An unforgettable summer, a New Mexico road trip and what’s next for the GlobetrotterGirls

Last Updated on October 22, 2024

With articles on Argentina and New York, Polaroids from Tucson and our last official update three months ago, we realized that those of you who don’t get our newsletter might have no idea where we actually are.

What we’ve been up to

Back in April, sitting in Puerto Iguazu, Argentina, we made the decision to return to North America and Europe for the summer to take a much-needed rest. We accepted a housesit in New York, we would live in Berlin for a month, housesit in Tucson afterwards and rest up for the hectic second half of our overland travel through South America starting again in October.

It turns out, we are terrible at resting. It’s about time we caught you up with where we are, where we’re going and where exactly we’ve been. So here’s how our ‘break’ really looked:

Two months living in Brooklyn Heights, New York, we stepped right in to the fast pace and explored the city top to bottom. In May there were still some chilly days and some rain, but June…

Just once – if you can – visit New York in June, when even New Yorkers have an extra swing in their step and the weather is in between spring showers and the melting heat of August.

Next up was a week spent apart. I was in Colorado visiting my best friend who was very pregnant and Dani spent an extra week in Germany with family before we met and headed to Berlin for five glorious weeks. June in Berlin can still be quite chilly but July…

Just once – if you can – visit Berlin in July, when young and old, tattooed and not tattooed (basically, that was only us) lay out in parks, chat or work in cafes by day and do the same in trendy restaurants, pubs and clubs by night. Instead of resting, Berlin was all about working hard and playing harder. Here we had tons of built-in friends and fellow digital nomads, and eventually a tight-knit group of us spent time racing back and forth between East and West Berlin, spending evenings together at open-air cinemas, dinners and beer fests. It was a summer we’ll never forget.

Then we hit the road and traveled for two weeks throughout Germany visiting friends and family until flying back to New York City mid-August. This time was only for four days before flying to Tucson to housesit.

Throughout the summer, Tucson had become a mirage, an oasis in the desert. We’ll rest in Tucson, we told ourselves. We’ll sit by the pool and relax, we’ll work and play with our dog Millie, and just recover. And that’s almost what we did.

Except we took day trips down to Tubac, hiked Sabino Canyon, visited Saguaro National Park and re-visited the old pueblo (Tucson’s historic downtown) and Mission San Xavier.

We also worked our tails off. We were interviewed twice on Rudy Maxa’s World – a syndicated radio show which goes out to 700,000 listeners, were in talks and made a show reel for a possible reality TV show, worked on new projects, recorded new Break Free podcast interviews, made major headway with our exciting new website redesign (coming this Fall!), launched our new Escape Route travel planning service and we also wrote about travel like crazy.

New Mexico road trip 2013 #2girls1chevy

During this time plans for a New Mexico road trip also crystallized. What was meant to be a two-week road trip through New Mexico has now evolved into an 19-day trip from Tucson to Chicago via Denver. Whenever we plan a road trip, it always grows and becomes an epic journey, like our 2011 NYC2NOLA road trip, when we meant to drive from New York to New Orleans. Instead we drove from Ottawa, Canada up through Montreal and Quebec City, down to Boston and then through the East, Southeast, to New Orleans and then up through Memphis and onward to Chicago. For our travel style, one-way car rental drop-offs are just easier and cheaper than two flights and returning the car to its pick-up location, so we always drive to a final destination rather than return the car and fly.

We left Tucson and began our New Mexico road trip last Friday and so far, the road trip has been a blast (especially with our double upgrade with free sat nav and Sirius satellite radio)!

New Mexico has so much to offer to those who make the trip here! Some things, like the alien obsession here in Roswell, feel quirky, but the landscape and natural monuments are what make New Mexico truly otherworldly. In just the first five days of the road trip, we have seen the Gila Cliff Dwellings, hiked across the incredible White Sands sand dunes, seen thousands of bats flying out of Carlsbad Caverns at dusk and then the next day, climbed down, down, down into the Earth and through the caves for three hours – mind blowing! We also drove for hours across southern New Mexico through tiny towns like Hatch, Carrizozo, Socorro and saw the Trinity Site, where the first nuclear bomb was detonated in 1945.

What’s next for us

After Roswell, we’re off for a night in Las Vegas (the one here in New Mexico) before spending time in Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Taos. If you have any tips for any of these places, we’d love you to share them in the comments below.

We’ll then take the back roads to Denver to again visit my best friend, this time with her brand new little baby, before beginning the last two day slog through the cornfields of Nebraska and Iowa into Chicago. Recommendations for roadside attractions or must see curiosities much appreciated – near or along the I 80!

Follow along on Facebook with our Photo of the Day, or at #2girls1chevy on Twitter and Instagram, where we’ve got photos and videos of the fun little things that make the essence of a great road trip!

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