Arches National Park

The last of the desert national parks before we travel up to Great Tetons NP. We struggled to find a campsite near the park so settled for one a little further away that was busy with boys toys ( All Terrain Vehicles  - ATV's) we had to laugh they even used them to drive to the washrooms from there RV's, upscale motorised wheelchairs. Anyway enough winging. This park is named for exactly what is contains, some amazing rock arches. It's all down to the rock types and there makeup. The weathering then works on them over thousands of years to drill potholes that then expand through further erosion and fracturing to form arches. 

This ones called landscape arch

Sarah offering her support, holding this one up. 

We had a lot of rain this day in the park

Delicate arch

The arches have collapsed a long time ago here. This set of rocks is called a parade of elephants, two parents and one baby. With imagination, when you were there you could see it!

This is called Double arch. In fact it's three potholes that have collapsed into a double hole this was our favourite one. 

We really have been in the Wild West but horse and wagon have been replaced with ATVs instead.

Bryce Canyon

Bryce Canyon - our favourite place so far here in the U.S. The place is beautiful with views  across the open plains deep in the rift between the valley walls. It's made up of several types of rock but it's the sandstone and limestone mixed with iron and manganese that gives all of this area the deep red colour and the contrasting whites and blacks visible across the plain. 

On the drive to Bryce we passed an area called Red Canyon and just after saw this interesting rainbow in the sky.  We've never seen this happen before it appears to have formed the stripe in the centre of a small cloud formation. No rain just hot weather, who knows why!

The pillars of rock stretch out into the canyon and down to its base some 600 to 1000 feet below at this point. The images probably don't portray this amazing place satisfactorily but hopefully you can get a sense of it from these few pictures. In the evening we attended a presentation from the local ranger about astronomy. Bryce has perfectly dark skies the only problem was it got so dark that ourselves and another couple we got to know couldn't find our way back to the campsite. It took us a few false trails and a hour or so walking to get back to the tent. 

This one is called Queen Victoria's garden, I wonder why?

Zion

This was our first stop in the mid west, it's about 4 hours drive from Las Vegas but we were a little worried we would not be a ble to get a camping spot as there are only two campsites available and you are not allowed to camp in the national park anywhere else. It turned out on arrival that both camp sites were full but with a little pleading with the park ranger she gave us a spot. Shortly after pitching the tent we had a small herd of mule deer come within 10 feet of us eating the grass. 

The cacti below looked really beautiful so we decided to share them with you 

The next day and our only full day here we spent walking and jumping on and off the free shuttle bus to all the places we wished to visit. Daytime in this area of the west is hot even at this time of year, evenings can be cool with temps below freezing. 

On our way out of the canyon the following day we drove through a series of steep switch-backs finally driving through a tunnel cut through the heart of mountain. Once at the top of the canyon we took a short hike to some point or other that I can't remember the name of right now and looked back on the route out of Zion Canyon you can see the vista in the image below. 

There were so many things to see, obviously you need to like landscape and rock to appreciIate it I guess, but the patterns were amazing,  One area called the Chequerboard Mesa was symmetrically crossed horizontally and vertically with distinct lines making a chequer board pattern,  another entire mountain looked like slow poured vanilla and strawberry blamange with the soft ripples flowing down the shallow sides it looked so nice you could reach out and eat it. Sorry we didn't take pictures of these on the iPhone just with the camera. 

Helen I put my favourite traveling shit on again' 

Vegas

On arrival in Las Vegas I am afraid we went to sleep at about 6:30pm in the evening................

Light weights aren't we? Well we had been awake for 35 hours after driving back to Miami through the night to catch our plane to Vegas at 7:30am. We said lets just close our eyes for  half an hour and then we'll decided what to do, well that half an hour turned out to be 14 hours, so at 8:30am the next day we woke up and had breakfast. 

It's a very superficial but glitzy city. About a 2 mile stretch along Las Vegas Boulevard from the "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign to the Wynn Encore, which incidentally has a golf course in its back yard, after that it goes down hill. It probably sounds really bad but imagine Blackpool and 'Kiss Me Quick' hats neither would have been out of place if plonked in Vegas. 

Can you guess which hotel this is?

We only bet about $20 in total all the time we were there and lost all of it. I won more in Australia!

After my critique above I do have to say that all the big resort casinos have interesting attractions to attract you in including fountain displays outside the Bellagio, volcano eruptions at the Mirage and the Venician with its singing gondolas. All of them have exclusive shops like Louis Vitton, Cartier, Henry Winston (crazily prices diamonds and such). Sarah looked, only! We took in the Michael Jackosn One, Cirque du Soliel show at Mandalay Bay which was excellent. I counted 5 Cirque du Soliel shows permenantly playing in Las Vegas. Donny and Marie Osmund also had a show rated the best for 3 years in a row, not sure who did the rating though. Didn't fancy that one even though Crazy Horses by the Osmonds was the first single I can remember buying as a kid. 

Ciaran we took this picture for you but it's only a side on view as the character wanted $5 to have his picture taken. We also passed Batman, Spider-Man (with a beer belly), a Transformer, a man and woman with very little on, Homer Simpson, the singing Cowboy in his underpants (we last saw him in New York a few years ago), Elmo gambling, Mini Mouse and Elsa (sorry girls no photo didn't have the phone with us a the time). 

Olaf must be magic because he didn't melt in the heat.

Grand Canyon

The coach trip is around 3 hours to the west rim of the Grand Canyon plus the detour to the Hoover Dam. We stopped at the the Indian reservation for the Hualapia tribe as its their land that this part of the Grand Canyon sits on. Not so sure that they could run a drinking contest in a brewery though. With changes to regulations nearly daily. We walked around a couple of different viewing areas and took photos, Sarah has been shooting with the iPhone, see pictures below. Not surprisingly it's deep, very deep and quite inspiring. Puts you in your place as we are clearly insignificance in comparison to its great size. Our only disappointment was that we didn't get to spend more time there. 

The Hualapia believe that the rock in the depression you can see in the middle of the picture is there sacred eagle. Can you see it? We managed to spot it after a short stare! 

Hoover Dam

Whilst in Vegas we took an early morning trip to the Grand Canyon via the Hoover Dam. Interesting spot high in the Nevada hills not to far from Las Vegas. Lake Meade sits closer to Vegas and I am not sure if it's fed by the Colorado River but the normal water level is very low and keeps dropping which is a big concern for the desert population of Las Vegas. No water no city I guess. Lake Meade is over 100 miles in length, it's big! Very big!

The Colorado river is also suffering from low water and concerns over the dams long term ability to produce electricity are prevelant. If you look at the image of the Colorado taken from in front of the dam you can see how low the water level is. We didn't take a photo of it but the are two excess water tunnels either side of the dam which are big enough to take a few coaches side by side down them, these haven't been needed since 2007. 

Lazy 5 Weeks

We've had a relaxing five weeks in Florida. Although the weathers been hot we have done some work around the house and garden so it's not been total relaxation. Also, we have travelled up to Floridas pan handle around Jacksonville and Lake City. The tent and my backpack have been sent back to Hilłeberg and Osprey (respectively) for repair. Both have been excellent and offered to take care of repairs free of charge.

We're in the process of planning our travel and trekking around North America. We're picking up a car from Las Vegas and driving/ walking through the central national parks Bryce, Zion, Arches, Grand Tetons and Yellowstone and then returning the car back to Vegas. Then off into Canada, latter back into Maine and finally catching the plane back to the UK for July. Then it's Europe by car!

It's been good speaking with so many of you over the past weeks. As you know we've had a leak in the pool, not a big deal but it's taken 3 attempts for the pool guys to resolve it, hope it's sorted now. I found a snake, dead, in the AC unit outside. It was still fresh so only died that day, had to move it before Sarah saw it. We've also done some painting including the front door. Finished putting the fence up so now the backs all done. After having the villa for nearly ten years now this year is the first time we have sorted the mail box out so we recived our first junk mail in ten years last week, how about that! Thankfully it's been the only one albeit the first mail we recived. 

We also went to see the rocket launch on 24th, little video attached but not much to see as we were 7 miles away. The wind sound you can hear from about half way through is the sonic boom reaching us from the launch site.