Month: July 2011

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

McWay Waterfall

Monterey Bay Aquarium

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”

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 😉

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!

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.