Archive for the ‘US Trip’ Category

This was a special moment. After one of the worst nights sleep I’d ever had I’d been away from the tent early and been to see Old Faithful. Whilst the geyser itself remains as spectacular as ever (except for the cone which was hacked away for souvenirs by early tourists) the surrounding area has been turned into a geological Disneyland, overrun by coachloads of tourists for whom Yellowstone can be crossed off once they’ve witnessed Old Faithful spouting.

Without a doubt, you have to go and see Old Faithful, a visit to Yellowstone would never be complete without it, but take your time and go and see some of the less well-known geysers and you’ll get to see something truly unique. Getting to Lone Star involves driving 10 minutes past Old Faithful and an hours walk. I was alone for the majority of the walk, apart from squirrels and deer grazing by the river that the path follows. This was good because if nobody was walking away from the geyser it probably meant it hadn’t recently erupted (it has intervals of between 3-4 hours), but bad because I was a little terrified of meeting a bear, and the lack of other walkers increased the possibility of that in my city-slicking mind.

But, I made it to the geyser unscathed, delighted to discover a group of around 20 people already gathered, who told me it was due to erupt within the next hour. And sure enough, 40 minutes later they rhythmic belching and hissing graduated into a fully-fledged jet of scalding water being fired 50 feet into the air, roaring like a small jet plane. It lasted for another 20 minutes or so, then fizzled out. One of the spectators noted the time in the log book, and slowly the group dispersed, witnesses of a unique and beautiful natural display.

I got here early on a beautiful summers day and already it was starting to get seriously hot. I had a lot to do that day so I didn’t stay too long but it’s not a big place so I got to see most of it. It’s a starkly beautiful place, very little vegetation and surreal rock formations all around. The red of the rock and the deep blue of the sky stays imprinted on your brain for a long time.

Today I am proud to present the greatest photo I never took.

Whilst in Alaska last year, I stayed for a week in Craig where my cousin’s husband was working. It’s a 2 hour ferry and hour’s drive from Ketchikan (itself only accessible by ferry or plane) so it’s kind of remote. To make the most of the beautiful, still weather they were enjoying (made more eerie by the haze from huge forest fires across the border in British Columbia), after work, Michael took us all out in a skiff for a spot of fishing.

The water was glassy, with not a breath of wind and we shot out into the bay for about 30 minutes heading for an area where the seabed rose up to within 15 feet of the surface, a good fishing spot I was reliably informed. And, it proved to be, Michael reeling in a tasty dinner every 5 minutes or so. Even I managed to snag a couple of rockfish, which I was all excited about, but one disdainful look from Valerie told me all I needed to know, and we threw it back.

It floated slowly away from the boat, and we got on with catching some more serious fish. At this point we were around half a mile away from the shore, with nothing else around and surrounded by total silence (the occasional noise of a whale exhaling could be heard).

A couple of minutes after the fish had gone back in the water, Valerie spotted a black shape in the distance flying towards us. “An eagle” she said, “It’s seen the rockfish.” And sure enough, having seen the fish in the water from half a mile away, a bald eagle was flying towards us, looking for dinner. It flew past us once to check out what was floating in the water, looped round and in one fluid movement, scooped my luckless fishy friend from the water, 15 feet away from the boat.

I had brought my camera along, and Valerie was holding it when the eagle swooped, and she managed to get a shot of it’s tailfeathers as it flew off. Her son Simon however, managed to get the perfect shot, so I will always have a reminder of what has to be the most incredible thing I have ever been lucky enough to have witnessed.

So this was supposed to be the big one. After leaving Monument Valley I’d driven along virtually deserted country roads to Page, Arizona where I spent the night, and in the morning headed off to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, about 2 hours away. I stopped on the way at a service station where the attendant was having enormous problems trying to understand a 50-something French lady who obviously spoke very little English. I asked the lady (in French) if I could help and without drawing breath she launched into a rant about how she’d been travelling with friends who turned out to be a bunch of arseholes and how she was now travelling alone and wanted to buy some coffee and she was from Clermont Ferrand and it’s not like France here is it?

She continued in this vein for the next 5 minutes, seemingly unaware of the fact that French is not the native tongue in Arizona, seeing nothing unusual in the fact I could understand her. Before too long, I paid for my own coffee and muffin and away I went, her chattering still in the background. She’s probably still there.

About 20 miles after leaving Page (top photo) you are faced with a choice, Grand Canyon North Rim or South Rim. This is the last chance you have to decide – as the crow flies the two are something like 10 miles apart (and visible to each other), by road it’s over 200 miles. So choose carefully young one. I went to the North Rim – to be honest I can’t remember why now, but there was a good reason at the time.

Before too long the scenery began to change dramatically and the rocks and desert began giving way to hills and trees as the road entered the Kaibab National Forest and after an hour or so of this you came to the North Rim itself. I set my tent up (I was getting pretty slick at it by this point) and headed down to the Canyon itself.

Everybody knows that pictures and words cannot do justice to a natural wonder such as the Grand Canyon, so I won’t try. I will say however that it’s breathtaking, there’s no doubt about it, but it doesn’t do much if you know what I mean.

You turn up, you ooh and ahh (and let’s face it, you’ve never seen anything like it before, it is incredible), then you move to another spot to get a slightly different perspective where you ooh and ahh some more. You stay for sunset, you come back for sunrise. Then you leave.

I think maybe I was suffering a little bit from not being able to share this with anyone. I’d spent an hour or so with some very nice people at Old Faithful in Yellowstone, but apart from that I’d barely spoken to a soul (eccentric Frenchies aside) for a week and it was starting to tell.

Slight lonely grumpiness aside however, you’re never going to regret going to the Grand Canyon and it certainly is one of those things you should try to see at least once in your life. My advice – take someone special with you!

Looking through my photos from last year earlier today I realised that I hadn’t written a lot about the Roadtrip I took from Seattle to Los Angeles last year. I’ve mentioned it, but haven’t really done it justice given the adventure it was, so over the next few days I’ll post some pictures and tales of what happened.

After leaving Yellowstone and the Grand Teton National Parks, I headed south towards Utah and Arizona. I had no real route planned, but the Grand Canyon was down there somewhere and I wasn’t going to come all this way and not pay it a visit so I based my navigation on this, using it as a target. I left the campsite at Grand Teton, 5 days after leaving Seattle, nice and early and drove south.



Through Jackson and onto Alpine, Wyoming where I stopped for some breakfast and then ever southwards, briefly touching Utah, then back into Wyoming where I made a slight detour to head through Evanston. After Evanston I entered Utah again where I would stay for the next day or so. The Northern part was fairly green and hilly and after some dull Interstate I crawled through the traffic in Provo, third largest city in Utah and home to the Church of the Latter Day Saints Missionary Training Centre.

I’ve not had many happy experiences with Mormons so for this reason I decided not to stop in Provo (although I enjoyed the billboards advertising Modest Clothing, Next Left!) and carried on over the wonderfully named Soldier Summit, through Helper (names after the Helper locomotives based there, used to help freight trains through the the mountain pass) and stopped for the evening in Green River, 470 miles from Grand Teton.

Green River wasn’t particularly accurately named, I saw nothing green and no river, I had definitely reached the desert at this point, miles of dust and rock, not much else. In the morning I headed to the Arches National Park just outside of Moab.



The arches, created over thousands of years through wind erosion are pretty spectacular, and the wide open space, hot sun beating down and red rock combine to create a special place, even taking into account the large number of tour buses (and tourists) sharing the space with you.



But the highlight of the day, and probably the highlight of the trip came later in the afternoon as I left the town of Mexican Hat in Utah and headed toward the Arizona border. I knew what was coming, but it still managed to take my breath away.



Monument Valley is one of those places you know even if you don’t know it. You’ve seen it before – scenes from some of the most iconic Westerns have been shot there, but the one that stuck out for me was the scene in Forrest Gump where he stops running. You see the same view as you drive towards it (photo above).



I had thought about spending the night there, they advertise a campsite (it’s part of Navajo Nation and the tribe run the site) but when I got there it was more a rocky car park than campsite so I spent a couple of hours taking in the view and as any good Western should end, rode off into the sunset.

What’s This?

This post was originally published in August 2009 Confused?
As my regular reader will know, I have already confessed my man-love for Bill Bryson. One of the charms of his book, The Lost Continent is the fact that it is the memoirs of a roadtrip. There are very few journeys as evocative as the US Roadtrip and if you’re honest I’m sure everyone has thought, or dreamed, of hitting the highway at least once in their lives. From Route 66, to Kerouac, Steinbeck, Springsteen and Hunter S Thompson, US culture is full of references to this mythical rite of passage. One line in The Lost Continent sticks in my mind, “for me, from here to Bozeman was a monotuous 5 hour drive across empty plains, whereas you dear reader simply turn the page”.

I had always wanted to do more that just turn the page, I wanted to drive 5 monotuous hours. And I did. Although it wasn’t that monotuous and the total distance I did in the 10 day trip would have barely got me from coast to coast had I driven in straight line, but that didn’t matter. I’d already driven from Orange County up to San Francisco, but this was the big, The American West. It was just me, a rented Pontiac G5, a woefully insufficient sleeping bag, 10 roadtrip CDs and 12 cereal bars. I loved it.

Having a deadline to stick to for the first time in what felt like a very long time I broke my normal protocol and actually did some planning (rather than my usual “I dunno” method of travelling) using my trusty and (now) ripped Rand McNally West Coast map, so I had a vague idea of the distances and the things I wanted to see. Arriving in Seattle from Ketchikan, I went to see a baseball game, Mariners vs Yankees (4-2 Yankees), sat in horrendous postgame traffic and was away from Seattle by about midnight. I drove for about an hour and a half in the dark and rain until I could take it no more and I stopped overnight in a ski resort whose name escapes me – it was something like Cle Elum which sounds unlikely but it was, honest.

I was away at 8am on a bright sunny Saturday morning and hit I-90 East and drove. And drove. It took me until past lunchtime to get past Spokane and out of Washington State. I was starting to to get an idea of ther task ahead of me. As cliched as it sounds, when I stopped for breakfast about an hour into the day I had the Oh Shit moment of looking at the map and comparing the distance travelled since Seattle (like half an inch) and the distance I had left in front of me (about 7 feet). No time for a coffee refill my son, get motoring. East Washington was pretty dull scenery-wise but things started getting interesting once I crossed into Idaho. The land rose and fell and the hillsides were covered in pine forests. It would stay that way for the next 5 days or so. Idaho didn’t last long and soon I crossed the Continental Divide into Montana. I also effectively lost an hour as I entered Mountain Time and the clocks went forward, one less hour on the road, oh no!

I had heard about the 50,000 Dollar Saloon from the bikers on the boat and true enough, it did what it says on the tin. There is indeed a Saloon with over 50,000 Silver Dollars attached to the walls. What else? But I didn’t stop long, I had miles to cover. I stopped in Missoula at around 5 for some lunch/dinner (lunner?) and then did the final 100 miles of the day across some incredible open countryside (this is Big Sky Country after all) and with the sun disappearing behind me I found a motel room in Butte and collapsed onto the bed, after a long 526 mile day.

The next morning I was up early (for me) and headed off, back on I-90 towards Yellowstone. I drove the first 80 miles or so in virtual solitude, barely seeing a soul. As it was getting to coffee break time I spotted a sign off the freeway saying Yellowstone National Park – I had intended on staying on the freeway until Bozeman so this was a novel idea. There was also a service station at the exit which decided me, so trying to check my GPS, look at my map and deciding what I wanted for breakfast I swerved onto the offramp. At the top, was a Stop sign and a pickup truck bearing down on me from the left so I braked somewhat sharply, let the truck past and then turned right.

As I glanced in my rear-view mirror for what must have been the first time in a while, I couldn’t help but notice that the entire view was full of bright, pretty, flashing blue lights. Believe or not, I’ve never been stopped by the police before, anywhere, let alone in Montana, but even so I managed to put 2 and 2 together and realise that, given their proximity, these particular lights had to be for me. Gulp. I pulled over, and having seen plenty of episodes of America’s Most Moronic Police Chases, simply wound my window down and waited for the gun-toting Law Enforcement Officer to scream at me to throw my keys out of the window and exit the vehicle with my hands up.

OK, I’m being a bit flippant, in reality I did kind of have a lump in my stomach. He strolled up, wished me a Good Morning (it was still only around 8am) asked for my licence and vehicle registration. I dutifully handed this over, shaking only slightly, and he asked me to get out of the car and come sit in his. As we walked over, he told me that I had been going a little bit fast (phew, so it wasn’t that the car had been registered as stolen) and that he was going to give me a warning. Yay! No ticket, the lump disappeared and I began to enjoy the experience. Sat in his nice warm car, he told me that I had been doing 81 (speed limit 75) and I needed to keep it down a bit. He was actually very nice and chatty. Asking me how I was enjoying my trip and where I was planning to head to next. The Swiss driving licence threw him a bit, especially as I had told him I was from London (it’s much easier to explain than Dorset), but it was all good in the hood and I got a little souvenir warning from the Montana State Troopers department. He even asked me how many official languages there are in Switzerland. Nice to share some knowledge around. I then asked him the best way to Yellowstone, and before I know it I was back in my own car, on my merry way.

The Guardian has published its Readers Travel Awards 2009 – of the 5 winners in the Best Overseas Travel Destination:

1. Iguazu Falls
2. Macchu Pichu
3. Ankgor Temples
4. Grand Canyon
5. Great Barrier Reef

I’ve been to 3 of ‘em in the last year.

My Top 5 is, in approximate order:

1. Macchu Picchu, Peru

2. Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia

3. Perito Moreno Glacier, Patagonia

4. Monument Valley, Arizona

5. Ilha Grande, Brasil

Was in a bookshop today and saw one of those 1000 X to Y Before You Die books. You know the ones, Places to See, Wines to Drink, Products to Boycott, Hotels to Feel Smug In, that sort of thing.

So seeing as I’ve done some pretty cool things in the past few months, and in my life, even if I say so myself here is my Top 10 Things I Have Done (So Far) Before I’m Dead:

10.  Had dinner and been to the house of an astronaut (twice). OK, so it’s the same guy, Jeff Hoffman, but I’ve been to his house in Houston and Paris and been out to dinner with him both times. He’s been up 5 times, including going up with his space spanners to fix the Hubble Telescope back in 1993. Basically, my mum went to school with his wife, that’s how we know him. It’s a very cool thing to tell people, but I kinda wish it had involved more of actually being in space myself rather than talking to somebody who’s done it, if you know what I mean.

9. Seen both sunset and sunrise over the Grand Canyon. Yup, the big one. The BBC got into the Before You Die thing and The Grand Canyon was the Number One place to see. Well, I don’t wish to sound ungrateful but I wasn’t overly impressed. Well, OK, I was. You are, after all, stood on the edge of a 10 mile wide, 1 mile deep, 250 mile long hole. But then that’s all you do. You stand there. Admittedly I could have stayed a little longer and hiked down it, although that would of course entailed hiking back up it which is not so much fun. But I didn’t, I stood there and stared. For well over an hour I promise. Both in the evening to watch the sun go down and again at 515 in the morning to watch it come back up again (I didn’t sleep very well in my tent).

8. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower so drunk I couldn’t remember having done it in the morning. True story. Don’t judge me.

7. Seen the Milky Way. Stars, lots of stars, like a cloud of stars. Seen it twice, both times freezing my bits off, unable to sleep. First time at -20c at 4300m in Bolivia, second time -3c at 2500m in Yellowstone Park. Suitably extreme I feel.

6. When we did the Machu Picchu 4 day “hike”, day 1 was cycling down a mountain. There were 9 of us, 3 Canadians and 6 people in my group. The Canadians seemed OK, all big and outdoorsy, but nice enough. That was until we got onto the bikes and one of them shot off and got all showy, doing little kicks to get rocks out of the way and that sort of showy-off stuff we Brits frown on. Got talking to one of his friends later and turns out he’s the Downhill Freestyle Mountain Bike World Champion. Seriously, he does this, and was a thoroughly nice chap! And I went cycling with him!

5. Seen a 2-metre-long whale’s penis. Well, what do  you want? Pictures?

4. Hitchhiked in the back of a pickup truck. There’s more info and a picture of this in my Tierra del Fuego post, but it was one of the highlights of my trip so far. Nothing beats the feeling of a climbing into bed, dusty and cold after a day trucking across the southernmost landmass in the world. Was fantastic.

3. Stroked a tiger. It was Grrrrrrreat! Sorry.

2. Been fishing for salmon in Alaska. Again, lots more salmon-related stuff in earlier posts, but being out there in a 14ft skiff with newly-found family-members, in Alaska, with a fishing rod and beer in my hand, was  great moment. Made all the greater by the eagle. In fact the eagle is one of the coolest things I have ever seen.

1. But it doesn’t beat…

..What you think I’m going to be able to pick one event from all the fantastic things I’ve seen and done just to bundle it up into a neat Number One in a list? Ain’t gonna happen. 10 months, 20,000 miles, 8 countries, that’s your number One right there ;o)