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USA 2018

October - December 2018
Beast of the east and the best of the west Read more
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  • TravelerUSA 2018
    Day 11

    Across to California

    October 29, 2018 in the United States ⋅ ⛅ 29 °C

    Up at 5am, dropped off the car and headed to the airport. Checked in with no dramas, and our flight was on time. All good. Flew cross-country with Alaska which are actually a proper airline, so we had reasonable seats and an actual meal! Schnitzel behaved himself this time except for one time when a little girl ran down the aisle and he barked at her. We were also the luckiest people on the plane! It was a full flight so we had a person next to us, but as soon as the seatbelt sign went off she spoke to a stewardess and moved up to first class, meaning we had a spare seat! Score.

    Landed in California where it was thankfully much warmer than the north-east. Picked up our car for the next six weeks and hit the freeway. First stop was lunch at In-N-Out Burger which I'd rank below Five Guys but above Shake Shack. A couple more hours of freeway driving across LA and out into the desert where we arrived at Palm Springs. This is basically a retirement city for California's gay population, though we only worked that out after retiring.

    Quite a pleasant town and we had a nice meal on the main street in the evening air. Though I ordered the "appetiser" size of nachos which turned out to be a baking tray sized serve, about two inches high. I spent the next couple of days digesting it.    Read more

  • TravelerUSA 2018
    Day 12

    Joshua Tree & Phoenix

    October 30, 2018 in the United States ⋅ ☀️ 27 °C

    Drove eastward out of Palm Springs, through the Joshua Tree national park. Very beautiful desert landscapes. Kept heading eastwards into the desert and eventually arrived in Phoenix late afternoon. Had a quick look around, but it's not exactly a tourist stop so we retired early.Read more

  • TravelerUSA 2018
    Day 13

    East to El Paso

    October 31, 2018 in the United States ⋅ ⛅ 16 °C

    Lots more driving today. Headed south-east out of Phoenix and across more desert. Stopped briefly in Tucson to check out the Boneyard - an air force base where all the decommissioned aircraft are stored. Miles and miles of huge aircraft just wrapped up in plastic - a very strange sight!

    Arrived in El Paso in the late afternoon, checked in, and then headed into town for dinner. It was strangely dead, though since it's literally on the border I think there's curfews in place of some sort. Couldn't find anywhere promising to eat, so we eventually drove back basically to where we were staying and ate at a Mexican restaurant across the road. It was nice, though my burrito was literally just meat filling - tasty but a bit overwhelming. Oh well!    Read more

  • TravelerUSA 2018
    1
    Day 14

    Carlsbad Caverns

    November 1, 2018 in the United States ⋅ ☀️ 10 °C

    Headed east from El Paso for a few hours of driving, then turned north back into New Mexico from Texas. Time for our first World Heritage site on the west coast - Carlsbad Caverns! First on the agenda was lunch from the cafeteria, which was really tasty Mexican food at a good price, so we were quite happy with that.

    We opted for the "natural entrance" route into the Caverns - a two hour downhill hike which was very impressive. We arrived at the main chamber which is enormous, though only the fifth-largest in the world or something, but still quite a sight to behold. The whole interior of the cave was covered with stalagtites, stalagmites, jellyfish rocks, and various other things. I've seen decorated caves before, and large caves before, but never quite such an impressive combination. A great stop all up.

    Back to the car where we drove north to Roswell, the infamous site of a "UFO" crash in 1947. It was of course actually a weather balloon, but covered up by the government since the weather balloon was observing nuclear tests. Lots of alien kitsch around as you'd expect.

    In the evening Shandos realised that our next stop, Taos Pueblo, which we'd planned to visit the day after tomorrow, was actually going to be closed! It's still an active Native American community and they close for feasts, funerals etc. So our only option really was to drive for six hours up there, have a look around, then the two hours drive back to Santa Fe and have the following day off. Yikes. But at least Shandos checked - the alternative would've really sucked!!    Read more

  • TravelerUSA 2018
    1
    Day 15

    Taos Pueblo

    November 2, 2018 in the United States ⋅ ☀️ 7 °C

    Super long day. We left Roswell around 8am and drove north across super empty landscapes. Very flat and boring, not quite desert but not agricultural land either. I suppose there are hidden cattle ranches off in the distance somewhere, but nothing really to see.

    After six hours we finally arrived at Taos Pueblo, the oldest continuously occupied settlement in North America. It actually pre-dates Columbus by several hundred years! Lots of adobe buildings, constructed into apartments which was quite interesting. A big church too, though the tour guide we had said their Catholicism was really just "interpreting" their traditional tribal religion. So tomorrow's "feast of St Anthony" or whatever was actually just their harvest festival, they just renamed it that to please the Spanish.

    Got our video done, then drove the couple of hours back to Santa Fe where we got takeaway Chinese and collapsed into bed. At least we don't have much to do tomorrow!    Read more

  • TravelerUSA 2018
    1
    Day 16

    Relaxing & Exploring Santa Fe

    November 3, 2018 in the United States ⋅ ☀️ 8 °C

    After our super long day yesterday we didn't feel like doing much. So we mostly hung around the hotel room and worked, though we did have a couple of hours out to look around Santa Fe. It's got some really interesting frontier-style architecture, a mix of adobe and native styles. Quite cool! Also the highest state capital in the USA.Read more

  • TravelerUSA 2018
    Day 17

    Chaco Canyon

    November 4, 2018 in the United States ⋅ ☀️ 10 °C

    Our next WHS for the trip was another native American site, located in a place called Chaco Canyon. This was way off the map, and required driving about 15 miles down what a ranger called the worst road in America - very rough and unpaved!

    It was definitely worth it though, the Chaco Culture sites were really interesting. It was a series of huge dwellings (towns, really) scattered through a canyon. There were also a bunch of temples known as kiwa too, one of which we toured with a very enthusiastic ranger. It must be an exciting but frustrating field to study in, since the original inhabitants are long gone (the sites were occupied around 1000-1300 AD), and of course left no written records. It's not really even known who their descendants are, though it's assumed modern local tribes like the Pueblo and the Hopi are among them.

    After spending a few hours here and filming our video we drove back out of the canyon and across to a town called Farmington, about the largest settlement in this corner of New Mexico. Lucky for us there was a local brewery where we stopped in for a pint and some dinner!    Read more

  • TravelerUSA 2018
    Day 18

    Mesa Verde

    November 5, 2018 in the United States ⋅ ☀️ 7 °C

    Up and out and heading north across into Colorado today, as we visited Mesa Verde National Park - site number 400 for me! Another exciting milestone.

    The site was quite interesting, though a bit similar to yesterday's Chaco Canyon. This was a collection of cliff dwellings - some large communities, others small and modest ones, but they were all located in over-hung cliffs. Very similar style to what we'd seen yesterday but still fascinating. Unfortunately we couldn't go down into these ones, as the tours had finished for the season (they get a lot of snow up here and it was impending in the next few weeks), so we had to content ourselves with just looking from atop the mesas. But still great.

    Northwards in the late afternoon to Cortez where we stayed the night, our only night in Colorado.    Read more

  • TravelerUSA 2018
    1
    Day 19

    Monument Valley and Williams

    November 6, 2018 in the United States ⋅ ☀️ 14 °C

    Heading back westwards now from Colorado, we drove for a few hours through basically empty desert. Eventually we arrived at Monument Valley and took lots of photos of the buttes. Also got some good shots at a place known as Forrest Gump Point - this is where in the movie, Forrest Gump decides he's had enough running across America, and just stops. It's quite an epic spot, with the road stretching out for miles directly straight in front of you, with the red desert either side and the hills of Monument Valley in the distance.

    Was a bit disappointed that you can't go right into Monument Valley proper anymore without paying $20 per car, which we thought was way too steep. Apparently there's a long 18 mile round trip you can do, but the track is very rough and not that great. So we turned around - I definitely don't remember that from 1992!

    We crossed into Arizona and kept heading south-west, though pulled off the highway at a sign reading "dinosaur prints". It delivered - lots of dinosaur footprints in the rock, even some fossilised eggs and a partial velociraptor skeleton as well! Definitely worth the $10 tip we gave our "guide".

    Finally arrived in Williams just after sunset. It was apparently the last place in America to get a freeway bypass for Route 66, and so is full of kitsch 50s Americana and the like. We were a bit tired and didn't buy in, just grabbed some McDonalds and headed to our Motel 6. Right next door to the Comfort Inn, which featured in our 1992 travels!    Read more

  • TravelerUSA 2018
    1
    Day 20

    Grand Canyon

    November 7, 2018 in the United States ⋅ ☀️ 18 °C

    Big day today - one of the most famous places on earth! We headed out quite early, knowing that we still had to cover an hour of driving from Williams before arriving. As expected, we were a bit limited in what we could do, because a lot of places are only reachable via the shuttle bus, and you can't take pets on the shuttle bus!

    So we did what most people do: wander around the south rim trail near the Village and Visitor's Centre, since Schnitzel was allowed there. Boggled at a few people climbing fences to take better selfies - after a couple had literally died doing exactly that only a couple of weeks earlier.

    Spent much of the rest of the day driving eastwards along the south rim, stopping at the various outlooks and watching the face of the canyon change as the sun moved. It was much as I remembered it - like looking at a huge painting. Large, colossal, empty, silent (except for yammering tourists). Since it was November it wasn't super busy, and there were plenty of places where it was just us, or maybe 1-2 other couples. I'd estimate in general actually that most places here on the west coast are at about 30-40% capacity, which is pretty nice. We also spotted a bit of wildlife on our drive - a large male deer grazing just off the road, and later a coyote hanging around a carpark evidently expecting scraps from someone's picnic! Thankfully Schnitzel was safely in the car.

    Late afternoon we hurried back to the visitor centre area, hoping to find a nice relaxing place to watch sunset. We didn't quite find a quiet isolated spot, but managed to see the sunset from a few areas nonetheless. Then it was just the long dark drive back to Williams where we had dinner at the local brewery - of course.    Read more

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