Cumulative miles driven: 126 Our USA Road Trip did not really get off to the best of starts yesterday, although this was mainly courtesy of the 'new' American Airlines (a recent merger of American Airlines and US Airways), on our second and third flights of the day. We had previously flown with British Airways from Paris to London Heathrow before joining their partners in the One World Alliance for the flight across to the US. Given the average American is, t...

Our flights to and from the USA cost us just under £400 each and bizarrely it was cheaper for us to fly via London than actually starting and ending our travels in London. Our outbound journey begins at Paris Orly with an early flight travelling with British Airways to London Heathrow at 0735 where we then have a little over three hours to change terminals and join the US Airways 3,999 mile flight across the Atlantic Ocean to Charlotte, North Carolina. Our t...

This is the first Christmas/New Year period where there has not been the need to think about how to best use those very precious annual leave days. Taking Christmas Eve as a day off always seemed a waste as did the days between Boxing Day and New Years Day as there would be very few people in work and invariably it would be used as a time to catch up on e-mails, filing and tidying up ready for the start of the next year. It was so nice not to have to worry about ...

Getting back to a 'proper' city has been very good and even though there is less traffic here than in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) it is still busy, busy, busy with motorcycles, taxis, bicycles, buses and the odd tuk tuk all whizzing about the city streets, peeping horns, twenty four hours a day. Crossing the roads is challenging in a different way as the drivers seem slightly more erratic and they don't seem to be able to judge pedestrian flows across the roads qui...

Be prepared for almost anything except maybe peace and quiet when catching a train in Vietnam. Our four weeks of travel through this country was mainly completed by train, with the odd taxi and a couple of boat trips to add a bit of excitement. Our 1,200 miles of rail travel was done in Soft Class air conditioned seats with the exception of the trip to Haiphong which was in Hard Class with air conditioning. Our journey with Vietnamese Railways started in Ho Ch ...