Author: matt

The flight was fairly uneventful, although a bit of frequent flyer residual status ensured that I got a crew rest seat on the plane, which is basically a big cushy fully reclining seat in a private area of the plane, much to the frustration of most of the other passengers. Arrived in Miami and met up with Morten who promptly took me to a local pub for a couple of hours, in sight of the runway so we could see when Steve’s plane landed in, then we went and met him too!

The first night we spent on Morten’s deck drinking copious amounts of wine with his girlfriend Johanna, next day wandered up and down Miami Beach and went out in the evening with Javier, another old Kenan cronie. Next day we headed off to Key West and landed ourselves a great little motel pretty much in the middle of downtown, Steve organised a fishing trip for the following day and myself a two-tank dive onto a wreck. The wind has been up the last few days so the seas were rough, but visibility was still pretty decent underwater and had a good couple of dives, coming across a monster size ray and moray eel just sitting there minding their own businesses. Steve’s boat also had a pretty decent catch, Steve catching some kind of sail fish which is apparently a once in a lifetime event, but declined to fork out the $1000 dollars or so required to have it stuffed and put in a show case…

Hit the town that night, there’s some great bars all around the marina area which we duly crawled around, me lasting only until 2am or so but Steve making it to the full 4am mark. Apart from the wind the weather was nice enough, mostly sunny and about the 87 region, and the humidity wasn’t as bad as it could have been, maybe due to the wind or something.

Now we are back in Miami at Morten’s place again, about to cook some of Steve’s “catch of the day” on the barbie. Tomorrow we’ll take his boat out weather permitting, then the drag starts of packing up our stuff. Incidentally, I’m returning the phone I borrowed and don’t think mine will work in South America, so I maybe out of phone contact for the next 6 weeks or so.

Oh, and if anyone is flying from Miami to the UK in the next 4 months and has space for a 60 lb duffel bag in their luggage, please let me know 🙂

Zion was pretty impressive, although we didn’t really do proper justice to it as we were short on time and still pretty tired out from the Grand Canyon hike. Then we hit Vegas, and it is certainly as glitzy and tacky as you imagine it would be! Had a couple of fairly hard nights out, one with Eric, Iain’s old flat mate from Denver. We had a cheap motel right in the middle of The Strip so it was all fairly handy.

Rushing now, in LAX airport waiting for a plane… From Vegas we went to San Diego, had a great couple of nights in Pacific Beach. The high point perhaps was the evening in Tijuana across the Mexican border, we went down for a couple of drinks, ended up staggering back through the border at 2am or something, both of us fully spread-eagled against some railings getting frisked by Mexican plods, then a full grilling from the US immigration people about which we can hardly remember anything..

Last night in LA, but didn’t do much apart from drive through Beverly Hills and Hollywood.

Must go, just time for one more red wine before the flight!

New Mexico was great, and gave a pleasant injection of culture over the rest of the States so far. Spent the first night in Taos, full of adobe-walled buildings from the Pueblo Indian tribes. Just outside the village is the Indian settlement of Taos Pueblo, a very weird looking place. The weather was well up into the 80’s as well so was also a vast improvement from recent times. Also just outside the town is the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, allegedly the second highest suspension bridge in the US at 620 feet or something (strange, as it is not actually a suspension bridge….) Anyone who’s seen Natural Born Killers would recognise it as the bridge on which they get married. This featured another legendary night out, we met an English guy called Bob who was shit faced and took us to a couple of places and we ended up mingling with a load of locals.

Next we moved onto Santa Fe for a couple of nights, also a pleasant town but a bit lacking in bar life for us. We spent the day there white water rafting the Rio Grande. Then we travelled West on I-40 to Flagstaff in Arizona, about 80 miles South of the Grand Canyon. This was a great town, also with fantastic weather and plenty of bars and night life. There is a railway going though the centre of town with a 1-mile long goods train coming through about once every 15 minutes, all day and all night. They blow their sirens every block as they go over the level crossings of the main streets, also all day and all night. How the hell anyone lives there is beyond me..

Then the momentous cock-up happened – we called the Grand Canyon to try for accommodations the following night. It turns out you need to book up 2 years in advance and the best they could do it wait list us. For this we needed to show up at 6:15 am at the Canyon rim so see if we were successful or not. We duly woke up at 4:15 to give us time to get there, showed up only to discover that it was 5:15 when we got there. After much puzzlement we found out that Arizona does not do summer time and so we had spent the last 3 days an hour out from what we expected, D’OH!!! This was annoying realising that we had in fact woken at 3:15 and could have had an extra hour in bed… I suppose we should have guessed by the fact that the clock in the bar the previous night was wrong by an hour, as was the automatic clock on the phone…

Anyway we got in, and it was well worth it. We hiked for 3 hours down the South Kaibab trail to the river in the base of the canyon, some 4,800 feet below. We had 2 beds in a dormitory down there which was very comfortable apart from the fact they wake you at 4:30 am and check out is 7:30, just what you need after being up since 3:30 the night before and hiking nearly a mile vertically downwards.. Then we began the ascent out of the canyon, up the Bright Angel trail, which was absolutely brutal, especially in the 90 degree temperatures. But the views were fantastic on the way up, just as they were on the way down of course. This took us 5 hours which is actually a pretty decent time. It was amazing how many people we saw heading down without any water or packs of any kind, how the hell they got back out is a mystery.

Last night we travelled back into Utah, stopping off at the impressive Glen Canyon dam across the canyon and the Colorado River. The town is Kanab, we had to drive a few miles out back over the Arizona border to get a beer as we are back in Mormon territory here (see postings from near the start of the trip!)

Must dash now, we’re heading out to Zion National Park and Las Vegas tonight.

We saw Kill Bill, and as it’s now open in the UK I can spoil the plot – she kill’s Bill. There you go…

Arapahoe Basin had 2 or 3 inches of new snow so was in pretty good condition by and large. I was on a death mission and was practising launching myself off a 5ft cornice onto rather icy snow which was great fun.. Other than that it’s been a fairly quiet weekend spent just hanging about with Iain and Wendy, including an Indian restaurant last night which was a strategic mistake on Iain’s part considering we’re staying in his house. You learn by your mistakes, as they say.

As promised it’s photo time! This was the “Double O” arch at Arches National Park.

 

and another shot of it through the middle.

You’re not allowed to walk on them but what the hell. This is a stark contrast between the 80 degree heat there and the mountains beyond.

At Capitol Reef there is a 1,000ft drop just beside my left foot. The weather was so good we wished we’d hiked up with the tent and camped there, but never mind.

We seen surprisingly little wildlife on the whole trip really, but we did see some at Tahoe.

The locals were surprisingly friendly as well.

A neat feature of Tahoe is the ability to ski across the stateline, on the Nevada side are where all the big casinos are at. Our motel was actually about 50 yards on the California side so was all very handy…

Here were the Essex guys and girls, Michelle, Justine and Steve.

Next, in Yosemite were the Vernal Falls, the guy standing at the top gives you some idea of the scale.

Onto some city life and the usual San Franciso sights, the Golden Gate of course.

Steve had had enough of me at one stage! (see sign above phone)

This is Alcatraz from a boat (fairly obviously).

Here is one of the cells where Frank Morris and those guys escaped from a la Clint Eastwood film, supposedly preserved as it was left at the time.

And finally one of the famous cable cars that run up and down the steep hills. We did catch one of these for the purposes of meeting Ray and Beata at a boozer, so we actually felt a bit less like tourists by catching one for a real transport reason!

On the way up the coast we stopped off at the giant Redwoods, these things grow in excess of 300 feet tall.

Next in Oregon this is Crater Lake, on top of an extinct volcano and still under at least 6 feet of snow when we were there.

In Washington state we did our backcountry camping trip, here is dinner cooking in the campfire, note the two steaks on the hot rocks in front with two super-heated baked potatoes behind somewhere.

During the night you have to hang your packs to keep them safe from the hungry bears who would have loved to tuck into our steaks, followed by us for dessert.

These next shots are from Yellowstone, this is some of the small amount of wildlife we’ve seen the whole trip, a bison and a deer thingy.

We did see thousands of these mind you, but no bears sadly. Further south in the park, the Beehive geyser, it only blows once a day and we got there just before it did. Once again the people give a sense of scale, it blows 180 ft into the air.

Then Old Faithful went shortly afterwards. We were so lucky here, in addition to getting the timing of the geysers right, they’d only opened the road after it’s winter closure to this area the day before we were there!

Right, that’s quite enough of that for now. We’re busy packing up before a final night on the razz with Joe and Iain, then in the morning we leave for New Mexico.

Back in Denver at Iain’s place. We managed to wangle a week’s free membership at a local gym so we have the chance to be active once more. Today we’re going to hit the climbing wall probably and then finally to see Kill Bill. We got 2 or 3 inches of snow build up in Denver over the course of last night so with any luck we’ll be hitting Arapahoe Basin tomorrow for a good final day’s skiing. They should get quite a build up there, as it’s over 13,000 feet at the top of the lifts.

I’ve offloaded the photos from my camera of the road trip so far, will sort through them later and upload a few choice ones.

Made it to the town of Gardiner just at the North gate of Yellowstone Park. Crossed through two more states to do this, Idaho and Montana. This turned out to be a cool little town really, we got a nice motel for virtually nothing and ended up doing a crawl of various local bars where we were once again the objects of much curiosity. We ended up getting a lock-in at one place until 3-15 with the bar maid making us free cocktails and JD and Coke’s…

Then we found we had totally lucked out with the park, just the day before the road through to the Old Faithful geyser was opened, would have been a bit of a tragedy had that been shut. So we hiked for one day in the hope of seeing wild life but saw bugger all, then the next day went to Old Faithful. We again lucked out with the timing, within 10 mins of arriving the nearby “beehive” geyser shot it’s load which it only does once a day, 180 feet into the air. Then 20 minutes after that the Old Faithful blew off too, which only goes about once every 90 minutes.

Now we are in Jackson, which is the hub of some ski resorts in Wyoming, but they’re shut, there’s no hiking, biking, rafting, climbing, fishing or pretty much anything to do, as the winter season has shut here and the summer one is not yet open. There’s sod all on telly either really… We did do a short hike through a snow caked trail to see a frozen lake which was, well, frozen really. Now we’re about to go out and try and find a restaurant that’s open, then we’re going to see Kill Bill vol II, I’ll be spoiling the plot tomorrow for those in the UK as it’s not yet open there 🙂

Going to do a long day driving back to Denver tomorrow, there’s not much else to see en route.

Amazingly it was a fairly quiet one last night (i.e. we got home at 1:30am) but still quite capable of walking. So before Vancouver we were in Whistler for a couple of days in Janet’s cabin, very nice up there and a fantastic view of the slopes from the balcony, but in a way that was a bad thing as it put me off skiing as the conditions looked pretty crap up there. Steve went, and indeed it was fairly crap apparently.

Today we start the long journey back south, we’re not sure what route to take yet but it may be over the Canadian Rockies or south to Seattle and then east. We’re heading for Yellowstone ultimately.

More updates tomorrow as I have to run for dinner with some people we know in Vancouver. It’s my birthday today so…… HELP!

A quick one from Whistler in Canada – we have the use of Janet’s cabin share which is a nice change from a motel for a few days. Janet is a friend of Steve’s he met in Alaska a few years ago. Crossed the border yesterday having done a night backcountry camping 9 miles into Olympic National Park which was also quite an experience. You have to suspend your food from the trees to stop the bears getting it!

The previous night we spent in the town of Bellingham just south of the border, but not a lot else of any note to report from Washington. Yesterday we went sea kayaking for a couple of hours in Dove Cove just outside of Vancouver, was a lovely sunny day and got a few miles in on calm waters in the bay.

In a library in Aberdeen in Washington state – massive hangover so excuse the drivel. Went for a “quiet one or two” in a few locals’ bars last night, which turned out to be cheap and cheerful.

So we’ve been 4 days on the road from San Francisco up through Oregon which have been fairly uneventful really, we stopped off at Crater Lake, an extinct volcano now full of water (fairly obvious, I know…) In the last post I completely forgot the fact that we spent 2 nights in Yosemite, after leaving Tahoe and on the way to San Jose. We slept in a tent cabin thing which has been our closest brush with nature as yet and did a hike up a couple of highly impressive waterfalls as the spring snow melt is in full force at the moment thanks to the unseasonably high temperatures. The actual trail was a bit mainstream for my liking, but then it’s a bit of a touristy place.

Today we’re off to Olympic National Park, up in the very north west corner of the States apart from Alaska. We might even do some back country camping up there in fact as the weather is pretty nice at the moment. Yesterday we actually had a little bit of very light drizzle which is the first rain we’ve seen in the 7 weeks we’ve been out here!

We’ve found out that we’ve got the use of a time share in Whistler in Canada through a friend of Steve’s so we’re heading over the border for that at the weekend and should hopefully get some late season skiing in with any luck. Apparently they’ve had some recent big snow up there so conditions are good.