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San Francisco
First view of San Francisco!
Dropping the car off 🙁
Crazy hills
Tiki bar at the Fairmont Hotel
Tram. Obviously.
Alcatraz
Ball game! Giants lost 🙁
July 4th fireworks
Posted from San Francisco, California, United States:
Napa Valley
Highway 1 and Monterey
McWay Waterfall
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Posted from BIG SUR, California, United States:
Hollywood/L.A.
We set off through the desert on our way to L.A., by now following the legendary Route 66 (I15), and came across this awesome place called Peggy Sue’s 50s Diner! It’s full of memorabilia, and has a diner section and a shop with loads of retro stuff for sale. Definitely worth the stop! We picked up a Kirk/Spock salt and pepper set for a friend’s birthday and had some really good food before getting back on the road.
The Mojave Desert is actually full of scrub and not at all like the sand dunes of the Sahara, but it is definitely very hot and we were glad of the air con. We passed places we’d heard of, like Baker (showing how hot it was with the biggest thermometer in the world), and others we hadn’t, like Zzyzx. Yeah. We were pretty sure the sign makers were just having an off day on that one, but it definitely exists.
We were feeling pretty tired by this point. Katherine was dozing in the passenger seat and I was trying to stay focussed on the road (it had been the other way around earlier in the day), but as we got closer to L.A. I got a bit of a waking up. The freeways around L.A. are a crazy, 6 lane wide, adrenaline pumping nightmare. At least, the first time you drive on them they are. I had the freeway scene from The Matrix Reloaded in my mind as huge cars and lorries weaved in and out of traffic, and was glad when we could get off!
We stayed in a hotel in Hollywood on Franklin Avenue, just north of Hollywood Boulevard. We wanted to be close to what we thought the main tourist attractions were, but it wasn’t quite the glamorous location we had expected. We went for a walk along Hollywood Blvd and saw the “Walk of Fame”, and to be honest, I can’t imagine anyone famous hanging around there for long. The Hollywood Heights shopping centre was nice enough though, adjoined to the Kodak Theatre where the Oscars are held. You can just about make out the Hollywood sign from the north side of it – during the day at least.
The next day we decided to go see the La Brea tar pits…
L.A. County Museum of Art
Griffith Observatory
Santa Monica
Venice Beach
Beverley Hills
In-n-Out Burger!
Hollywood “Walk of Fame”
Posted from Los Angeles, California, United States:
Las Vegas
We had planned to go to Zion National Park after Bryce, but when we tried to book accommodation for Las Vegas it was nowhere near as cheap as we thought it was going to be because we would be staying there over a weekend. The rates quadruple in a lot of places at the weekend, at least on The Strip which is where we wanted to stay so we could take a bit of a rest from driving. So we decided to sacrifice Zion and head to Las Vegas early, which was a shame but we had been to Antelope Canyon which made up for it.
We stayed at Bally’s Casino, which we’d never heard of but which is right next door to Paris and opposite the Bellagio, so we were in a perfect position to be able to walk to all the major casinos.
Vegas is pretty much a city plopped down in the middle of a desert, and the weather doesn’t let you forget it. Even the wind is hot. We had to keep ducking into casinos and shops to cool down, which wasn’t a problem as most of them are interconnected anyway.
The casinos and hotels are crazy; the smallest of the ones on The Strip have over 2000 rooms, and they really go all out on the décor. Bally’s was probably the least interesting one there, but we could walk through to Paris which was awesome – like Disneyland for adults (without the rides, although New York New York has a rollercoaster). There are shopping malls in almost every hotel (a lot of which have exactly the same shops it must be said), but they’re all different styles to go with the hotel.
We thought it might be a fairly tacky place to be honest, but everything is so polished in the big hotels that it’s actually quite nice. We never made it downtown though, so our experience might be biased.
Katherine had planned a surprise for me the day after we arrived. She had us waiting in the hotel lobby when a limo with “The Little White Wedding Chapel” on the side turned up! It whisked us off to the chapel, where we renewed our vows in a small ceremony. It was amazing and totally unexpected, which surprised Katherine as she thought the game had been given away 😛
After that, Katherine decided she wanted to shoot something. Yeah, I thought it was a strange connection too! We drove to a gun range where you can pick from a load of different guns and just fire away. Katherine asked which gun would be best for a girl and was recommended a Beretta. I chose a Glock 17. Other people there had sprung for the more expensive machine guns, and I think we would have left the place deaf if we hadn’t been wearing ear protectors. Katherine says she’s mildly scared by how good I was, but everyone knows Katherine is the one to fear if she picks up a gun 😉
Going home!
We’re on our way home now, just about to board the flight, but there are still a few blog entries to come. We just haven’t been very good at keeping up!
Bryce Canyon
Working our way back west, we came to Bryce Canyon. You’d think we’d be bored of canyons by now – seen one, seen them all, right? – but the landscape varies so much between them that it’s worth the time to stop.
Bryce is famous for its “hoodoos” (I can’t help but think of the film Labyrinth when I hear that), which are tall pillars that look like stone turrets. The rock is orange, pink and white and the the place looks like something out of a fantasy novel.
Detour to Antelope Canyon
We hadn’t quite realised how close we were to Antelope Canyon, when we looked on google maps it put it somewhere completely different.
When we realised that we could make a simple detour to see it we thought, why the heck not!
The evening before we visited the canyon we watched the sun set over Lake Powell from a hill in Page. It was beautiful and lovely to be chilling out rather than on the road for once.
The canyon itself is incredible. The colours in the rock are amazing, especially when the sunlight comes down in beams, and the shapes the water and wind have made are stunning. It’s become a very popular destination, so the tours get a little busy.
We were driven out to the canyon in a group of covered “monster trucks” along a long sandy road, past cows trying to find grass in the dunes. We had a guide that took us through the canyon, and wasn’t shy about telling us exactly what we should be taking photos of – “you’re going to stand here and take a vertical shot”!
The next morning we went to have a look at the “Horseshoe Bend”, which is a point overlooking the Colorado River near Page and is very impressive. The colours are beautiful, and probably not done justice in this picture!
The Grand Canyon
We decided to visit the North rim of the Grand Canyon as:
A) it was on route up to the other canyons and we were too lazy to drive to the South rim.
B) only 10% of visitors to the Grand Canyon go to the North rim and we wanted to be the cool kids who didn’t follow the crowd.
C) the North rim is higher and therefore cooler than the South rim so although the atmosphere is thinner and I am more likely to get burnt I will at least not be so hot whilst it’s happening.
The Grand Canyon is HUGE! It’s really hard to gauge how big it really is as the Colorado River looks soooo tiny.
We were lucky as it was a fairly clear day and we could see the distant Californian Hills on the horizon.
I also learnt something new about Matt… he isn’t great with heights that overlook massive drops, it was kinda cute that he was a bit nervous 🙂
Monument Valley
Next stop Monument Valley just a few hours from Arches.
It’s a bit of an odd place really, the rocks are very similar to what we had already seen in Arches but far more eroded so you are left with isolated towers of rocks rather than interconnecting rock ridges and hills.
You don’t need to enter the Indian Reserve as you can see the iconic rock formations from the highway but we wanted a closer look.
Now this would have been the perfect time to have a 4×4 as the lady at the entrance looked a little doubtful that our Ford Fusion would cope with the rough unpaved road, and she was right!
Matt was my trusty copilot and he did a fantastic job at keeping me calm and not panicking as I navigated the huge pot holes…
I have to admit that on one awful bit of steep downhill road I managed to scrape the bottom of car in a pot hole not meant for anything other than monster trucks, but no major damage was done, phew!
I sadly had to come back that way and I was dreading it. The rock formations are pretty impressive when you’re closer and definitely worth the horrid road we had to drive along.
On the way back along the road we managed to find a mini diversion to the pot holes so I didn’t beat up the car again 🙂
