for 5,000 miles (about 8,000 km) with 5/6 people in 3.5 weeks in two cars can be pretty awesome, but also exhausting. I would definitely do it again, but next time a little slower to soak in more of America's great continent.

YOU CAN FOLLOW MY USA/CANADA JOURNEY ON MY INSTAGRAM HIGHLIGHTS: USA & CANADA HIGHLIGHTS