The French Quarter in New Orleans is exactly how I imagined it: music at every corner and parades in the streets! And it seems that public drinking is allowed?!

I did a boat tour in the nearby swamp, we saw alligators and wild (spanish) pigs!

Das französische Viertel in New Orleans ist genau wie man es sich vorstellt: Musik an jeder Ecke und Paraden in den Strassen! Und scheinbar darf man hier öffentlich Alkohol trinken!

Ich habe eine Bootstour durch den Sumpf gemacht und dabei Alligatoren und verwildete (spanische) Schweine gesehen!

As you know I am a space nerd. So I had to go to Houston to visit the Nasa Space Center! There I could touch an original moon rock! And I  could also see the original Control Center of the moon landings, the Apollo 17 capsule and the last existing Saturn V rocket!

There were also life sized mockups of the ISS, Soyuz, Orion and Boeing capsules for the astronauts to train on. And other new and upcoming NASA tech like rovers and robots!

The Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico became famous because of the movie ‚Contact‘ with Jodie Foster. The VLA consists of 27 connected antennas with 25m dishes!

After visiting other arrays in Australia and Chile, I had to see this one, too 🙂

There‘s a famous race every year to the top of Pikes Peak on 14,115ft/4300m in Colorado! Watch Walter Röhrl on his Audi Quatro S1 racing up the mountain in 1987 on Youtube 😁

Unfortunately they were building the new visitor center/restaurant on the peak so I couldn’t ride up to the top, but had to take a shuttle bus for the last 3 miles ☹️

Nevertheless there was a great view up there! And some ‚big horn sheep‘!

The Natural Bridges Monument was the last NP in Utah. After a night of wild camping on a canyon rim I entered Colorado. It’s mostly higher altitudes and lower temperatures than Utah.