So we made it to Brazil. After a 4:30am departure from the hotel (ouch), we took the 6:55am flight back from Cusco to Lima. We ended up having to collect our bags and recheck them onwards to Sao Paolo, as LATAM needed to issue us a new ticket after cancelling the previous leg due to our "missing" the flight from LA to Lima (this is when we were re-routed via Dallas and Miami, as you'd be forgiven for not remembering :-). The wait in Lima was a little long but not insufferably so. The flight to Sao Paolo was otherwise…

We were always expecting these few days to be special – one of the highlights of our trip – and they haven't disappointed. We didn't want to take any chances with the Peruvian leg, so we had the complete itinerary – including airport transfers and hotels – organised as part of the overall round-the-world trip. The week started well: I mentioned in passing, last time, that we had one fewer bag than expected on arrival in Lima. It took the airline a few days to sort out, but we were finally able to pick the bag up just prior to…

We left early on Thursday morning to get to SFO in good time for our flight. Catching BART would have been my preferred way to get there, but when I costed up the options it looked cheaper to catch an UberXL (at around $43) than to pay for 5 people at $8.90 per person (it's frankly outrageous there are no discounted BART tickets for kids unless they have a Clipper card). Plus there would have been the not-insignificant effort of walking 6 blocks to 16th & Mission (which is way up on the list of most sketchy BART stations) first…

After leaving Sequoia National Park, we headed across the central Californian valley towards Monterey, stopping for lunch in Fresno. Approaching Monterey we started to get excited, seeing the golden hills of California reminded us strongly of our time living in the Bay Area. Then we hit the bank of fog coming off the Pacific and remembered just how much the temperature can vary during the summer months in this part of the world. Camping might prove interesting. We'd just spent a couple of days of camping in Sequoia – and the previous days of camping were just before the unpleasant…

Las Vegas pretty much met my expectations (which were admittedly very low). After coming to the city 1-2 times a year for around 20 years for Autodesk conferences, it was strange coming back with my family. We initially struggled to get a room at late notice: between the Black Hat security conference, a huge basketball tournament and the World Poker Championships (plus probably 15 other events I'm not aware of) the city was pretty well booked. In the end we stayed at the Travelodge by McCarran, which was on the helicopter flight path for the airport. We had fun, though:…

Utah is an absolutely incredible place. We've spent the last week or so discovering some of its State and National Parks. As mentioned previously, we used Dead Horse Point State Park as our base for the first few days, from there visiting Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. We then hit the road and headed towards Bryce Canyon, passing through Capitol Reef and staying overnight outside Bryce at Cannonville, so that we could get in early for a first-come-first-serve camping spot. Our stay in Bryce went very well: after a couple of days we got up really early – packed and…

Our plan – as you can see from our website – was to spend some time in Grand Teton National Park before breaking the journey south to Bryce Canyon in Salt Lake City. That plan changed in Yellowstone: while in Mammoth Hot Springs we met a really nice family from Oregon who had some interesting advice about visiting the Arches and Canyonlands National Parks while using Dead Horse Point State Park as a base. Thanks, Dan and Meghan! So it was that we headed south through Grand Teton and even ultimately decided to power on through, rather than staying overnight…