It's Snow Time!

It's been a while since I've updated, think I must be getting lazy! So we left Panguitch and drove to Bryce Canyon. It was first thing in the morning when we got there and my god, it was the coldest place we've ever been to. We drove right up to the viewpoint and yes, it was an outstanding view, but despite wearing 3 t-shirts, a thermal long sleeve top, 2 fleece jumpers and an anorak, plus tights, legwarmers, jeans, gloves, hat, scarf etc... neither me or Kev could bring ourselves to stand there long and appreciate the view! Instead, as you'll see from the photos, we quickly snapped a few while huddling together and gritting our teeth on the cliff edge.

We drove back down the road, but quickly stopped off to take an amusing photo by the 'Welcome to Bryce Canyon' sign – who knew setting a timer on the camera and running in the snow to get into the photo was so much fun, we laughed so much!

Next we stopped off at Ruby's restaurant for a coffee. Kev had wanted to stay at Ruby's last night but I said I'd rather stay in Panguitch town – turns out I should have listened to Kev because Ruby's was a dream compared to the dodgy motel we had chosen at Panguitch! Yep, as usual, should have listened to Kev! So Ruby's is a restaurant and hotel that has been at Bryce Canyon since the turn of the century, when a guy named Reuben first realised the canyon was there and encouraged people to come see it. The restaurant, hotel, shop, pub etc... is now still run by Reuben's family and their gift shop is the best place in the world. If we had had endless money, we could have spend a fortune on stag's heads, cowboy hats and belt buckles – probably a good thing we didn't eh!

We spent the rest of the day driving through Utah to a place called Moab, right near the border of Colorado. The drive through Utah was stunning and we came to the conclusion that Utah totally goes to the toilet all over the scenery of New Zealand! It's just amazing, better than Arizona even and that was pretty good there too!

We got to Moab and decided to leave 'The Arches' till the next day as the national park was much bigger than we thought and it was getting late in the afternoon. So we just checked into a motel, got some dinner and that was about that.

The next morning we got up early and drove into the Arches national park, where Indiana Jones (The Last Crusade) was filmed. Kev was obviously, very excited about being there and I think he enjoyed the park much more than I did. To me it was just a load of big rocks that have formed arches – to Kev, it was the chance to live a dream!!

It was still pretty early when we left The Arches, but it was a long and beautiful drive to Salt Lake City. After hours of driving up the longest, straightest, most deserted roads we've ever seen, we then embarked on the road into Salt Lake City and my god, what a shock to the system that was! The road into SLC was the scariest road ever. No-one sticks to the speed limit, no one lets you change lane and there are like a million cars on the 4 lane highway – scary stuff, and to be honest, I think the drive into the city put us off the city itself. If it hadn't been for that, I think we would have stayed in SLC longer, but we both had it in our minds that we had to drive out of there at some point and we should probably just get it over and done with!

Salt Lake City was a beautiful place though. Temple Square was just stunning and I loved the way all the boys walked around in black suits and all the girls wore really geeky long skirts. I hear SLC has a great Emo/punk/rock culture about it, but I certainly didn't see any evidence. I did see a teenage wedding taking place at the beautiful church of the Latter Day Saints- the bride and groom looked about 14 years old and it made me wonder what number wife this one way for the groom! I would have loved to have stayed longer in SLC, but only if we knew people there who could have given us an insight into the weird Mormon world that goes on there. But, alas, we didn't know anyone and we were very aware that the storms were on their way and we needed to get west as soon as possible. So we left a few hours later and made the surprisingly easy drive out of the city – they let you leave Mormon Country much more easily than they let you in! Driving through the salt planes next to the Great Salt Lake (the third, I think, saltiest lake in the world) was pretty awesome, just huge flat planes of salt for as far as the eye could see. Utah has the best scenery in the world, fact!!

We drove right through Utah and eventually ended up back in the state of Nevada, but this time we were right up in the north of Nevada. We needed to stop somewhere for the night, so we found a motel in a town called Elko. Elko was a bit of a dive, just a poor man's Vegas really. Lots of neon signs and casinos, but we got a cheap motel and stayed in watching TV all evening, so it didn't really matter much to us what the place was like.

Elko was just a stop off for us on our way back to California and Lake Tahoe. So the next morning we got straight back on the road and drove to Tahoe City, just over the California border. Instantly we knew we like Tahoe. The local pub was called Rosie's and it over looked the amazingly huge lake. The people were friendly and the place was a beautiful little town. We checked a few motels to see where we could get for the cheapest, but everywhere seemed expensive. We stopped at one who said they could give us a room for $77. It was over budget and it didn't even look that nice from outside, but we though, well, we're not going to get much cheaper and Rosie's is just round the corner, so it was meant to be!! We got our key and went into our room, expecting yet another boring motel room. To our surprise, we opened the door to heaven! Our room was a white oasis of cleanliness and behind a wall of glass bricks was a fantastic heart shaped jacuzzi. Tahoe City was our favourite place ever!!

That evening was the night the locals were lighting the Christmas tree and I got quite excited by that prospect. Santa was due to arrive at 6pm and it was bitterly cold out there, so we decided we needed to head to Rosie's to get a quick hot toddy in before Santa's arrival. Rosie's was an awesome little American bar. The barman was a real character called Dennis and the locals really made us feel at home. Kev loved the place so much that I let him stay inside, while I layered myself up in lots of clothes and then popped across the road to see Santa.

As a huge American fire truck arrived, all the kids started screaming 'Santa, Santa'. Bless them they were so happy to see this fat man dressed up in a costume, but I was just excited to see the big fire engine and I proceeded to ignore the big man and just take photos of the trucks! One of the firemen noticed and offered to take a picture of me with the truck, which totally made my Christmas! The firemen were lovely and told me all about Tahoe and how the tourists have priced the locals out and now all the local firemen etc...have to live in Reno (a place we passed through on the way, which wasn't very nice!). It was such a lovely friendly vibe in Tahoe, we were having a great night.

Back in the pub, the locals were making Kev feel welcome in there too. They were nuts in there. Tahoe people have a thing about shots of Jegermeister, or anything that is alcoholic basically, and they readily involved us in their tradition. We ended up getting pretty drunk and were very thankful we weren't going to be on the roads that night, because it seems drink driving is not an issue for these people. They all had miles to drive home and even the bar man, who drank a shot every time he served a customer pretty much, had 30 miles to drive home – don't get on the roads in Tahoe at night – that's my tip. Luckily for us, we just had to stumble our way back to the motel just 2 minutes up the road. It had been a great night and one of the few times we had really let our hair down in America.

The next morning we were gutted that we had to leave. We wanted to stay just one more night, but the storm was due to come into Tahoe that evening at around 3pm. If we didn't get out before then, we wouldn't be getting out for a few days, so we had to go! We left about half ten and drove up the local road to the Interstate (motorway). Just as we got to the motorway, it started snowing heavily and as we got onto the interstate we saw a big sign saying all cars had to carry snow chains. We didn't have any snow chains, so we had to take the turn off and go to the garage. At the garage we were sold some snow chains for $70 and some rubber bungies that hold them on better, or something like that – to be honest, I was so scared at that moment in time that the woman in the garage could have told me I needed to buy everything in their shop to make it across the summit of the mountain alive, and I would have believed here – she could have bankrupted me if she had wanted!! Just as we had bought the chains, so they put restrictions on the interstate saying that everyone had to put their snow chains on. We didn't have a clue what we were doing and it was bitterly cold there at the garage. It seemed like total chaos and reminded me of one of those Armageddon films where the storm to end all storms was coming to finish the world off. Car upon car full of people were pulling into the garage to buy snow chains and it just seemed like everyone was getting ready for the end!! Thankfully, some guy who looked amazing like Justin Timberlake, came up and asked us if we wanted him to put the chains on for us. We had never been so grateful to anyone, even if it did cost us $20 for the privileged (that's the only reason I know this guy wasn't actually JT – somehow I don't think he'd have been working the snowy streets for $20!).

Snow chains on, it was time to hit the scary road and we got back onto the motorway, right into a stand still traffic jam. We had no idea what was going on, all we knew was that we were not moving and the snow was getting worse. Both of us started feeling very claustrophobic as we couldn't go back, couldn't go forward and couldn't see a thing. The storm was a white out and Kev said out loud what we were both thinking: 'I hate just sitting here, feels like we're just being buried!' It wasn't nice at all and I was playing a movie in my head where the snow got so high that we all had to stand on our car roofs to escape while helicopters tried to rescue us all one by one! My imagination will really be the end of me!!

Eventually, the traffic started moving and as we reached the front of the queue we realised we were all just being turned round because the storm was so bad, they had closed the Interstate! We had two choices, either stay in Truckee (basically a town that is a huge service station for the motorway) and be stuck there in a Holiday Inn for days, or try and make it back to Tahoe City where we would have a nice hotel, a nice pub and nice people. You can imagine which option we chose.

The drive back down to Tahoe City was pretty scary, but snow chains are awesome things and you don't slip at all. We just took it really slowly and made it in once piece. I think Kev's eyes nearly fell out from concentrating so hard as he drove through the storm! They were certainly blood shot when we got there.

Our hearts fell when we saw that our hotel had closed it's doors due to the storm, but they rose again when we realised the lady in Number 3 was giving out keys to rooms! We managed to get our old room back and we knew we'd be OK! We went straight to Rosie's where we got a lovely welcome that made us feel happy to be stranded here. Had some food, a few drinks and then got introduced to the local film maker of the area. He was a nice guy, but was totally high on something that wasn't alcohol. He insisted that if we were still stuck the next night we had to stay with him!

We left the pub and headed to our hotel where I had a great time in the heart shaped jacuzzi watching Jaws on VHS! It was a good night!

The next morning we woke up and the snow was amazing. Our car was totally buried and the snow outside came up to way over my knees. We left the room and tried to walk down the stairs to ground level, but they were buried in snow as well. It was a really lovely soft, powdery snow so it was fun to slide down the stairs! We used the snow shovels to dig out our car, but we knew we weren't going anywhere that day – the snow was still falling heavily and as we dug out the car, so it just got buried more. We popped to the Safeway next door and stocked up on emergency rations just in case. We didn't know how long we would be stuck, although it was predicted it would stop later that day. We then went back to our room and just watched films in the bath for most of the day!! We couldn't go back to Rosie's as we didn't want to bump into that guy as we had no good excuse for not taking him up on his offer of letting us stay at his place, no good excuse that is other than, we were sensible people!!

That afternoon, the snow eventually began to stop. We got up the next morning and knew we had to go. The snow had stopped and the next storm was due tomorrow, so this was our chance. We wrapped up warm – it was minus 8 degree Fahrenheit outside, which is minus 22 degrees C!! The we scrapped all the ice off our car and piled our luggage onto the back seat (our trunk had frozen shut!).

The drive out of Tahoe was surprisingly easy. The roads were icy, but we didn't need our snow chains, so we stopped off at the garage in Truckee and I took the chains off – all by myself- for me this was living our a childhood dream, pretending I was a mechanic and fixing the car -thankfully, I didn't grow up to be a lesbian!!

The interstate was open again and had been cleared completely. The roads were quiet and we made it to Sacramento in pretty good time. And before I tell you about the next leg of our journey, I'll hand over to Kev for some pictures so far....