USA & Canada
2023
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 be to 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, payed 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 Novo virus 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 suck in more of America's great continent.
2020
I visited California for the first time in 2017 and didn't want to leave. So, when the opportunity arose in March 2020 to do a two-week road trip through the Sunshine State, I couldn't say no. However, the whole trip was accompanied by the news of the global pandemic and first local lockdowns in San Francisco and San José.
We started off by getting sun-burned in San Francisco. Then, only to get snowed in at Yosemite National Park two days later. We headed further down south to see the biggest tree in the world: The General Sherman Tree in Sequoia National Park. As I always wanted to shoot the Milky Way from a very dark place, we spent a night outside in Joshua Tree National Park on our way to San Diego. Although the timing for shooting the Milky Way was not perfect (we had an early moon rise), I have rarely seen such a wonderful night sky before.
On the coastal cliffs of San Diego, we enjoyed the turquoise water, saw cute baby seals, and watched beautiful sunsets with paragliders right in front of us. Before flying back to Germany, we had to visit the “City of Angels” - Los Angeles and, of course, the world famous, Venice Beach.
For me, California is worth a visit all year round!
