In 1991 my wife (to be) and I decided to go to to the U.S. We took the train to Copenhagen, spent the evening at "Tivoli" and stayed the night at a misionary hotel!?! The next day we got on the plane for L.A.

The first week in L.A. we visited some friends of ours. We went out looking for a suitable car for the roundtrip. I already knew what I was looking for. It's always been a goal to cruise around in a Cadillac Eldorado with the top down. When I stopped at a traffic light I saw such a car in a sidestreet. I phoned the number on the for sale sign on the windshield and a short while later I had bought it from an aussie living in Hollywood. It was in fair shape with a 8,2 litre engine.

Then it was time to set out for Montana. We revisited some favourite places along the way such as Sequoia National Forest and Yosemite Valley, the most beautiful place on earth I think. We slept in the car one night in Kings Canyon, unaware of the bears roaming the carparks looking for food left in cars. On to Lassen Volcanic Park and Mt. St. Helens, a volcano that had a very big eruption ten years earlier that blew half of the mountain away. Trees blown to the ground by the bang still lay there for miles around .

In Bend, a little town in Oregon we stopped for the night ready to go eastward the next day. At a chinese restaurant I got this note in a fortune cookie saying "You're standing at a fork in the road". Later in the motel I read in a newspaper that the greatest country singer ever, Merle Haggard was giving a concert in Portland so the next day we went westward instead, win or lose. We managed to get tickets and the show was a near religious experience for me.

We crossed the plains of Washington (I always thought this would be deep forests) then the troubles started. When we bought the car it wouldn't run under a quarter tank of gas because of a clogged fuel filter.The car also had another little problem because the former owner had drilled a little hole in the trunk to drain the water that always leaks in from the ragtop. What he forgot was that it was a fuel tank under the floor which he also drilled a hole in.This caused the car to smell of gasolin when we topped it off. I tried to fix this with a bubblegum but it didn't work so well. So when we started climbing the Rocky Mountain roads in Idaho the car ran really bad and we had to stop several times not knowing if we would get over the mountain passes. There weren't any towns around, not even small ones. We had to drive really slow and finally reached the top, the continental devide on the border between Idaho and Montana.

Montana, the state that IS what the rest of the states wish they still were. We fixed the car at a gas station with the help of a little compressed air and could continue down to Wyoming and Yellowstone National Park. Seeing "Old Faithful" the geyser was one of the biggest letdowns on the trip. A giant tourist trap instead of a natural wonder. Then on to Denver, Colorado and up in the Rockies again. We drove over the highest pass on the trip (3750 m.) and through some very beutiful scenery with the aspens in their yellow fall colours.

Monument Valley and Grand Canyon (The worlds largest ditch.) Then back to L.A. and got the car in a container and shipped home to Sweden.

We took the train to New Orleans, spent the evening on Bourbon Street and went on to Atlanta the next day. Rented a car to go up to Tennessee and Lexington, Kentucky a city known for its horse racing stables. We saw some dragracing (Fall Nationals) in Bristol and a Nascar race in Charlotte, North Carolina with 185.000 other spectators.

Nashville, The Mecca of country music was the next stop and another big thing for me was The Hall of Fame and The Hank Williams Museum. All good things must come to an end so it was back to Atlanta to fly home. Eight months later our daughter Jessica Montana was born.