CAUTIOUS CARGO ↑ This way up ↑: USA: From the east's Atlanta to the west's San Diego. July 2014.

So our South and Central America adventure had finally come to an end and it was time to relax for a bit. We arrived in Atlanta in Georgia on 4th July and spent almost a week at Matt's father's house eating well, sleeping well and staying in one spot rather well too. We visited the excellent Martin Luther King museum, took neighbourhood walks in the humid, glow-worm evenings and generally made light work of recharging our metaphorical and non-metaphorical batteries. What joy it was to do a simple load of laundry, too.

A week later we packed up the new addition to our travels, Matt's Subaru, with all his worldly belongings complete with furniture and art 'collection', a year's supply of pretzels, peanuts, crunchy peanut butter and smooth peanut butter, and drove 500 miles to New Orleans. This was the first leg of the westward journey to Matt's as yet unfound new home in San Diego, California.

We drove through heavy rain as we approached New Orleans, at points driving on freeways lowly-built above swamps and rivers, and after we checked out raucous downtown streets of Mardi Gras fame, stayed with Kaysi, a friend of a friend who put us up at her studio apartment. Kaysi's was the best US accent I've encountered, so Southern, and she was a keen kayaker, confirmed by the presence of the massive kayak we slept next to that night. We shared stories over beer and deer chili, courtesy of her brother's deer stalking. Kaysi left us to leave at our own pace the next morning when she left for work, and to think we'd met only the previous night.

Another 500 or so miles to Lewisville Lake Park in Texas where after a well-deserved lakeside beer we camped opposite a couple who were having some sort of tiff ('I'ma kill that bitch!') who were gone by morning. Endless, busy oil pumps dotted the Texan landscape.

It had long been a hope of Matt's to visit White Sands National Park in New Mexico and fortuitously the night we were due 600 miles later, a Mexican mariachi band were going to play in the park, fairly common on full moon nights. After driving through beautiful, cool, pine-scented Lincoln National Forest with its wooden houses and red American barns, we ended up camping for $10 at the Sheriff's house in a small town called Alamogordo, 'The Friendliest Place on Earth', where the US' first nuclear bomb was detonated in July 1945. After pitching the tent accompanied by the odd rabbit, we drove to White Sands for an evening of full moon mariachi action.

The next morning we drove away from Alamogordo's active missile complex (can't say I wasn't relieved) north to Socorro, Breaking Bad territory just 50 miles south of Albuquerque, Arizona. We then blazed west to Kaibab National Forest where after another 500 miles we landed a free night of camping at a seemingly unstaffed site near Flagstaff. More well-deserved beer. Pitched the tent just in time with the rumble of thunder approaching. Not long before Kaibab National Forest we'd been tempted into a 12 mile detour to a meteor site, which we abandoned when we saw the office there wanted $32 for the pleasure. So Matt had a skate in their car park instead.

Our penultimate day of driving saw us visit sweltering Palm Springs, California, then on and up to the Santa Rosa-San Jacinto Mountains, an impressive moonscape which made us fear for the car's health. It took us two hours to drive over the mountain alone until we finally made it to mosquito-inhabited Palomar Mountain on the other side, where we landed another free night of camping in the eerily-silent forest..silent except for some tent-side animal shufflings at 4am, which were shortly followed by a dawn chorus of animal sounds all completely alien to me. Now that's what it's all about.

Less than two hours from San Diego we packed up our things in the morning in preparation for some flat viewings that day. After three apartments Matt signed on the dotted line and we moved in that afternoon to a great flat in La Jolla, San Diego.