My American Adventure, 1995

For a number of years I had wanted to travel. Why I waited so long with actually doing it, I don't know. Anyways, this summer, the summer of '95, I DID go. Alone, with the destination being 6 weeks of down-to-earth travelling in the USA. Goody. The reason I went there instead of somewhere else was that the major field trip for the computer science students at the Norwegian Institute of Technology would take place in the Silicon Valley area the last week of August, and could easily be combined with a vacation "over there".

I really wanted to:

• Wake up with a decent-sized cockroach looking me in the eyes from my very own shoulder.
• Look at people and smile in a New York City subway.
• Get a sunburn on a Californian beach.
• Walk on the Golden Gate Bridge with as much fog around me as possible.
• Walk astray in the wrong place in Washington D.C.
• Celebrate my birthday the American way in a restaurant
• Lie down under the whale in the Museum of Natural History and get a new perspective on the world.
• Buy and eat a bagle with cream cheese in New York City before 9 am.
• Give the person at the cash register at any McDonalds money with change so that they should give me an exact number of dollars back, and see what I actually get.
• Climb a tree more than 6000 feet above the ocean-level.
• Steal corn from a field and eat it.
• Order a glass of water on the rocks at Hooters.
• Tell a Greyhound representative I am going to complain to his superior, and experience a heartily laughter.
• See a minor-league baseball match.
• Eat a Chicago-style pizza in Chicago.
• Visit a Georgia peach farm.
• Jog in Eugene, the jogging capital of the Universe.
• Smuggle minimum 2 kilograms of fruit into California.
• Go visit the troll under the bridge in Fremont, Seattle.
• Bring a map and help the taxi-driver find his way to whereever in any well-sized US city.

Some of these wishes of course came to the surface after I arrived in the US, but I still think they have been in me forever, just waiting for the right time to tell me they were there. And they did. But did I get to actually do them? Read and find out. #8D)

While travelling, I wrote a log, making sure I would not forget any of the great things I experienced while travelling. The text is now just about what I want it to be, but I am still working on inserting pictures from my trip. I consider the text to be the most important part, though. So...

Enjoy!