Tin Can Travels

11th – 15th Jan

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.

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.

8th – 11th Jan

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.

4th – 8th Jan

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.

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.

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.

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.

27th Dec – 3rd Jan

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:

1. Living in a RV is way more fun when the temperatures are above freezing.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

22nd – 27th Dec

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.

18th – 22st Dec

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.

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.

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.

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 the next 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.

9th -18th Dec

We began this trip, as we did last year, with no real fixed itinerary. Save for a few specific dates like meeting friends in Tennessee, our college football game in Texas, a weekend to come in Las Vegas with my brother, and obviously our end date, we have made our plans as we go along. But there comes a point, as we approach the final month or so, when we start ‘back-filling’ the bookings. We also had to think where we wanted to be, and where we could be, for Christmas and New Year, especially as this seemed to be coinciding with being at altitude, in the desert, in winter, in areas totally geared up for spring, summer and autumn tourism. Our itinerary was starting to firm up and we realised that we were a bit ahead of schedule with some days in hand. For this reason, and because we had been in the relative wilderness for 5 weeks, we booked ourselves into a city centre RV park in Tucson for 8 nights. Civilisation!

At first glance our park was quite austere. A small tarmac lot, surrounded by a tall wall with a large electronic gate, sandwiched between an apartment complex and a small school. It turned out to be a fantastic base for our week of city life. There was a supermarket and hardware store over the road, a long riverside cycle path a few hundred metres away and good bike and walking routes into downtown, which was only a mile or two away. There was also a great clubhouse space complete with pool table, table football and ping pong table, all of which were like private facilities as no-one else seemed to ever use them. My pool did improve a little, but I cannot compete with Hampson’s skills. His tertiary education was in English, History and Pool.

We walked and cycled a lot in Tucson. The manageress of the park thought we were crazy when we told her we had walked the 6km to a shopping mall one day. 4kms to a hairdressers another day (Well it is rare to fine a Toni & Guy!). Cycled 25 km along the river around town on the cycle paths and another day cycled up the steep road to the top of Sentinel Peak, or ‘A’ Mountain. This peak is a small cone-shaped hill overlooking the CBD and was a few km from camp. It is called ‘A’ mountain for the large whitewashed stone ‘A’ constructed on its upper face by freshmen University of Arizona in 1915. This has been maintained by subsequent generations of UA students.

Christmas is definitely on its way and I have managed to find a teeny-tiny TinCan appropriate tree. This is Albert. Named for the supermarket chain, Albertsons from which he was procured. He is 42cm tall including the pot and has a daily trip outside to photosynthesise.

Our stay coincided with the city’s ‘Parade of Lights’, a Christmas parade by any other name. This was a convoy of fifty or so vehicles, private and municipal, bedecked with countless strands of fairy lights and festive decorations. It was very pretty and as we stood in the cool and dark, all wrapped up, it made us quite nostalgic for the Northern Hemisphere winter Christmas. Despite sixteen years of living in the Southern Hemisphere, the concept of a summer Christmas, complete with long warm days, broad daylight parades, BBQs and salads has never really made sense. Just not cold and miserable enough ‘down under’.

A trip to the movies was too far to cycle and required a voyage by Uber, another advantage of city living. We went to see Mortal Engines (Hampson’s choice). This was not only in 3D, but in those fancy D-box seats too. These are reclining Lazy Boy style seats that move and shudder in synch with the action. Another level in movie going experience! Despite being only the second day since the movie’s release there were only about six others watching with us. Perhaps not the box office hit that it was hoped to be, although we both really enjoyed it.

Our weather here was delightful for the whole week. T-shirt weather in the day and not cold enough to need the heater on at night and bone dry. It is easy to see why the Snow Birds all flock from Canada and the Northern states to spend winters in these benign conditions. We spoke to the locals that we met about the heat of the summer. Its not bad, apparently, as long as you don’t go outside at all. Our Uber driver to the cinema was originally from Sudan. He thought it was too hot. Our homeward bound driver was one of the most verbose humans we have ever encountered. Like an olympian for chit-chat. Astounding.

Tucson is sandwiched between East and West Saguaro National Parks, the only National Parks created to preserve a specific species of plant, the very impressive and characterful Saguaro cactus. This is a very slow growing species that can be up to 70 years old before they start to sprout the branches like arms that can make them look very human. They stand like an army of upright soldiers on the hillsides, looking like they are waiting for something. As we left Tucson we headed out to Saguaro West, first stopping at the quite stupendously impressive Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. This is a zoological park that apparently is routinely listed in the top ten of its kind in the world. It is a 100 acre park with walking trails through the desert terrain and various exhibits of native animals like coyote, javelinas, mountain lions, beavers, otters, birds reptiles and spiders. It also, a bit bizarrely had a small aquarium and a stingray petting exhibit. My favourite area was the walk-in hummingbird aviary. There were 20-30 beautifully colourful tiny hummingbirds free-flying around our heads and drinking from eye level feeding stations. It was magical. After we left the museum we drove through the park, admiring the Saguaro, and then onward to our next stop a couple of hours up the road, an overnighter at a large park in Casa Grande. It was fine.

Visiting Tombstone was a bit of a dog-leg in our trip, but this place has been so immortalised in our childhood consciousnesses by Hollywood that we couldn’t resist spending a few days here.

The Wild West town, like many others of its era, was a mining boom town. Silver was the prize. It was founded in 1879 and grew from a population of 100 to 14000 over 7 years. Unfortunately in the mid-1880s the mines hit the water table and although heavy duty pumps kept the mines dry for a while a fire in 1886 destroyed the pump house and the pumps and mining was abandoned. It had a hay day of a mere 7 years. The town clung on by the skin of its teeth only because it was the county seat until 1929, avoiding becoming one of the many ghost towns left behind by the mining busts, and managing to retain its Wild West flavour.  It also owes its survival to the lore and legend of its most famed event: The 1881 gunfight at the OK Corral.  

This was a showdown between lawmen ‘goodies’: Virgil, Wyatt and Morgan Earp and their dentist/gambling associate, Doc Holliday, who shot and killed cowboy ‘baddies’: Tom and Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton.  The exact spot of the gunfight is preserved, with a mannequin mock-up of the protagonists in their various positions, but there is also a live re-enactment show of events nearby.  The lead up, and fallout of this 30 second short moment in time captured the imagination of Hollywood and is the setting and backstory for at least eight movies, a few TV shows and several songs. The town is a ready-made film set. The preserved main street is made from packed earth, lined with wooden verandas, a thoroughfare for horse-drawn buggies and lots of folks were walking around dressed un-ironically as cowboys, holstered revolvers on hips.  This is the only place that we have seen civilians openly carrying firearms.  And it all seems entirely normal.  

Our stop for two nights was a small camp right in the middle of town. It was only about 50 metres from the OK Corral and the soundtrack to our stay was Ennio Morricone spaghetti western tracks and blank gunfire from the hourly re-enactment shows. Very mood inducing. We arrived in the tail end of the rain, get wet setting up, and then the sun came out again. Normal desert winter weather was resumed.  We went full ‘tourist‘ during our stay, which is the only way to go here.  We went to the gunfight show, toured the OK Corral site and associated museum exhibits, saw the film and cheesy, but quite impressive and informative, revolving diorama show, walked the streets having bizarrely developed slight swaggers and ‘itchy revolver hands’, had ‘old time photos’ taken in fancy dress, shot paintballs from a revolver at man-sized targets in a shooting alley and drank at the original long mahogany bar in an establishment called ‘Big Nose Kate’s’. (The Kate in question was the prostitute and on-off girlfriend of our gunfighting dentist, Doc Holliday. ) This is definitely a destination for the ‘themed party gathering’. There are numerous stores doing Wild West costume rental and sales, although not in great numbers whilst we were here.  We did, however, see a group of four grown men wandering around in lion and tiger onesies. Either a case of wrong town or wrong costumes. Best not to ask.

I wonder what all the 1880s townsfolk would have thought about the craziness of the 21st century tourism in Tombstone, but I suspect that life was a much bigger heap of bonkers back then. 

5th – 7th Dec

We left Roswell on a cold, cold morning having had to deal with our first frozen water hosepipe of the trip.  It wasn’t too much of a drama as the solution was to use water from the tank (which happily is kept liquid by the heating system) for essentials whilst the hose defrosted in the shower. We knew the deal when we made the decision to make this an Autumn/Winter trip but even the mild southern winters of the USA can get far colder than the winterless north of NZ. Throw in a few mountains, and this is going to be a shock to the system, especially as we have been avoiding winter altogether over the past few years.  

We headed west across the plains of New Mexico. This bit is enchanting, and now its name of ‘Land of Enchantment’ makes a lot more sense.  The road carved through miles and miles of empty plains, mostly devoid of any evidence of humans. West Texas was massive, but never felt as empty as this part of New Mexico. In the distance a mountain range loomed and eventually we reached it and climbed over it. There was snow at the top. There was also a tribal reservation and a petrol station with a casino. Or was it a casino with a petrol station? Not sure, but surely bizarre. We refuelled, resisted the urge to have a late morning game of roulette and descended the other side. As we were presented with the view of the huge flat Tularosa basin on the other side we had our first glimpse of the reason we have come this way. Gypsum fields or white sands. 

The nearest town to White Sands is called Alamogordo.  It appears fairly unprepossessing but surprisingly large and one could wonder why on earth it was here. All to service tourists visiting sand dunes? No. There is another fairly interesting reason. Tularosa basin is home to Holloman Airforce Base and The White Sands Missile Testing Range; a significant contribution to space innovation and exploration was made here.  The Trinity site, where the first atomic bomb was tested, is near here. The Space Shuttle landed here several times. HAM, the space chimp, was trained here.

HAM (Short for Holloman Aerospace Medical centre) was born in Cameroon, came to the USA after he was granted a green card (or stolen by poachers, one of the two,) and at 2 years of age was chosen from a group of 40 little hairy astronauts to be the first hominid to go on, and safely return from, a space flight. He was trained to do some tasks of earth, rewarded with a little banana pellet if he did them, punished with an electric shock if he didn’t, and then the space scientists compared his performance on earth to that in space. He was nearly as good in orbit, and all his vital signs were stable throughout, thus proving than humans could probably safely travel to space.  He retired after his flight and lived in a zoo in Washington DC for 17 years, and then moved to a North Carolina zoo with a colony of chimps for his last 2 years, dying in 1983 at the age of 24.  His remains returned to Alamogardo, where they are buried at the New Mexico Museum of Space History.  RIP little hairy spaceman.

We spent a couple of  hours at the aforementioned museum, which also is the serves as the International Space Hall of Fame. It was pretty interesting, had some great views over the basin, and we might have jumped at the opportunity to dress up a bit…We took this photo ourselves as we were all alone up there!

Our camp for the night was in town, but we didn’t venture out.  The next morning we headed off to the White Sands National Monument which was only about 16 miles away.  Given its proximity to the Missile Testing Range, about once a week the park road is closed for safety when they are testing.  

Brace yourselves for some physical geography facts:

This area used to be a shallow sea, which, when it retreated millions of years ago, left deep layers of gypsum, a soft mineral consisting of hydrated calcium sulphate. The mountains rose, taking the gypsum high. The water from the melting glaciers dissolved the mineral and washed it back into the basin, and rain and snow today does the same. With no outflow rivers, the water from the standing lakes evaporates, leaving the mineral in crystal form, selenite. The crystals are broken down by wind until they form a bright white sand. This gypsum sand is used in the fertiliser and building industries. Wall board, plaster of Paris, blackboard chalk and alabaster all owe their whiteness to it. In this basin the gypsum has formed the most spectacular and unworldly area of bright white dunes, protected from plunder by the National Parks Service as White Sands National Monument. 

We caught the tail end of a closure, and were first in line of the queue to get in.   The Sands are amazing with miles and miles of bright white dunes which are dotted with the occasional grasses and yucca trees.  There is plenty of wildlife here, but mainly small critters like spiders, moths, lizards and snakes.  Natural selection has hit fast-forward here as despite the dunes only being a few thousand years old, many of these animals have evolved to be very pale in colour. 

We parked up and set out on a designated loop trail. The info on the trailhead sign said that the 5km would take 3 hours because it was just up and down the dunes, following marker posts. So we didn’t do that and risked straying from the path to do our own 1 hour walk. The temperature was in the early 60 degs F and very pleasant.

This place must be unbearable in the heat of the summer, and getting lost, which would be very easy, could be quite dangerous. We didn’t see the bleached bones of any lost tourists or any wildlife, only plenty of lizard foot prints and a few fighter jets and helicopters doing military manoeuvres. We safely made it back to the carpark and had our picnic sat atop a dune, looking at the mountains. Not a bad lunch spot.

We rolled on across the plains of the basin and crossed another small mountain range to our next stop, Las Cruses. This is a sprawling desert town straddling the I-10 interstate. Named for some crosses erected to commemorate a band of travellers who were attacked and killed in this area in the 18th C, it is now a medium sized town, home to many who work in the nearby military facilities.  It has a couple of historic areas and our camp for the night was within a short walk of one of them, Mesilla. This had a cute little square and we found a cool locals bar for a drink then had an enormous plate of Mexican food each at a nearby restaurant.

Despite going out completely unprepared we managed to be entirely unaffected by a strange and unusual event than happened during our evening out. It rained. Really hard. After weeks and weeks of travelling through desert and battling dust and dry skin, the heavens opened and it poured. Happily we managed to get home between downpours and stayed completely dry.  This weather was the start of our exposure to the wintery storm that was to crash across the more northern and eastern states, bringing plenty of snow to those areas, but only a few hours of rain to us.  This continued the next day as we did a long day of driving to leave New Mexico and to our next state, Arizona. Pretty miserable conditions on the highway, but we plodded along and arrived at our next stop, the town of Tombstone, safely.

1st – 5th Dec

We left our roost in the Guadelupe Mountains in an ongoing cool brisk breeze but glorious sunshine.  Our mini convoy of two truck campers cruised the easy 40 miles over the ongoing desert plains dotted with oil wells, across the border into New Mexico and to the tourist-activity-of-the-day, a visit to the Carlsbad Caverns National Park.   We followed the tail of our new buddies up the hill to the visitors centre, parked up and set off on one the most spectacular 2 mile walks that I think I have ever done.

The Cavern complex was discovered in 1898 by a teenager called Jim White, who explored it with a homemade wire ladder and gonads bigger than mine. By 1923 it had been declared a National Park and visitors were descending the 230m into the caverns down a narrow switchback path, using rickety ladders and steps to get into the numerous rooms. By 1932 two elevator shafts had been sunk to link the main cavern room with the surface. Now it has a new visitor centre with shop and cafe at the top, 4 elevators, and a cafe underground.  You can get the elevator down, but there is now an amazing  path that winds down from the visitor centre into the mouth of the cavern, through numerous chambers and rooms into the Big Room, an enormous chamber 8.2 acres in size.  There are countless formations, fabulously lit, and the whole journey to, and around the Big Room is 2 miles long. It was stupendous. Epic. Photographs do it no justice at all.

The outer rooms are also home to another large population of Mexican Bats which put on a great show as they leave at dusk to feed. They, like the Austin bats that we did not see because they had already gone to Mexico for the winter, had already gone to Mexico for the winter. Don’t blame them either.

We surfaced by elevator and all had lunch in the cafe before saying our goodbyes to Val and Wayne, who were heading back to Colorado via a night in Roswell. We weren’t going that far. Our next stop was in a park north of Carlsbad for 3 nights, where we had arranged a mobile RV repair guy to come out to mend our water heater.  Carlsbad is not a pretty place. What was a small town servicing the caverns is now a large sprawling conurbation servicing an oil boom.  Most of the workers, who are predominantly single men, live in featureless dusty RV parks and the main strip was a collection of food joints, liquor stores and truck sales and service shops. I imagine this place is quite a harsh place to live. After a brief stop for provisions we escaped the town and headed 20 miles north to our camp for the next 3 nights. We had no plans to do anything for the next few days, so being out of town didn’t matter at all.  We quite successfully achieved our goal of nothingness with the addition of:

1) a 3 mile stroll down a track from the camp to a nearby reservoir. This was billed as a ‘nature trail to bird refuge’, but the reality was ‘dry, dusty, rutted track littered with beer bottles, plastic bags and spent shotgun cartridges leading to body of water with a couple of coots drifting around on it’. It was a bit optimistic to have taken the binoculars.

2) Three loads of laundry.

3) Getting a BBQ dinner from the camp kitchen. We had to not only order our meal in the morning, but also book a time slot for it to be prepared. We snagged the very latest slot available, which was 6.30pm. This is the land of the early dinner.

4) Getting the water heater fixed. Warren, the RV fixit guy came and after an hour of diagnostics, seemingly fixed it. He is now the 4th person to be involved with this blasted heater, but by far and away the most competent. We were disappointed the next day, when, as we prepared to leave Carlsbad area, it didn’t seem to be working fully. After a phone call he arranged for an assistant to drive another part out to us. I replaced this that evening, but to no effect. Our hearts were heavy with the prospect of having to arrange another person to come and look at it, and spending even more money on it, at some future point on our travels. But then we managed to magically fix it by……. flipping the fuse switch back into the ON position! Still not sure if this had tripped, or been left off by Warren, but who cares. Hot water is hot water. Hoorah!

Our next stop in ‘The Land of Enchantment’, as New Mexico is charmingly called, was Roswell. Alien City. Land of the little green men, the flying saucer, a plethora of naff gift shops and a whole heap of intrigue. It was a shortish drive through some fairly un-enchanting portions of New Mexico to this mythic town.  It is, on the face of it, a town like any other, with a few notable exceptions.

1. In July 1947 someone saw something odd, found some bits of something odd and reported it to the authorities.  The military, who had an enormous presence in the area at the time, became very interested and took over ‘investigations’.  What ever it was that  the military were up to and had manage to stuff up was frantically covered up and the ‘little green men/flying saucer’ rumours were theatrically ‘quashed’ to feed the appetite of the conspiracy theorists and draw attention away from the truth.  (That’s my opinion anyway.)
2. Roswell needs alien conspiracy theories.
3. Aliens are everywhere, especially the plastic/chainsaw sculpture/inflatable types.
4. My husband was very excited about coming here because he, and bizarrely also my mother, believe that they are aliens themselves. (Nuts, the pair of them).
5. In the visitors centre there are some friendly aliens that will pose for a photo for free. How friendly is that?

We came, we toured the museum, we had a burger lunch, we visited a very eclectic art gallery and we spent one night in a small RV park just out of town. The host was friendly here too.