Aliens, space and rocket-geekery is a thing in New Mexico. We decide to investigate. But there’s much more to overlanding New Mexico, so we do check out a bit of the other stuff too: some sand, a Chloride time-capsule, a ‘Truth or Consequence’ and some wolves. But for us in New Mexico, geekery is where it’s at.

Dashing from east to west across USA we have acquired new knowledge. We learned that not everything that looks like space-junk is actually space-junk; there is such a thing as too much steak; and there is no Forrest Gump bench in the Savannah square. We found no yellow brick road in Kansas and not even a lineman in Wichita. We did however, find the Choo choo in Chattanooga. At some (undetermined) point we were 24hrs from Tulsa, and someone did show us the way to Amarillo, so it’s not all bad, going west.

From around the world people flock in their millions to Florida, or Orlando to be more precise, to visit The Mouse (or The Duck, or the Frozen girl, or whatever this week’s Disney-fad happens to be). That’s all rather splendid, but we’re here to visit friends… friends we haven’t seen in a loooong time! We love life on the road but if there is one thing we miss, it’s spending time with old friends. Florida is our rare chance to put that right. And as we happen to be in the neighbourhood, we thought it would be remiss of us not to do a teeny bit of Florida overlanding stuff too. So we explored the ‘panhandle’, kayaked the creeks, saw some space stuff, some race stuff, and turned north at America’s bottom.

For some, the Deep South USA conjures-up images of cotton plantations, white mansions and big dresses (as in… ‘Frankly my dear… I don’t give a damn’). Or maybe some thing jazz and blues marching street-bands. For us, it turned out to be lots of great creole food, some ‘fake-news’ Tabasco sauce and failing miserably with a GPS and fake American accents.     

Howdy Texas! What an absolutely amazing start to the USA ya’ll have been. When we crossed the border a month ago, we knew Texas overlanding would be a huge change from Mexico, but this Lone Star State has delivered waaay beyond our expectations. We saw cool scenery, wildlife, cities, space rockets, history, politics, long-horns, money-printing and a rock-star. We won an award and we saw (a lot of) stuff fried. But by far the best thing has been the people – Texans are just the best!