We flew from Salt Lake City to LA, for our final couple of nights in America-land. We based ourselves in Beverley Hills for one reason, and one reason only. The Petersen Automotive Museum. This is a quite epic collection of classic and valuable cars that belonged to a magazine empire bazillionaire called Robert Petersen. He housed it in an old department store building on Wilshire Boulevard which has had a funky facelift, making it one of the most eye-catching buildings in the world.
By David Zaitz – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php? curid=45555215
The collection is vast and priceless. Most of it is housed in the basement of the building, called The Vault. For an extra fee you can have a small-group tour around these cars, 10% of which are covered in transparent waterproof covers much like car-sized versions of disposable hotel shower caps. This is because this jaw-dropping building full of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cars leaks like a sieve. Go figure.
Apart from oogling at cars, we spent our time here walking and soaking up the bizarre environs of Beverley Hills, Rodeo Drive and Wilshire Boulevard and we ate and drank at ‘not-unexpectedly-inflated’ expense.
We spent some time reflecting on our trip, the second of two epic journeys across this enormous and diverse country.
This trip had taken us to more cities than the first one, but also through more miles of desert wilderness than we could have previously imagined existed.
The South is a very different beast to the rest of the country, and Texas is just Texas: a huge slab of the land that would be happy if you cut it out and set it loose as an island in the Pacific to do its own thing.
Music and BBQ matters more the further South you slip and fossil fuels still rule the roost.
The winters in the south are mild, but cold in the mountains took us by surprise. I know that it shouldn’t have.
Living in a camper is not fun in sub-zero temperatures.
The more cities we visit, the more we fall in love with the small towns of America.
We return to New Zealand on 19th Feb where we will have fourteen weeks to catch up with friends, enjoy the tail-end of summer and autumn, and do some life-sorting. We return to USA at the end of May for our 3rd Tin Can Travels adventure. See you all there quite soon!
8. Get up, cry out with pain of stiff legs….repeat 2-8 until time to go home.
Here I can make an honourable mention of Wayne and Val whom we had met in Texas and who drove 7 hours from their home in Colorado (15 minutes from a very good ski resort), to come skiing with us. A much appreciated effort, which resulted in a very fun few days. Thank you!
One of life’s great truths is that all great ski trips must come to an end. It is an expensive type of fun, but worth every penny (or cent). It is also good to come away without injury, and slightly firmer thighs despite having eaten like a horse.
Perhaps it was Vegas, perhaps it was having been on the road for five months, but I obviously ran out of steam and a little bit of enthusiasm to get these last posts done. The whole trip I have battled with being weeks behind writing about our travels, but I now find myself MONTHS in arrears. I am contrite, but now armed with a brand new laptop, which I don’t have to share, here I am, fingertips to keyboard, to fill you in on the final fortnight of Tin Can Travels-The Sequel, and our last few weeks in the USA.
As we drove away from Las Vegas, we were certain of one thing. We would be back in two weeks. Big Dave and Tin Can were booked into storage here in a brand new facility capable of storing 300 big RV buses. We would definitely be the ‘small kids on the block’. Our next date in the meantime was to be in Southern California in three days. Here we were meeting Lori again and staying with her and her parents, Rocky and Casey, at their winter-time residence in Palm Desert, a town near Palm Springs.
Our first stop on our way there was a place called Lake Havasu City, Arizona. As the name suggests it is on the shores of Lake Havasu, one of the many lakes created by the damming of the Colorado River. This place is fairly sleepy in the winter, being an affordable place for the temporary winter-escaping Snowbirds to come and quietly sit, but in Spring, Summer and Autumn it is a buzzing playground for all-comers with all types of water craft. It is best known for a bridge. Not any old bridge, but the original London Bridge.
This was purchased from the City of London by a chap called Robert McCulloch in 1962. The 1831 construction was not strong enough to cope with the increasing traffic of the day and needed replacing. McCulloch, a developer who had founded the lakeside retirement town needed a gimmick to bring in the crowds and put his town on the map. He bought the bridge which was disassembled and shipped to Arizona. The individual stones were cut thinner and used to clad a modern ‘under-structure’, retaining its original appearance. (He then on-sold the remaining stone for a considerable amount, covering most of his costs of the whole project.) The bridge was a triumph. It attracted lots of people who came to see the displaced historic British monument, who then bought the plots he had developed. We arrived here on a lovely sunny afternoon and headed to the only RV park within walking distance of the bridge. We didn’t have a booking, but luckily for us the last available site was right on the lakeshore with a stunning view. We headed into town to admire the bridge, enjoyed a couple of beers in the sun and headed home in time to catch sunset over the lake.
Our stay was short and in the morning we continued southwards to another curiosity, The Quartzsite RV show. This is a week-long expo of all things RV, co-located with a gem show, and hosts a million visitors in this time. Many of these will, of course, come in their rigs, and due to very relaxed freedom camping rules in Arizona, the scrubby desert land around the show is covered with buses, vans, trailers and campers as far as the eye can see.
We came, we queued, we parked in a dry river bed, we wandered the stalls, we window-shopped a few new trailers and apart from the junk food we had for lunch, we left without being parted from any money. We headed off before the crowds had the same idea and crossed into California to find the night’s roost, a riverside camp outside a town called Blythe. This initially seemed a questionable choice as we struggled to find a suitable pitch that we could fit into, amongst the many permanent dwellers. This was the closest we had come to ‘trailer park trash’ on this trip. Spirits were low and we were close to just driving on, but by magic, one of the premium riverside sites on the posh side of the camp suddenly became available. It was lovely. A westerly view, with much more savoury neighbours. We happily installed ourselves and grabbed a cold beer each to accompany the setting of the sun. Spirits resurrected. Magic all around!
The next day we headed off to Palm Desert and our few nights on ‘dry land’ with Lori and her parents. Rocky and Casey live in a gated retirement community complete with golf course, clubhouse, pool, gym, bar and restaurant, all beautifully manicured. The town consists almost entirely of similar communities, and the golf cart is an entirely legal form of transport, with dedicated traffic lanes. At this time of the year the weather is perfect, whereas in Seattle it is ‘challenging’. I can entirely understand why they, and hundreds of thousands of like-minded retirees, head south for the winters. The ‘enclave’ was so safe and security conscious that it took a 20 minute delay and several phone calls to be allowed in, despite Casey having been very organised and left all our details at the gatehouse. We sneeked in under the canopy of the entrance and wound our way through the maze of roads to find their place, then squeezed onto the driveway.
The Hillbilly Hampsons had arrived! Our accommodation was a cozy ensuite bedroom in a garden casita. Quite perfect! We had a lovely few days with Lori, spending our time variously with and without her folks, sitting in the sun, eating and drinking, exploring nearby Palm Springs, hiking and visiting markets. One day we took a gondola ride up the mountain above Palm Springs which gives a great view of the desert and valley. The gondola car rotated on its ascent, which was a little nauseating for me, and at the top there was still snow on the ground despite the mid 70s F temps at the bottom of the hill. This was quite exciting for the day tripping Southern Californians who don’t see much of the white stuff. Many of them were comically overdressed in snow gear and carrying flimsy plastic sledges. The sledges seemed mostly designed to only withstand the rigours of a couple of ‘runs’ before self-destructing into a hundred pieces, which, for some reason their riders then saw fit to abandon at the bottom of the slopes. The lovely hiking area up there was littered with tons of brightly coloured shards of plastic. This is behaviour that makes my blood boil… “Pick up your s*&t, People!” We finished our walk with armfuls of the broken pieces which we were able to dispose of in the dedicated ‘dead sledge’ area. Such is the size of the problem.
We bade farewell to the Rocky and Casey, hopefully long before we had overstayed our welcome, and with huge gratitude for their hospitality, and headed back East. The federal shutdown was by now suspended, and Joshua Tree National Park, which had had to be closed to protect it from destructive unsupervised visitors during the shutdown, was now open again. (There are reports that the park may take up to 350 years to recover from the damage, which includes damage to the slow-growing eponymous Joshua Trees by people that were running amok in the absence of park rangers. This also makes my blood boil. “Don’t vandalise s*&t, People!”)
We drove through the park, a little underwhelmed by the Joshua trees, but impressed by some of the characteristic rock formations and after a lunch stop north of the park, headed north along one of the most unexpectedly amazing roads of the trip. It was a like a synopsis of our whole journey in one road: deserted endless blacktop winding through miles and miles of scrubby desert plains dotted with some far more impressive Joshua trees than in the park, horizons rimmed by distant snow capped mountains, with blue skies and fluffy high cloud. A joy to travel.
Our splendid isolation ended as we approached a town called Barstow, and our unusually long day of driving ended at our night’s roost, possibly the most unusual of our stops: Peggy Sue’s 50s Diner. This was a rare ‘boon docking’ night. It was not a formal RV park, but a truck-stop. There were no services to hook up to, we were to be self sufficient for the night. This was an old fashioned 50s diner right next to a busy noisy interstate highway.
The diner piped loud 50s music out into the carpark from dawn to 9pm, and bizarrely had a dinosaur park. Across the road was an army training base where they were loading hundreds of tanks nose-to-tail onto railway carriages, all night. Massive trucks were arriving and leaving all the time. It was noisy, very noisy. But it was free, and we had ear plugs. We availed ourselves of a classic diner meal for dinner and actually slept quite well.
We had a few days in hand before we were due back in Vegas, so decided to head back through Death Valley. We found a camp on the southern border of the park that had all the pre-requisites to keep the Hampsons happy for a few days: good wifi, a view, somewhere nearby to go for a walk or cycle and a bar/restaurant/shop within walking distance. This was in a village called Shoshone. Unfortunately we were unable to take full advantage of its charms as Nick succumbed to a bout of food poisoning. We retrospectively traced this back to some elderly tomato chutney that thankfully hadn’t made into my sandwich. Suffice to say, the next two days were very miserable for him, and a test of managing to sustain sincere sympathy whilst breathing through my mouth, maintaining strict hygiene standards and tip-toeing around for me. The camper has never felt quite so small…
On day three we both emerged from the haze (literal and metaphorical) and made the final long journey of our trip back to Las Vegas. Nick was still feeling very tired and fragile, so I took the wheel and took us back to Sin City. This was a bit hairy at the end as we hit the urban highway with all its craziness of fast drivers, tailgaters and random lane changers. I am normally a passenger, so the knuckles where white on the wheel! We arrived at our final camp in north Vegas, chosen for its proximity to our storage facility and its on site bar/restaurant. We had given ourselves three nights here, plenty of time to do all the chores involved in getting everything ready to go into storage. Nick was starting to perk up as we arrived and had his first proper meal in days that evening. The camp was right next to Nellis Air Force Base, a fast jet facility. We were treated to some impressive (but very loud) low level flying displays, approaches and take offs. Very Top Gun.
The next couple of days were a slow blur of laundry, cleaning, sorting, chucking and packing. Nick retuned to his usual perky self eventually, but we never did make it to the bar. Instead we ate several of those interesting invented meals that are created only by ‘eating up’ and emptying cupboards and the fridge. Finally on the morning of the 4th Feb we headed up the road to our storage facility. On the way we put Big Dave through a commercial truck wash. This involved pulling into a large drive-thru’ shed staffed with half a dozen chaps armed with various implements like long handled brushes and industrial strength jet wash wands. It was quick, fierce, efficient and very effective at removing the last few months of road grime, and perhaps rather predictably, some of our decals. Our ‘Lance’ camper is now a ‘Lan’ camper. I have added ‘new decals’ to our list of jobs next trip.
This year’s storage is in a massive, newly built facility that had booked up fast and we were lucky to secure a space. We arrived still dripping wet, did all the necessary paperwork and paid our bill. This time we only will be away for three and a half months, so it didn’t feel such a wrench to unload our bags, book an Uber and walk away. Our flight out of Vegas wasn’t until the next day so we had booked another night on The Strip, at the MGM Grand. This was not a patch on The Venetian, but we had a lovely Chinese meal and an otherwise very ‘un-Vegas’ type of evening. We were tired and Nick not quite back to 100%. We had to save ourselves for the fun of the next ten days…
We had a date in Las Vegas, a weekend rendezvous with my brother Martin. He works remotely for a large Los Angeles based company from home in London, mostly wearing his pyjamas, but about once every three months he gets dressed and flies to LA for a couple of weeks to show his face and go to meetings. We clashed diaries several months ago and a plan was hatched. We could meet in Vegas on his mid-trip weekend and share our Sin City experience with him. We booked hotel rooms on the Strip for the Friday and Saturday nights, he booked flights, a few Vegas-centric activities were organised and we were ready for fun!
Our meanderings brought us to Las Vegas three days before our ‘Trip to the Strip’. We booked into the RV park at Sam’s Town, a casino hotel complex on the outskirts of the city, immortalised by The Killers in their eponymous track. This was cheap, had all the facilities that we needed and had a free shuttle bus to both the Strip and to the Downtown area. We arrived on Nick’s birthday and after a wash and brush-up we walked over to the main building, navigated our way through the cigarette smoke and flashing light filled gaming hall and found a bar and then a steak restaurant. These are the places my husband chose for his birthday treat. He was happy.
The next day we took advantage of the shuttle bus and took a trip into town for our first glimpse of the craziness. The Las Vegas strip is a mythical place. Familiar but mysterious. The location of countless movies and TV shows and the setting for many a tale of woe or glory. Neither of us had been here before and we were looking forward to seeing it for ourselves. Of course, at about midday on a Wednesday Vegas is a fairly subdued place. Most folks are inside, either still sleeping, eating or feeding a slot machine. We joined the small procession of tourists drifting down the pavements, taking in the casino hotels with all the familiar names and initially thinking that overall The Strip seemed a bit smaller and more intimate than we had imagined. We cruised through the lobby, gambling hall and along the ‘Grand Canal Shoppes’ of the Venetian, which is where we had booked in for the weekend.
The hotels here are not normal. Their scale is enormous. Thousands of rooms, hundreds and hundreds of slot machines, and bars and restaurants at every turn. It is easy to get disorientated and lost and I wonder if that is part of the strategy for making money. ‘Oh, I am lost. I cannot find my room/the way out/ the gym. Never mind, let me sit down and throw $50 into a slot machine instead…’ We managed to escape back outside, crossed the Bridge of Sighs, passed the Venetian Tower and gondolas and headed up to one of the equally massive shopping malls. We had a rare hour apart to do a bit of clothes shopping and then headed back to the shuttle mid afternoon via a couple of scoops of ice-cream.
The next day it rained, but we were prepared for that. We had booked appointments for late morning at the casino’s in-house hair salon and having emerged with surprisingly half decent haircuts, we filled the rest of the day with laundry. Life is just one big adventure, you know.
Friday came, the rain was gone and we packed a bag and headed back to town. The check-in area of The Venetian was more like that of an airport with ropes creating a snaking queue. We were quite early so luckily avoided a long wait. We got our keys and headed upstairs. We had booked adjoining rooms with Martin, who was not due until mid evening. The room was one of their ‘basic’ ones: with a sunken lounge area, 3 TVs and an enormous bathroom with the all important tub. No kettle or coffee machine though. How’s a girl meant to get a cup of tea??? After lunch we filled the afternoon with a movie and I had the first of 4 baths in 48 hours. If I couldn’t get a hot drink then I was going to get my money’s worth in hot water. The afternoon had one interruption, with a delivery to our room. A bottle of champagne and a box of luxury chocolates. A very generous gift from the lovely Jeromes. What impeccable taste and timing!
After a few glasses of the champers (oh all right, all of it) we went down to one of the hotel’s cocktail bars to await Martin’s arrival. He had pulled of a successful ‘Friday Evening Dash’, getting from work to Las Vegas without any delays. His timing was perfect, arriving with time for a quick change and a G&T before our 9.30pm dinner booking. This was at a great steak restaurant in the hotel. It was excellent, and should have been for the price. It was great to catch up with him, much rubbish was spoken and wine drunk. We were officially the last to leave, and headed back to the casino floor via another cocktail or two. The spirit for a night of gambling was strong, but the flesh was weak (and fairly drunk by now). Martin and I lost Nick for about an hour somewhere in the casino hall. Plan A for finding him was to stay put, but he didn’t come back. Plan B was to wander around and around the vast room filled with hundreds and hundreds of flashing machines and hundreds and hundreds of people to ‘see if we could see him’. We couldn’t. Plan C? Check the room in case he had done a very uncharacteristic ‘take-himself- t0- bed’ move. Nope. It wasn’t until we got to Plan D that we remembered that savour of ‘getting lost in modern times’, the mobile telephone. We rang him, he answered and we found him. Duh. I managed to convince the re-assembled party that our beds, not the Black Jack tables, were the place be at 2.30 am, and thence we went.
Saturday morning was well underway by the time we reconvened. Heads were slightly fuzzy and Martin was also still dealing with some jet lag and a cold. Breakfast was needed. We decided to wriggle out of the embrace of the hotel and walk up the Strip in the sunshine to a breakfast diner with good reviews that Nick had found online. Unfortunately a bazillion other people had had the same idea and there was an hour’s wait for a table. We couldn’t wait that long. Hangovers needed feeding. Stat. The first place that we could find that fitted the bill of serving coffee and cooked breakfast was a rather elegant garden restaurant in the more snazzy hotel, the Encore. Out of one embrace, straight into another, but it was perfect. A bit fancier than we had planned, but this was a survival situation…. After breakfast, which was actually at lunchtime, we shuffled back to the hotel, and back to our beds. More sleep was needed if there was any hope of making it through another night on the town and an afternoon nap is practically compulsory in this town, I hear.
It was dark again by the time we surfaced for our 6pm rendezvous. Rested, washed, dressed and ready for another meal. Our first choice burger restaurant was packed, with another long queue, so we found another that had plenty of space. In retrospect, there was a very good reason for this as our meal was very mediocre, but it was food, served with acceptable beer and didn’t cost a small fortune. Tonight’s focus was more on the entertainment. We had booked tickets to see Penn and Teller, the magicians. They are grand-daddies of Vegas and their show has been running here since 2001 in an older hotel off the Strip called the Rio.
We grabbed a cab and headed over there a bit early to be in good time to pick up our tickets and visit the Voodoo Bar, a roof top ‘nite club’ with good views of town. The bar didn’t open until 8pm and we were first in the queue behind the little velvet rope at the entrance to the lift lobby. There was a security check before we could go up in the lift, from which we emerged into possibly one of the most soulless establishments in this town. ALL the seating inside, and outside was cordoned off and reserved, but empty, and the view from the open-air area was good, but the way to it blocked off by the empty seating. We had one very overpriced drink served in plastic (Hate, hate, hate) and then happily it was time to go.
Penn and Teller were brilliant. Magic shows aren’t usually my thing. I am too logical and need to know how the trick works. But they were very entertaining and actually gave away a fair few secrets along the way. Or did they? I’m not sure now. I certainly don’t know how they made the elephant disappear. (NB. Not a real elephant.) From the Rio we bypassed the long queue at the taxi rank and walked back to the Strip.
We stopped to watch the Bellagio fountains do their thing and then cruised with the throngs back in the direction of the Venetian. Now the place was alive. There were scantily clad ‘showgirls’ with feathered headdresses trying to lure tourists into having their photo taken with them for a hefty tip, no doubt. Folks handing out leaflets for clubs/tours/casinos. There were normal people and the weird. The sober and the merry. There were all ages and all nationalities. (The Russians were easy to spot.) There were kids in push chairs and adults on mobility scooters. And there were countless people like us, just drinking it all in, in wonderment. It is like Disney for the vices. We arrived back at the Venetian and found a classy bar in which to spend our $100 drinks voucher. This is almost exactly the same amount as the ‘resort fees’ that the hotels charge for seemingly nothing other than to annoy everyone. We could call it quits this time….. By the time the voucher was spent, so were we, and we again resisted the call of the tables and the slot machines and called it a night.
We all emerged on Sunday morning a bit brighter eyed and bushier tailed than the morning previous and had a better plan for breakfast: the French restaurant in the hotel. We checked out, stored the bags and after only a short wait, had a (mostly) good breakfast at ‘Bouchon’. Fed and caffeinated we finally did some gambling and hit the slot machines. These are our stats: Sara: $5 stake. lost it all. Martin: $10 stake, lost it all. Nick $40 stake, won $70. So overall we came out of Vegas having made a (gambling) profit of $15. Woohoo. High Rollers, Baby! Now, in already good spirits, we were ready for the next fantastical ‘only-in-Vegas’ activity. Shooting guns.
We had booked a visit to Battlefield Vegas, a shooting range on steroids, where you can fire almost any weapon combination that you can dream up. The courtesy shuttle that collected us from the hotel entrance was a canvas-sided Humvee with bench seating and the adrenaline flow was kick started by a white knuckle ride through the traffic of Vegas. We were chauffeured by an ex-soldier, barely looking at the road and definitely not considering the low co-efficient of friction of his passengers bottoms on the smooth wood bench seat as he accelerated and decelerated. Luckily there was a thin rope across the open back of the vehicle for safety…. We arrived at the range in one piece, signed the paperwork to say that we weren’t felons or mentally unwell, paid the money and entered the range. The whole place is staffed by ex-military. Still-young men who had done their 5 years of service, de-mobbed, then could not quite let it go. Still sporting buzzcuts and stomping around in para-military wear, playing with guns. We had all booked the ‘Platoon Package’, featuring weapons from the Vietnam War. A colt .45 handgun, an M16 machine gun, a grenade launcher and an M-60 (much bigger) machine gun. It was an amazing experience to fire such powerful weapons, but humbling to think that their primary function is not for the amusement of Las Vegas tourists, but to kill other humans. My ‘favourite’ weapon was the handgun. It was more tangible than the others, so familiar from TV and film but so alien to have it in my hands and be firing it. I can’t imagine being in the situation of using one in anger, and thankfully I never shall be.
The boys also spent some silly money to fire a Mini-gun. This is a mounted machine gun that fires 100 rounds in 4s. Our instructor said firing it for the first time is like another memorable ‘first time’. Huge expectation, very exciting and all over very quickly. I’ll have to take his word for it. We managed to resist spending $2500 to drive a tank over a car and, clutching our shredded targets, we were delivered back to the Strip in a less scary fashion. We collected our bags and were in good time to catch the shuttle back to Sam’s Town. As Monday was a public holiday, Martin had an extra night with us and was to be our honoured 2nd overnight guest in the Tin Can. You can read about it. You can see the photos. But nothing can quite prepare you for the magnificence of the beast until you see it in the flesh! Isn’t that right, Mart??!! From the Venetian to the dinette bed of a small habitable box. It was a weekend of accomodation extremes. We gave him the (very short) guided tour, installed him on the sofa and we had a few hours of down-time before the next activity.
Sunday evening took us to Downtown Vegas. This is where the original hotels and casinos are. It is just as glitzy, but less glamorous and is where the really weird and wonderful hang out. It has the pedestrianised Fremont Street over which is suspended the world’s largest screen.
It has Slotzilla, the world’s largest slot machine which is 11 stories high, and from which you can zip-line under the aforementioned screen along Fremont Street. it has countless bars and restaurants including the bizarre, ‘only in America’, Heart Attack Grill. All customers must don a hospital robe and wrist band on entry, the ‘nurses’ take your ‘prescription’ and the menu features delights such as endless Flatliner fries cooked in lard and an 8 patty cheeseburger. If you weight 350 pounds or more, you eat for free. If you don’t finish your meal your nurse will spank you with a paddle. We didn’t eat here, instead we found a lovely little Mexican restaurant up the road and our very delicious dinner and margaritas whilst watching the lunar eclipse out of the window. A good spot on many counts. We couldn’t muster the energy for another late night and the end of our meal saw us calling an Uber and taking our three mid-to-late-40s selves ‘home’. We constructed Martin’s deluxe, nearly-long-enough-for-a-grown-man bed from the dinette booth and all crashed.
After a slow moving morning we headed back to town and the fun continued with a mini-golf challenge. We found a course in the basement of one of the Strip hotels. Dimly lit with Twilight Zone theme and decorated with luminescent paint, the UV lights not only picked up the course features, but also any shoulder dandruff. Took me back to my black-clad night clubbing days of the early 90s. I lost, by the way. Martin came second. And Nick? Not important. (Such a gloater). Then it was lunch time. Time for another meal. We walked over to Holsteins Shakes and Buns in the Cosmopolitan Hotel, allegedly serving the best burgers on the Strip. The verdict? We can confirm that they are pretty darn good.
We ate too much, obviously, and then unfortunately had to bid farewell to Martin. We saw him into a cab to the airport and then sloped back to TC to rest and digest.
We hadn’t had the wildest of Vegas weekends, but we had had a lot of fun. We had eaten and drunken more than is healthy. We had spent a reasonable amount of money, but had won against the casino. We had gained a good sense of what this town is about and lost a bit of sleep, but not gained any regrettable facial tattoos, babies or tigers or lost any teeth or members of our party to kidnapping. A weekend was more than enough, but perhaps one weekend in a lifetime isn’t.
Death Valley is a massive, empty, mostly barren place of extremes. It is the largest of the National Parks outside Alaska, at about 5000 square miles. It is the driest place in the USA, with an average rainfall of 2.36″/60mm. It gets very hot, with the highest ever temperature anywhere on earth recorded here in 1913: 134 deg F/56 deg C. It is home to the lowest point in the USA, at 282ft below sea level. (This is less than 100 miles from the USA’s highest point, Mount Whitney at 14505ft). It was also, like the majority of the other National Parks, a bit of a victim of the ongoing partial federal shutdown, which frustratingly grinds on with no end in sight. The park itself was open, mainly as it has CA 190 running through it, but many of the campsites, toilets and side roads had been closed.
The road from Pahrump (!) to Death Valley crossed us from Nevada in to California, and into our final new state of this trip. We knew we had arrived in California when we drove past a 4oft shipping container repurposed as a small cannabis dispensary, sitting next to a large fenced poly tunnel complex where the crop was being cultivated. Modern times indeed. We cruised down the hill into Death Valley, quite tickled to watch the altimeter run down from 3000 ft to -266 ft. It is an odd concept to be this low. I can grasp being high up on a mountain, but we should be underwater here.
The camping options were limited by current events, but we found one of the few ‘plug in’ sites belonging to the lodge at Stovepipe Wells. This was right next to the National Park Service primitive campsite, which was one of the few still open. It was like being in the dress circle to their cheap seats. They had a toilet block, but otherwise it was essentially just a parking spot.
The views here were amazing. Stovepipe Wells ‘village’ consisted of a motel style lodge, a restaurant, a gift shop, a general store, a small petrol station and the campsites. It nestled close to the base of a range of mountains in a wide open space, surrounded by more mountains. It was stunning. It was a place to sit and gaze, watch sunsets, clouds and stars.
We had great plans to offload TC here and go off exploring in Big D, but where to go that was more beautiful than right where we were? One of the most popular and interesting hikes in Death Valley was right on our doorstep: Mosaic Canyon. This is a slot canyon with smooth polished marble sides that winds up into the range just behind the camp. The trailhead was 2.5 miles from camp up a road that was closed for repair, so this made the hike a 9 mile round trip. A perfect day hike. The closed road seemed to put off everyone else and we had this amazing place all to ourselves for 4 hours. The canyon was really interesting and beautiful.
It had both narrow parts where you could see the walls polished by the powerful water flows of old and wider open areas with the floor filled with masses of gravel washed down from the mountains during past flash floods. This was not a place to be after a heavy rainfall. On the walk back down the hill the views from the trailhead down onto Stovepipe Wells show how small and inconsequential it is in the grand scheme of this enormous place.
The next day was warm and sunny and didn’t feel like winter at all. Despite the slightly sore calves from our 2200ft of gradual elevation gain on yesterday’s walk, we made the most of the day to do another nearby hike. This was a 2.5 mile cycle down the road to an area of sand dunes called Mesquite Dunes.
The tallest dune, at 100ft, was a significantly undulating, calf taxing 1 mile walk from the carpark. Again the place was mostly deserted which allowed for a good degree of immaturity such as running down dunes so fast that you fall over, making sand angels etc. You know the drill.
Sand Angel in progress
This was a social place. We got chatting to lots of people, but made friends with a couple called Tim & Jasmine. They were living out of a roof tent atop an FJ cruiser with 2 small dogs: the quiet and nervy Wylie and the shouty and attitude laden Bacon. They had managed to escape the devastating fire that destroyed the town of Paradise, California last November with not much more than the clothes on their backs, the dogs and the car. This significant life event had prompted them to hit the road and spend some time living a simple nomadic life. I thought we had pared our lives down to the basics, but these guys are in a whole different league. We spent a couple of sunsets sharing a drink or several with them and look forward to hearing where their lives take them from here.
Our last afternoon and evening we were subjected to a rare Death Valley event: rain. About 3/4″, so about a third of the average annual fall, and this fell on the surrounding hills as snow. For a hot dry place, this was briefly quite cold and wet. The next day was Nick’s birthday. We were woken early by the antics of 3 fighter jets from the nearby airforce base that use Death Valley as one of its training grounds. They were doing very loud, low fly-overs and simulated dog fights. Very Top Gun. We got up, packed up, said our goodbyes to Tim and Jasmine and headed back through the Valley. On the way out of Death Valley we stopped at a pretty area called Zabriskie Point and went for 3 mile stroll through ‘The Badlands’, an area of colourful sculpted mounds of soft loose rock and then headed through the light rain and gloom back towards Las Vegas.
We left the Grand Canyon on a lovely sunny day and headed south. Our destination was Kingman, just a place for an overnight stop in moderate civilisation. A camp with wifi to the van and a laundry. We have simple needs! On the way there we drove a teeny tiny section of Historic Route 66 to see what all the fuss was about. This was another private road that we didn’t have to share and it took us to the small drive-through town of Seligman. Seligman rests on its Route 66 laurels in a big way, with numerous curio and gift shops, diners and bars, all paying homage to the great road. We had a very satisfactory lunch in one of the diners and continued on our way, on the Interstate. Kingman was warm and snowless and it was as if the previous 3 weeks of sub-freezing temperatures had all been a dream. We could have the doors and windows open, sleep without the heating on, and go about in shirt sleeves. Oh, and our park had its very own mini-golf course right next to our site. AND it was free. All this was too good to be true so stayed for two nights.
From here we were heading towards Death Valley and we identified the town of Pahrump (pardon me!) for our next stop. Our route took us around the southern side of Las Vegas and past the Hoover Dam. The road used to go over the dam until they built a massive span bridge for the highway, so now it is a short detour off the main road to have a gander. There is quite tight security to get close to the dam, then you can follow the old road across it to some parking on the other side and then walk back to it. Again, this is a place that can get seriously busy in peak season with reports of 2 hour queues to get through the security checks, but we sailed through and easily found a Big D/TC sized parking space.
Despite the lack of people it still seemed a bit congested on the walkways, and I can’t imagine how they cope with the throngs. Now the dam itself is very impressive, but somehow I expected it to be bigger. Is that unfair to one of the engineering marvels of the 20th century? Probably, but was well worth the stop and I was very impressed by the span bridge.
We ate sandwiches on a carpark wall looking at the back of the dam and Lake Mead and then headed off. The road to Pahrump (pardon me!) skirted around south Vegas and we had our first glimpse of the skyline of the strip through the smog. We would be back soon to experience the craziness of Sin City. Pahrump (!) is in the next valley over from Vegas and Big D did a great job of grinding up and over the hill to get there. I randomly selected and booked an RV park as we approached and soon we were pulling into a large park full of long term ‘snowbirds’, taking the last available site. This park was co-located with a vineyard and once set up we decided to head over to the tasting room to buy a couple of glasses of wine and watch the sunset. Now at this time of year, having lost a hour as we passed into the Pacific Time Zone, in a place surrounded by mountains, the sun sets pretty early. So despite it being closer to afternoon tea time than evening drinking time we found ourselves having done a full wine tasting and seeing off a bottle of wine at about 4.30pm. Accidental drunkeness.
In the morning we rinsed the salt and dirt off BD & TC at the park’s own RV jet wash station, stopped at the supermarket for supplies, filled with fuel and headed for Death Valley.
My 47th birthday began with another deep bath and a bagel ( consecutively not concurrently). We checked out of the hotel and retrieved Big Dave and Tin Can from the carpark. After a brief refuelling stop we were on the road again. Destination: The Grand Canyon. Lots of other National Parks might be closed, but not this jewel. It was being kept fully open, snow and all, having being funded by Arizona State Government. The state’s strap line is ‘ The Grand Canyon State’, so there was a bit of political pressure to keep the tourists rolling in. Good for us. There has been a significant snowfall over the Canyon area with the same weather system that had given us our Moab snow, and the quickest route between Tuba City and Grand Canyon Village had been shut for days. We were hoping that it was going to be open as the long way round was going to add another 100 miles to our journey. It was, open. Two hours saved. The road steadily climbed up to the plateau and the edge of the Canyon, which is at 7,000ft. There were snow piles, but the sun was shining and it wasn’t cold. The funny thing about the Grand Canyon is that despite its enormity, you can’t see it until you have actually arrived. There is no distant peak to slowly approach, no ocean horizon teaser. It hides from view, ready to jump out at you and smack you square in the face with its massiveness. We stopped at the first lookout, parked up and followed the signs, and steady stream of fellow pilgrims to the rim. And there suddenly it was. A truly gigantic, complex, colourful scar carved deep into the earth. Photographs and words cannot really do it any justice. It is a place of superlatives and the descriptor ‘Grand’ seems a bit of an understatement.
We headed up to Grand Canyon Village, which sits within the National Park on the South rim. At this time of year the North rim is closed. The RV park was about half a mile from the Yavapai Lodge and a very well stocked General Store & Deli, and it was only another half mile walk on to the rim. A very handy location. The afternoon remained beautiful and sunny, and we headed off to catch sunset at the Canyon’s edge. There is a good path along the rim that was mostly clear, but a bit icy in parts. We joined the steady slow stream of perambulators gingerly negotiating the trail, stopping for numerous photos and successfully managing not to slip and plummet to our certain deaths. It obviously wasn’t that dangerous, but the mind starts to play tricks on you when you are stood 6 foot away from a 3000ft sheer cliff face. As darkness fell we made our way back to the pub in the Lodge, had a few birthday beers and a burger each before returning to TC and bed. I was still feeling a bit under the weather with my cold, but all in all, it was a pretty cool destination for a birthday.
It was another cold night given the lack of cloud cover, but nowhere near as cold as it had been in Moab. We got up and had brunch, then set off on the day’s adventure. We took the free shuttle bus from the RV park to the Visitors Centre, a few miles East, then walked West along the rim trail, past the melée of the lodges, shops and restaurants of the Village area and out along the quieter trail beyond. It was lovely and deserted, with only a few others on the trail, including a small herd of deer.
Deer bums
We walked for about 10 miles in total, turning around at Powell Point, named for the adventurous soul who first explored this section of the Canyon by boat along the Colorado River. We headed home, picking up the shuttle bus back to the RV park.
Snow was forecast to fall overnight, and it certainly did. We awoke to 8 inches of the white stuff, and it was still falling. We thought that 3-4 ” in Moab had been a lot! I started the day in my ski gear back on the roof of TC to clear the snow that was weighing down the awnings that cover the slide outs. Our neighbours tried to leave, towing a big 5th wheel trailer, and managed to lose traction and wedge it under a large overhanging tree branch. By the time the tow truck had been dispatched and had managed to pull them out it was midday, and they still had a 10 hour drive home to Denver. I was glad we had no plans to go anywhere for a few days. We walked up to the Lodge to get some wifi, then on to the Deli for lunch. Once back at camp we did the only thing that you can do on a snowy day that doesn’t involve planks and a hill, we built another snowman, or should I say, snow-woman. She was quite a hit with the small population left at the park and had her photo taken by many.
Snow Madonna
I imagine that the Grand Canyon is either frantically busy or fairly busy, but there can be nothing like a winter snowstorm to create that rare beast: the nearly deserted Grand Canyon. The staff worked hard to keep the roads and paths clear, whoever was paying them, but we nearly had it to ourselves for the next 24 hours. The next day, having spent another hour on the roof clearing off all the snow and ice, we took the bus to the most Easterly bus stop on the rim trail, and walked home, about 5 miles of quiet, snowy, private walking path. It was delightful. The view was not quite as impressive, however, as the Canyon was a foggy white-out.
Invisible Canyon
We had another pub dinner and the next day, having found a man with a Bobcat to clear the snow from in front of Big D, we rolled away from the Biggest, the Best, the Deepest, the Widest, the most Grandest of Canyons. Adieu.
We pulled out of our camp in Monument Valley and headed north, although then we were going south and then the tarmac ran out in a decidedly rough settlement of native homes. So before we became the protagonists in a scary movie plot, we back tracked and found the correct road, and then we were actually heading north. We had booked three nights in a small town called Bluff which was only about 40 miles away. It was on our road to Moab and had 3 or 4 restaurants and an old historic fort and a museum to amuse us. The managers of the RV park were away and had left us a welcome pack outside the office. As we pulled in it was fairly obvious why they had taken the opportunity to take off. The place was deserted.
We parked up near the tiny shed that housed the single toilet and shower and after lunch walked down the road into ‘town’ to assess the offerings. All four restaurants, the visitors centre, the museum, the fort and the laundry were all closed. The only open place was the petrol station/shop, so we called in to confirm that Bluff was indeed ‘shut’. We bought beer and headed back to assess our options. Three nights was going to be entirely excessive but snow was forecast overnight and it seemed silly to be planning to move on the next day when the roads were still being cleared. We could amuse ourselves for two nights. I messaged the managers who agreed to refund us our 3rd night, and advised us that they were sure that the restaurant at the other end of town was open the next day. The beer and a mini scrabble tournament killed the rest of the day and when we woke in the morning, it had indeed snowed, and was still snowing. This was a little bit exciting for us as we have lived in the sub-tropics for 16 years and only seen snow on a few ski trips. After a very lazy morning we rugged up and set off on our day’s expedition: a two mile walk to see if the restaurant really was open for lunch. We were, as usual, the lone pedestrians. Cars, trucks and RVs were passing through town caked in filthy snow and ice. The roads were open, but it didn’t look like fun out there. We were happy on foot and holed up in our private camp-ground for two. We turned the last corner, empty of stomach and full of hope, and were very pleased to see the carpark of Twin Rocks Cafe full and the doors open for business. Hoorah! We indulged again in the lusciousness that is Navajo fry bread, hot chilli, and a burger. And then we walked home again. Busy day.
The next day we headed up to Moab. This is the town that services Arches and Canyonlands National Parks and is surrounded by lots of other state parks and miles and miles of off road driving trails. It is a playground town, full of businesses catering to the bazillions of people that head to this area in spring, summer and autumn to ‘recreate’, visit the parks, and hire wrangler jeeps and go trail bashing. It was much quieter at this time of year. The snow had petered out as we approached Moab and the sun was shining, but it was cold. We stocked up on provisions in town and then found our camp which was about 2 miles north. There was a good cycle trail back to town and we were confident that this would be achievable on bicycles to get back from a bar on New Years!
For those of you following the US news, you will be aware that the federal government standoff/shutdown had affected the National Park Service. The Utah State government had realised that, even in the winter, its National Parks of Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Bryce and Zion are the main reason that many tourists, us included, visit the state and it had agreed to provide interim funding to its parks to keep them open, so we were going to be fine….
The next day was gloriously sunny, but Nick was struck down by a cold, and didn’t feel like doing anything. So we didn’t. We had bags of time to visit the parks…but then it snowed overnight. We woke on New Years Eve morning to four inches of snow. Snow that the National Parks had no extra funding in place to clear with snow ploughs. So they shut anyway. There seemed little point off loading Tin Can from Big D as there was nowhere really to go.
We assessed our options for New Years Eve celebrations. Our research discovered that the only bar actually open all the way up to, and beyond, midnight was at the other end of town, 3 miles away, and now our ‘easy cycle path’ into town was a now an icy, slushy, filthy, partially obscured adventure death-trap trail. A dicey prospect even in daylight and sober, let alone well-oiled at 1.00am on a freezing inky dark night. So we resigned ourselves to the prospect of a Tin Can New Year’s Eve, and decided to go out for lunch instead. The rest of the morning was filled with that very grown up and mature activity: building a snowman. This took longer than expected as the snow was very dry, but we persevered and created ‘Mo’ (short for Moab)
Lunchtime was then upon us and we set off walking, gingerly, and of course alone, along the aforementioned cycle trail, committing to stopping at the first eating establishment that we came to. This was a Denny’s at the one mile mark. It appeared like an oasis in the cold, snowy desert and we celebrated the outgoing year with a gallon of diet coke and a pile of hot, unhealthy food. Perfect!
2019 saw itself in. This was the first New Year’ that I have slept through since I was in my early teens. Our plans had been different, but what with Nick’s residual snot situation and temperatures falling to -17 deg C / 2 deg F at night, curling up in bed under our entire blanket collection was by far and away the more attractive option.
We woke up in 2019 to ice on the inside of Tin Can despite having had the heating going full chat all night. The day was sunny, but the temperature didn’t rise above -4 C/ 24 F all day. The upcoming days were showing no signs of temperatures increasing. The nearby parks we still closed with no prospect of opening. Our next planned destination, Bryce Canyon National Park at 8,000ft, was likely to be colder and shut now if it had snowed and definitely shut in a few days once the emergency funding ran out. After that, Zion National park, would also shut once funding expired if the shutdown continued. The combination of the partial federal shutdown, and winter conditions much harsher than we had expected meant that our Utah experience was falling way short of expectations. We had ANOTHER reassessment of plans. We came to the following decisions:
Living in a RV is way more fun when the temperatures are above freezing.
We knew that the Utah parks were amazing and we have the luxury of being able to come back to experience them in all their glory, sunshine and fully staffed orderliness later in the year.
There was no point staying in Moab. We would (begrudgingly) back-track through Monument Vally and head to the Grand Canyon as our next stop, before, not after, Las Vegas.
On our way to the Grand Canyon we would have a night in a hotel. A warm, dry hotel room with no ice on the inside. And a bath. This was to be my birthday present to me.
Of course everything was closed on the 1st, so difficult to action our changes, so we loafed. We needed to do laundry but the park’s machines were out of order due to frozen pipes, and we needed antifreeze. The temperatures were going to be equally low for the next few nights, so on the hotel night, when we weren’t going to be staying in TC, so it was going to be better to winterise, even for just one night. On the 2nd Jan we unplugged and drove into town, got the stuff, did the stuff, came back, plugged back in and made our bookings. By now Nick was feeling much better, but predictably I now had The Cold. Oh Happy Winter.
After another bitterly cold night we sorted ourselves out on the morning of the 3rd Jan, did the winterisation (draining the water and replacing it with antifreeze ) and headed back down the road we had driven up 8 days earlier. This would have been a bit depressing if it hadn’t been such a beautiful drive. The landscapes on this section of this trip have been universally stunning. The sun was shining, all the roads were clear and we pulled into our hotel carpark in Tuba City at about 4pm.
My birthday hotel room was in a newly built Navajo owned hotel, the only half decent establishment in this area. To get a big bath we had booked a very reasonably priced ‘luxury one bedroom suite’. This was about 10 times the size of TC and was notable for its size rather than its luxury, but it was perfect. On check-in we had to declare that we were not going to smoke and not going to bring any pets or alcohol into the hotel. We could honestly declare that our overnight bag (very stylish re-useable shopping bag) definitely didn’t contain contraband cats or poodles, but we might have lied about the six-pack… How naughty.
The bath was bliss and I spent so long in it that I was minutes away from morphing into a dolphin. I was lured out of the water for dinner which was at the diner next to the hotel, another Denny’s. Never been to one before, now this was our second visit in 4 days. We spent the rest of the evening romantically watching different things on different TVs in different rooms of our suite. After many months of 24/7 living in each other’s pockets, this was also a little bit of bliss. I had a terrible night’s sleep with a completely blocked up nose, but was very thankful to be miserable in a huge bed in a massive, warm hotel room. Of course I managed to squeeze in another bath in the morning, we had breakfast and then hit the road again. Next stop, the Grand Canyon.
Monument Valley. It is not hard to see how it got its name. The Monuments, or buttes, seem to rise up from the flat valley floor like a motley band of giants, overseeing the craziness of man. Man in car. Man in camper van. Man filming movies. Man taking photos. This is one of the most iconic landscapes on the planet, a place to see, to be in. A place to spend our first ever Christmas À Deux. Of course, the buttes don’t rise up. They are just the last bits of a prehistoric plateau to crumble away. The whole place is actually disintegrating and one could wonder what the chances are of being crushed by a massive slice of rock falling from a butte face. Epitaph writing would be easy. ‘Her monumental butt was kicked by a Monumental Butte’. But I digress.
As I told you previously, we headed here a day earlier than planned, on a gorgeous late afternoon with the low winter sun lighting up the Monuments which glowed pink, leaving Arizona and entering Utah just as they started to come into view. The options for camping at this time of year are limited, and we were booked into a place called Gouldings. This is named after a Harry and his wife, ‘Mike’ Goulding, an intrepid couple who started a trading post in the 1920s. This has grown into a sprawling business including a motel, cottages, restaurant, gift shop, museum, petrol station, laundrette, grocery store and our RV park. Despite a small flurry of increased visitors over the holiday week, this is a very quiet time of year and we were easily accommodated a day early. In fact, we had our pick of sites and so chose the site at the very front of the park with an unobstructed view of the Monuments, a big space with a fire pit and a handy tree for the Christmas lights.
Due to desert dryness, and being in town parks, there had been fire restrictions in most places we had been this year, our last fire having been in Pigeon forge, 11 weeks ago. We were very excited at the prospect of more camp fires here and bought up a significant portion of the camp shop’s wood supply. After the small stresses of the day, our first evening was a blissful combination of the amazing view, beautiful sunset, full-moon rise and a few hours sitting around the fire, under our tree bedecked with red fairy lights, on a cold crisp evening in a deserted campsite.
The Gouldings complex sits at the edge of the Valley with its back to two large buttes, the RV campsite being about half a mile up the road that cuts up between them. Everything looks at ‘that view’. We wandered down the hill on the first day for a fossick around. We visited the small museum and large gift shop and checked out the restaurant for dinner that evening. We got some idea of how busy this place can get in peak season given the amount of accomodation, the number of campsites and the number of tables in the restaurant. Bananas. On the way home we called into the grocery store which was surprisingly well stocked, with one notable exception. Booze. All this area is still Navajo Nation land, so dry. Alcohol-free beer and wine is available in the restaurants and grocery stores, but there is no alcohol to be bought. (We had known this before we arrived and were prepared. The back seats of Big Dave were mostly given over to our stocks of beer, with the odd bottle of fizz, vodka, rum and whisky thrown in for Christmas cheer. Monument Valley, BYO). We walked back up the hill and hung out for a few hours, and then walked back down again for dinner. The cold evening met its perfect antidote in the form of two bowls of hot chilli served with the gloriousness that is Navajo fry bread. A frisbee-sized disc of oily naughtiness. After dinner we went over to another of Gouldings offerings, a small movie theatre that has nightly shows of old John Wayne movies that were filmed here. Monument Valley has been used as a backdrop in many movies, of which five starred John Wayne. We were treated to the 1939 movie ‘Stagecoach’, directed by John Ford, a man who directed so many movies out here that he has an area of the park named after him.
The next day we explored a few of the trails around the area. One of these was up to a small arch behind camp, and another was round the base of one of the nearby buttes giving us a much wider view of the Monuments.
On this second trail we also unexpectedly had more of a view than we really needed of a romantic tryst between a local native couple. Unnoticed, we backtracked and sat on a rock out of sight for ten minutes awaiting finalisation of events. They then left in different directions, with a stagger of a few minutes. How clandestine! We finished our walk with no more voyeuristic episodes and popped into the store for a few last minute provisions for Christmas dinner. In a fit of domestic goddessness, I made cranberry sauce and a loaf of bread in the afternoon and as dusk approached we lit the campfire again and had our first games of ‘weasel bag’ (aka corn hole) of this trip. Hampson kicked my butte.
And so to Christmas Day! The morning consisted of a hearty cooked breakfast, a gallon of coffee and opening our presents to each other. The offerings were a combination of frivolous and useful things to aid entertainment and staying warm. I got a book of poetry by Neruda, called Ode To Common Things. Here is a passage from a poem entitled ‘Ode To The Cat’:
‘There was something wrong/ with the animals:/ their tails were too long, and they had/ unfortunate heads./ They started coming together,/ little by little/ fitting together to make a landscape,/ developing birthmarks, grace, pep./ But the cat,/ only the cat,/ turned out finished,/ and proud:/ born in a state of total completion,/ it sticks to itself and knows exactly what it wants.’ -Neruda.
After all the excitement of all the unwrapping, we made very small piles of our gifts, wrapped up warm and set off for another walk. This was up a short canyon and took us close up to some very impressive rock faces. After building the obligatory inukshuk (apologies to the Inuit),
we wandered home and spent an hour or so sharing drinks and nibbles with our neighbours before, unfortunately, it started to rain.
This sent us all scurrying back inside our respective Tin Cans where we had our fairly traditional Christmas dinner: a tiny chicken each, draped in bacon, stuffed, with roasties, brussell sprouts and gravy, with, of course, homemade cranberry sauce. Yum. We ate too much to eat dessert. Just as dusk fell, the rain stopped, giving us a moody view of the monuments, and we managed to squeeze in another fire.
Hoorah! To cap it all off, we found Love Actually on TV in the evening. All in all, it was a lovely, low key Christmas Day. A wintery Christmas after many Southern hemisphere years. We had managed to speak to all the UK and Australian families and went to bed happy.
Boxing Day saw most of the other campers in the park move on, leaving us in almost an empty park. We did some festive laundry, did another short walk and yes, had another campfire. It is a kind of obsession. The next day we headed off. We had spent 5 mostly gloriously sunny days gazing at the Monuments from afar, and when it came to the prospect of driving the park loop road to get up close and personal to them, we decided that we didn’t need to do this. Somehow it was going to change how we saw them. So we stayed at a distance, and headed northwards. Our next stop, a small settlement called Bluff, just 40 or so miles away.
From Casa Grande, just south of Phoenix, we headed north. This was a ‘highway day’, a 200 mile straight-line drive with a 6000ft gain of elevation. Destination, Flagstaff. Today we bade farewell to the mild temperatures of the desert lowlands and headed to the hills and to winter proper. With sub-freezing overnight temperatures, and some persisting snow piles from the last winter storm, this was to to be where the summer clothes finally got put away, and operation ‘stay warm’ began.
We didn’t stop in Phoenix, the largest state capitol in the country. We were swept through it on the urban highway, surrounded by hurtling cars and trucks, many with no concept of indicators, stopping distances or the ‘passing on the left’ rule. The usual considerate driving manners of the American motorist do not seem to apply on Interstate highways where they become cast members of Fast and Furious. It is interesting that this does not seem to provoke any road rage incidents (that we have seen) and I surmise that the widespread carrying of firearms is the reason for this. It was a tense 20 mins, but we got through without incident. North of Phoenix the road climbed to a desolate plateau and we rolled onwards and upwards for the next 2 hours. The scenery just continued to be magnificent. It seems endless.
Flagstaff is at 7000ft and is a city of about 70,000. It is busy place, being situated at a junction of 2 major Interstates and it is a major railway hub. The Grand Canyon is only about 70 miles from here, but our route there will be a longer way round, passing up into Utah and doing a big loop of the big National Parks before heading back to The Grand Canyon, another 1000 miles or so. Our RV park here was called Blackbarts, co-located with a locally renowned steak restaurant and bar of the same name. (Pro.) It was an easy 15 minute cycle to town on dedicated bike trails, (Pro.) and there were shops for us to do our ‘limited-budget-stocking-filler-only’ Christmas shopping for each other. (Pro.) It also had a restaurant in town that served the finest Cornish pasties and scotch eggs that we have ever consumed. (Big Pro, apologies to Cornwall and Yorkshire (look it up)!). It was a bit noisy because the camp was right next to the aforementioned highway and railway. (Con.) It was cold at night (Con.)
Below freezing temps overnight meant that we had to work a bit harder to stay warm. Tin Can is ‘Four Seasons’ certified, meaning that it is (sort of) insulated and has an LPG furnace heater. This ducts some warm air around the internal pipes and tanks meaning that they stay defrosted but the hose connection to the mains water needed disconnecting at night. There are also some insulated pads to put up at the ceiling vents and I have fashioned some blanket covers for the door and windows. Condensation is the scourge of winter camping and all the hard work of keeping warm at night is undone by having to open everything up in the daytime to dry out. At least the sun is usually shining and the ambient humidity is low so this is a manageable battle currently. It doesn’t seem that long ago since we were in Galveston, Tx, in 95F/35C temps with 100% humidity, having to sit inside with the air con blasting. I can safely say that the middle ground is a sweet spot in the RV life, but we are not miserable. We would much rather be trying to stay warm than battling heat and humidity, and that is why, I remind myself, we are here at this time of year.
On one of our evenings here we made the long trek (about 50 paces) to the steak restaurant for dinner. This was a quirky place with a large main room, a small seperate bar with real life saloon doors and a roaring log fire in the foyer area flanked by couple of comfy seats. We deliberately went over a bit early, and annexed the fireside spot with our pre-dinner drinks. Our steaks were respectable, although the meal might have been enhanced by them being served at the same time, but the defining feature of the evening was the musical revue. At regular intervals the wait staff would take turns to sing a song on a small stage in the corner of the dining room, accompanied on the piano by a lady that looked like every primary school music teacher that I have ever come across. Every so often all the staff would stop in their tracks and sing a chorus-line tune. It was quite entertaining, but probably explains why the service wasn’t perfect.
From Flagstaff we headed east to the town of Holbrook. This seemed a bit counterintuitive to the overarching East-West itinerary of this trip, but that’s where our next destination, The Petrified Forest National Park is. This park protects an area of large fossilised tree trunks, and was about a 20km drive from our overnight camp. Our plan was to do a drive-through of the park, stopping for a couple of short hikes, and then continue on our journey up north to Utah. Well that was the plan until the small matter of a man wanting a wall and because he didn’t get it, partly shutting down the federal government. And that included the National Park funding. This was what greeted us at the entrance to the Petrified Forest.
Annoyed tourist at entrance to Petrified Forest National Park
Well that was a waste of time and fuel. We were slightly apprehensive about what the shut-down might mean for the next month of our trip, which was entirely centred around the National Parks of Utah. It was too early to tell. We got back on the road, retraced our steps back to Holbrook and then northwards.
Only bit of Petrified Forest we were to see.
We hadn’t forward booked our next night’s park, but were headed to a town called Chinle, a service town in the middle of Navajo Nation lands. It is home to The Canyon De Chelly, a mini version of the Grand Canyon, managed by the National Park Service, with a small first-come-first-served campsite co-located with the visitors centre. (Can you see where this is is going…?)
The drive up to Chinle, about 100 miles was another deserted road through the wilderness. Miles and miles of nothingness with the odd flimsy house/shack/mobile home surrounded by a halo of rotting vehicles. People are poor here. There were a few cars headed south, but no-one else going in our direction, which was a bit disconcerting. We arrived in Chinle and it was a very bleak place. A chaotic collection of prefab buildings, high razor-wire fences surrounding government agency compounds and litter everywhere. Our low of the morning was deepening. We left the main road and drove the 5 miles up to the Canyon. Of course the visitor centre and the campsite were both closed. There were no real other choices for camping, and besides, we didn’t want to be here.
Canyon De Chelly
We took a quick look at the Canyon from a couple of lookouts. Going for a walk was not an option. As this is Navajo Nation land, you can only enter the Canyon with a licensed guide. We had a short pow-wow (pun intended, and code for a short irritable marital discussion) and decided to hit the road again. Our planned destination for thenext night, and Christmas, was Monument Valley. It was easily within striking distance that afternoon and we were confident our park would be able to accomodate us a day early. The next two hours of driving were along one of the most magnificent roads that we have travelled so far. A road of no name, with no credentials, featuring in no ‘top-roads-to-travel’ lists, and certainly with no instagram followers. We cheered up quickly and enjoyed the ride, rolling into Monument Valley during the amazing light of late afternoon and a fantastic sunset.
