This series will go country by country through my two-year trip. I plan on sharing some experiences, thoughts, and photos of each country that I visited.

Country by Country 21: U.S.A.

After spending around 4 months in Vietnam, it was time to move on. My family was having a reunion in California, so I flew out to the USA to see everyone. I think it had been around 2 or 3 years since my last visit to the States.

The reunion only lasted for a few days. After the reunion was finished, I flew down to Los Angeles to meet up with some friends that I hadn't seen in years. After that, I flew to Guatemala for a few months of Spanish classes. I went to Colombia after that, but I had a 4-day layover in San Antonio, Texas to visit my friend. I'll include some of those photos too.

I got to see my nephews when I got back. My friend from Vietnam had given me these masks as a gift.

My family rented a big house for the reunion. The house came with a fully equipped game room. Most of us "kids" spent the majority of our time there.

Here's my nephew playing air hocky.

The house was on a cliff overlooking the ocean. It had a pool and a ping-pong table.

There was a feeding frenzy in the water.

This is the view from a restaurant in the area.

After the reunion, I flew down to L.A. and rented a car. I grew up in the San Bernardino area, so I went out there to see some of my friends.

We went to Dave and Buster's to play some shuffleboard.

Shuffleboard is my favorite bar game, but not that many places have it because the tables are so big.

This was one of the highlights of my trip back to America. An authentic SoCal breakfast burrito with 4 kinds of salsa, pickled beets and carrots, and a cup of horchata.

I visited some other friends out in the Mojave desert area.

I use an HDR mode on my phone that takes 3 pictures and merges them together. This one turned out pretty funny. It gave my friend an extra mouth.

We ate at a restaurant across the street from this place. It's called a "Bottle Forrest", but it looks a lot like a junkyard to me.

During the summer, one of the skiing areas converts to a big frisbee golf course. We played all the holes and only lost a couple of the frisbees.

Taking a break from the frisbee golfing.

After golf, we went camping in the desert.

It's pretty dry and hot out here.

While we were hanging out at our campground, these guys came into our campsite with their horses. They were a little weird and were giving a strange vibe. They must have stood around talking about how hot one of their daughters was for 10 minutes. They left after a while and I asked my friend to keep his gun close, in case they came back in the night. They didn't.

We went on a short hike in the morning.

After a couple of weeks in California, I went back to LAX to return my rental car and to fly to Guatemala. This is a picture that I took at the car rental place.

A few months later, I came back to the USA for a short visit with a friend that I'd made in Germany. He was living in San Antonio, Texas. International airline tickets are crazy expensive in South America. Going from Guatemala to Colombia would have only been a little cheaper than making a layover in San Antonio for a few days. So I made a stop in San Antonio to see my friend.

I had never been to San Antonio before and I didn't know that it had this cool riverwalk area. It's a very pretty downtown for an American city.

My friend that I stayed with.

We met up with some other friends and did some pretty serious drinking. I ended up half-way falling into the river that runs through downtown.

This is a natural stone bridge that we saw.

This is one of the few cavern photos that actually looks ok.

That's about it for my trips to the U.S.A. I didn't take many photos, but I had a fun time seeing my loved ones. In my next post, I'll share some of my photos from Guatemala.