Fun in Arizona

Today we drove for a while on Route 66, which is supposed to be famous for being the first interstate highway ever. I think whoever gave it that title was grasping at straws - there were roads LONG before this one was built, and they even went between different places! Just like an interstate highway!

Anyway.

It was neat in a retro sort of way. We stopped at the Roadkill Cafe for coffee. I'm not sure, but I think it's famous. Their motto is "You kill it, we grill it".


Next stop was the Grand Canyon Caverns. It was so much fun! Our tour guide into the caves, a gruff old guy named Pete, was almost as fascinating as the caverns themselves. He looked and sounded like an old prospector and his laid back drawl and dry sense of humour kept us amused the entire time. I got my picture with him.


Also, we took some pictures of the caverns. They're pretty. Some dude found them in 1927, bought the land over top of them, and started charging people 25 cents for a tour in which he took them into the caverns by lowering them by rope in a bucket with a gas lantern and some matches. Pete the tour guide turned off the electric lights at one point and lit a match instead. It was kind of scary.

Oh yeah, the pictures:



Mark says the Grand Canyon Caverns were more fun than, but not as spectacular as, the Grand Canyon itself.

After that we moseyed on down to the tourist town of Lake Havasu City, which sit on the Colorado River and is a stone's throw away from California.

Why did we come here? Well, let me tell you...

In 1968, the London Bridge in London, England was decaying and no longer able to support the great amount of traffic that crossed over the River Thames every day. Well, London replaced it with a new London Bridge... and Lake Havasu City BOUGHT THE OLD ONE, SHIPPED IT TO THEIR TOWN, AND RE-BUILT IT, BRICK BY BRICK OVER A CANAL. Only in America, folks.

We're gonna go look at the authentic London Bridge, located in downtown Lake Havasu City, Arizona, tomorrow.

I'll let you know how that goes, and I'll leave you for now with a picture of the sun setting over Lake Havasu, which I accidentally called "Lake Sususu" the other day.

Grand Canyon

So today we went to the Grand Canyon in Arizona.

Let me say two things about the Grand Canyon. First of all, I loved the extreme natural drama of the area and really appreciated the general awesomeness of the landscape. Secondly, the Grand Canyon National Park is a masterful tourist trap.


We were awed by the amazing vistas, but it was tiring to be constantly herded towards cheesy gift shops and overpriced food. In some areas the crowds of witless tourists were almost overwhelming, but fortunately all it took was a short hike up the easy trails to get away from the thick crowds. Like the Hoover Dam, we were astounded that a weekday in February would draw so many people, and we were thankful that we were not visiting in the midst of the summer.

Here are a bunch of pictures:







On our way to the park we stopped in for fuel at a local trading post. The friendly proprietor was quite a character and we ended up staying in his shop for about a half hour talking with him. He was an old ex-marine with oxygen equipment behind the counter, and whenever he got excited about something he was talking about, he got louder and more animated, and then had to put his oxygen tubes on. He had been everywhere and done everything, and had lots of suggestions for where we should go over the next few days of our trip.

One thing he recommended was the Grand Canyon Caverns, something we had been planning on seeing anyway. I was glad for the endorsement though!

So we are hoping to visit the caverns tomorrow, and after that, who knows.

I was glad we saw the Grand Canyon - it's amazing place. However, I was EXHAUSTED at the end of the day!

Time to veg out.

Hoover be Dammed

We drove from Death Valley, south through Las Vegas, and hit the Nevada / Arizona border at the site of the Hoover Dam.


Before driving over the dam, a guard inspected the back of our truck and the Boler. He didn't find our explosives, so we were on our way to the dam. It was mid-afternoon on a random weekday in February, and the traffic over the dam was horrendous! I would hate to see what it would be like in high summer. We drove slowly over, looking for a place to park so we could go to the information centre. (You can't actually see anything at while you're driving over. The concrete safety walls are too high.) We kept seeing parking lots, with a sign for cars only, and a separate sign for RVs pointing further up the road. This happened at every parking lot until we were past the dam and in the middle of the wilderness again - I guess that was their subtle hint that they don't want any RVs to actually stop at all. We weren't that upset. It was crowded and expensive - to park a car costs $11, and the entrance fee is more again. We did pull over (illegaly) for a couple of pictures , and we were on our way with our money intact.

And now for something completely different.

Here are a few pictures of animals we've seen in the past few days. Some were wild, like this here road runner (meep meep!):


and some were donkeys:


K, that's it for now.

Death Valley!

California has redeemed itself today.

Our first stop today was Rhyolite, Nevada. Rhyolite is a ghost town!! Oooooh!

As we drove into the ghost town, we noticed we were being followed by a line of... you guessed it: seven black Porsches. Um, that was pretty bizarre. They all went into Rhyolite and parked together at the far end of the town. As we were wandering around a little while later, they all passed us again in a little convoy, on their way out of town. It was kind of weird.

Anyway, ghost town pictures:




We were unable to find any ghosts, so we were soon on the road again and headed for Death Valley, which is on the Nevada-California border but is mostly in California.


We walked around for a bit in a very desert-like sandy, dune-y part, and Mark tried to jump down one big dune and fell halfway down. It was funny. We found some desert wildlife there:


The thing about Death Valley is, it's the lowest elevation in the western hemisphere. (Trivia: Coincidentally, the highest elevation in the continental United States is less than 100 miles away.) The dunes we played in were at about sea level:


and at one point we were significantly below sea level, as this sign says:


...and by the end of the day, we were more than 5475 feet up, looking down on the lowest elevation, which was 282 feet BELOW sea level. As a result, I went from wool socks and sneakers to bare feet and sandals, shedding my sweater for short sleeves, and then had to put the wool socks back on again for the high elevation. Apparently the rule is that there's a temperature difference of five degrees for every thousand feet of elevation. I believe it!

Hmm..what else...okay, a region called "Artist's Drive" where all the rocks were distinctive colours, like purple, blue, pink, green, and stuff.


Zabriskie Point, which had nice views and a big bus-load of tourists who I took pictures of:


Mark wanted me to mention that "Zabriskie Point" has some sort of connection to a Pink Floyd album or something. I guess that's neat if you're obsessed with Pink Floyd.


...and finally, our grand finale for the day, seeing Badwater Basin, the lowest elevation in the western hemisphere, from the top of a nearby mountain. The road to get there was so steep that we had to drive up in first gear. Oh, and the series of tight, twisting switchbacks was also a nice touch. The view was worth it!


Overall Death Valley was incredibly cool.

Mark's Random Ramblings

I don't write much, but figured I should chime in with some of the stuff Julie either left out or wasn't interested in.

First of all, a photo capturing the essence of the United States:


Yes, you read it correctly, you get free beef with the purchase of new tires.

Also, we forgot to grab the pictures off our "backup" camera, so Julie missed the photos of the sand dunes in Oregon. The particular ones we stopped at were called the Taylor Dunes. Nearby we could have taken a dune-buggy ride on some other dunes, but we were still on a schedule at that point. We'll probably get another chance sometime, after all we'll be spending lots more time in the desert.


I got a kick out of the street name below. For a long time I've thought "Guitarded" would make an amusing name for an album, with me being the Guittard in question. Right next door to the Jelly Belly factory, they had a street named just for me. Alas, I'm not as original as I thought I was.


We've been taking it easy in Beatty, Nevada for the past couple of days, and yesterday we wandered into the local museum. It was full of all the stuff you'd expect - old-timey radios, railroad equipment, old pictures and maps - but one thing I found a little unusual:


You're not just supposed to leave that stuff lying around, are you? I guess radiation affects your ability to spell too. Oh well, thanks Ken!

Finally, the last weird thing of note is the gas pumps here in Nevada. They want you to pre-pay, which is fine. That's what I'm used to anyways. So, step 1 is to swipe the card. Check. Step 2 is where I got lost... the gas pump demanded to know my Zip code. I tried 90210 (the only zip code I know), but it was too clever for me, and rejected it. I had to hang my head and go inside to explain to the cashier that I don't have a zip code. She was nice though, and let me fill up after taking my credit card for collateral.


That's it for me. Back to your regularly scheduled Julie-updates.

Deserts & Windstorms (& Snow! Oh my!)

I suppose we should have expected this:


..but it was very strange to go from sunny California weather to HUGE PILES OF SNOW in a matter of a couple of hours. After we left Sacramento, we were still of course heading inland, and had to get through the mountains at some point. We breached the mountain passes near Lake Tahoe and came out on the other side near Reno, Nevada. It only took a few hours to get through the scary looking region, and thank goodness it was a beautiful, clear day with nice clean, dry roads. We heard it snowed later that evening.

On the other side of the mountains was Reno, Nevada! Reno is quite a picturesque town - or the part that we saw as we blew on through was. We figured we didn't need to stop since we're going to be spending time in Las Vegas, and we wanted to get as far from the cold climate as possible. (Reno is actually at a high elevation, and is surrounded by snowy mountains.)

Nevada roads are amazing, by they way. Take THAT, California - you're our least favourite state so far! Anyway the landscape in Nevada is always incredible, and very alien to us. They have tumbleweeds here! We saw our first tumbling tumbleweed bouncing along the side of the road as we were driving. It was huge. We got all excited and watched it go! It bounced, as though in slow motion, along the shoulder of the highway and looked VERY cool. Then it bounced, as though in slow motion, right onto the road towards us, and we got a little freaked out. We couldn't stop as we had a huge semi truck right behind us, and I'm sad to report that we KILLED the very first tumbling tumbleweed that we'd ever seen. They're pretty feeble, so nothing happened to the truck, but still...

As we were driving along we passed Walker Lake, a pretty, turquoise-blue body of water in the middle of the desert, with mountains in the background. We hiked around near the lake for the afternoon. It struck me as odd that this body of water, in the middle of desert country, didn't support any plant-life around it's perimeter.


So the weather wasn't really the greatest for our first day in Nevada. As I already mentioned, we were still at a high elevation and it was cold! Also, it was quite overcast for most of the day. We pulled in to a rest area for the night that happened to be in a high wind zone. And the night we pulled in, there happened to be a wind storm. We lay in our bed inside our tiny Boler that night, listening to the wind scream across the desert. The poor Boler shook and shuddered. We had put all our stabilizing feet down, but it still felt as though a strong blast might knock us right over. It took us a long time to fall asleep!


Fortunately, the next day dawned clear and calm. We started out for Death Valley, oohing and aahing at the spectacular vistas of northern Nevada. Here's a picture of us at some pokey trees that I'm not confident enough to call cacti. Although they poked Mark pretty good.


We reached Beatty, Nevada and as I write we're sitting at the "Space Station RV Park" near Death Valley. We're going to go to Death Valley tomorrow - should be fun!

San Francisco and stuff

We're sitting outside a little cafe in MILL VALLEY, California right now! Any die-hard M*A*S*H fans will get a kick out of that. By the way, Mill Valley is a suburb of San Francisco. It's nice here - the sky is blue and full of fluffy clouds, and everything is green and lush. We passed by about a million vineyards on the way into town and I'm sure we'll see more this afternoon. This is as far south as we are going on the coast - we don't want to get into the mess that is Los Angeles! We're heading inland later today and might make it as far as Sacramento.


California drivers are crazy. I'm not just saying that because we're here. They all have huge SUVs (mostly white, proof is in the pictures in this post) and speed a lot, and almost nobody signals. Oh, and everyone cuts everyone else off all the time. I think it's normal driving etiquette here. Here's an example of California driving etiuette - please note the white lines this driver is parked on, and the adjacent handicapped spaces. The picture doesn't show it, but there were a lot of empty, legal parking spaces close to him:


We saw some beautiful giant redwood trees yesterday, but we didn't enjoy them that much because we were too busy being stressed out about the ominous signs at the side of the road that said things like "FLOODED" and then didn't give any more information.

We got off the beautiful redwood tree road called "Avenue of the Giants" after that and went on the nice safe freeway. Well, I guess it wasn't that safe, but at least it wasn't flooded.

I've got to sign off for now, but I'll write more later on...

...LATER ON:

I'm back!

After we left Mill Valley, Mark put forward the strong argument that we were only about ten minutes away from the Golden Gate Bridge, and even though we’re not crazy about driving in cities, we decided we had to go take a look. It was cool! Except that the marked out viewing area was way up a very windy and extremely steep hill.

Our little truck did great because the speed limit was low, and as we drove up the hill we could see the bridge and all the pull-over areas that were accessible to downhill traffic. We got to almost the tippity-top of the hill and there was a big scary sign saying “ALL RVs AND TRAILERS, RIGHT LANE ONLY!” or something almost exactly like that. So we went in the right lane, and it took us…back down the back side of the hill we had just climbed. Mark was optimistic and assumed that a visitor info centre was at the bottom of the hill. I had a sinking feeling that that was not the case. When we reached the bottom of the hill, we seemed to be in farm country. We had a quick fightscussion, did a u-turn in some dirt, and went BACK UP the hill AGAIN. This time, we were able to drive down the correct, exciting side, and we got to pull out into all the pull-out areas and take pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge, and the pretty city of San Francisco behind it.


Then we left town.

We pulled off the highway for a break about halfway to Sacramento, and Mark’s hawk eyes spotted a sign that said “Jelly Belly Factory Tours”!!!! Eeek! Of course we went. The tour was amazingly cool in spite of the fact that we were the only people that were not accompanied by hyper little kids. They gave us each a free bag of Jelly Beans at the end of the tour, and there was another line we could get in to get free samples of any flavours we wanted. They’ve started making gross flavours, inspired by the Harry Potter candies no doubt. Did you know this? I didn’t know this. They had stuff like “Skunk Spray”, “Pencil Shavings”, and “Moldy Cheese”. The bad part is, all the gross ones really do taste very accurately like what they’re supposed to. I only got one gross one. Mark got about four. Mmmm Jelly Bellies!


We made it to Sacramento with lots of time to spare, so we wandered around the Ikea store that was near where we had boondocked for the night and – on our friend Jeff’s recommendation – bought the Ikea Café macaroni and cheese for supper. (Only 99 cents, and it comes with a drink!)

Tomorrow: Nevada.

California

We've made it to California. I have to say that I'm extremely impressed with Oregon, but California is so-so thus far. Although we are finally in warm weather! Camping will be much more fun without having to wear a toque to bed.

So we left you all at the end of day one, a Sunday. On Monday we made it to a suburb of Portland where we met up with Mark’s aunt Barb and her three kids, who had recently moved back to North America from Bangkok. Uncle Dan was missing in action because he was in Brazil. We wandered around Lake Oswego with Barb and she showed us her new house from the outside. They had not yet taken occupancy when we were in town, but since the house was vacant we wandered around the outside and she described the layout as we peered in the windows. Their back deck has a slide attached to it, going to the ground in the back yard! Cool.

We then hung around the Portland area for about another 24 hours, trying to get in contact with our friends Taras and Ellen, who were supposedly due to arrive back in Portland (where they currently live) on the Tuesday. We had no luck whatsoever reaching them, and their suburb, formerly known as “Hillsboro”, will henceforth be called “HillsBORING”. We were not looking forward to another cold February night of Oregon camping, so on Tuesday afternoon, not having contacted Taras, we finally left town and drove on the CRAZIEST roads ever in an attempt to reach the coast. It was very hilly and winding – at one point the highway made a more than 180 degree turn as it wound down a forested hill. Then Karen, our GPS unit, took a fit and tried to make us turn onto a dirt road. No thank you, Karen. Man, she can be moody.

We did make it back to the coast that evening, and wouldn’t you know it, once we were a few hours out of town, Taras finally called us. Drat!! I’m sure we’ll see him again.

We drove ‘til after dark (I don’t want to do much more of that) and pulled over into our own private rest area, where we parked on a hill overlooking a spectacular sandy beach with huge waves. We listened to the waves all night and watched the sun rise from the beach the next morning.

On Wednesday we arrived in California! It was a day filled with more driving, more hanging out on spectacular beaches (similar to Long Beach in Tofino) and we went for a hike in some sand dunes in a state park or something. The sand dunes were neat.

Wednesday evening we UTTERLY FAILED to find a place to pull over for the night. Karen the GPS unit, in another fit of moodiness, let us drive towards a “safety rest area” for an hour, only to find out that it was perfectly empty, all the street lights in it were on, and it was closed and had boards across the entrance. Who closes a safety rest area? Again it was already after dark, so we drove to a nearby state park, decided not to stay because they wanted us to pay $20 for next-to-no facilities, and we got trapped in it and had to drive the entire length of the park in the dark because there was nowhere to turn around. We had failed at the rest area. We had failed at the park. We asked Karen to find us an RV park and the nasty thing took us to a mobile home community instead. Who knew it would be SOOO hard to park somewhere for the night? We drove around until we found a cheap-ish motel and finally settled down for the night. At least we were somewhere where we could shower, although inexplicably, the hot water only ever lasted for about four minutes at a time. Also, it was harrowing to walk around in the bathroom because the floor was soft and felt like it was rotting out from under the cheap linoleum. So far California is NOT as good as Oregon. But it's still pretty good.

Day One: Washington & Oregon

We left Victoria on a cool but bright February morning. We cleared customs without any problems and were on the Coho Ferry to Port Angeles, Washington that left town at 10:30am.


Day one was actually pretty uneventful. The weather was a bit cool but very nice all the same. We spent most of the day travelling because one of our few concrete appointments takes place tomorrow near Portland, so we had to get reasonably close to it before stopping for the night.

We took the coast highway through Washington and it was gorgeous. There were beaches that reminded us very much of Tofino and we stopped to wander around for a while.


We made it into Oregon, which is (so far) another charming state. We stayed on the coast, zipped through Astoria, and stopped for the night in the town of Seaside, where we found the glory that is Pig'n Pancake. Mmm, breakfast for dinner!


I'm having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that other people are now responsible for my dogs. I'm sure I'll worry the whole trip, but the longer we go without any incidents (yes I'm paranoid and yes the people watching my dogs are great) the better I will feel. I know it's not logical. I can't help it.

Anyway that's all for now. We had a string of very long and busy days in lead-up to our departure, and we are both pretty beat. Time to recharge and have a leisurely vacation!