Leg 2: Canada and the United States

5612km

12 US States

1 Canadian Province

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I had initially began thinking about the idea behind “The Long Road Tour” in mid 2009 but had never actually sat down and seriously gone over a definite route, I enjoyed looking over options for where I would like to visit if I were to actually do this, Starting in Australia and finishing In the Netherlands opened up two options in terms of direction for us, to head west through Asia and the Middle East, or east across the USA.

Not wanting to push our luck to much while convincing friends and family that our tour was a good idea we decided the USA option was our best option and also opened up charity opportunities with Livestrong and Michael J Fox Foundation in the USA.

We were always going to be heading from the west to the east and New York seemed like the logical end point, but where to start..... I have always wanted to visit Seattle and Portland so our start locations were also settled.

Our initial route across the country had us flying in to LA and jumping on the train to get us to our start point in Portland, then up to Seattle before we head east towards New York, via Lake Michigan and Toronto but after reviewing our route we decided to make a few changes mainly to the start and end of the leg.

We will now be starting our North American leg in Vancouver Canada, and through a mix of riding and ferries will make our way to Seattle via Vancouver Island, then down to Portland before heading east. Starting in Canada eliminated the need for multiple border crossings to and from the USA which should make things a little less complicated.

Now I tend to spend a little too much time looking over various cities and towns that we may pass through or stop in, and it was this that led to changes made to the later part of the US leg, Having moved our time in Canada to the start of the leg and reading a number of unsavoury things about some of the locations we would be passing through on our way to Toronto (Now I'm sure these places are actually not that bad, maybe I should stop reading so much otherwise we may not go anywhere.), we decided to move our route a little further south bellow the great lakes and head directly east to New York.

The new route will also hopefully allow us to meet up with some people who have followed us from quite early on.

We are also hoping to hold some sort of fundraising event at the end of our American leg in New York to benefit our US charities.

From there it is off to Leg 3 of the tour..... Europe!