Friday, 11 December 2009
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....
Wednesday, 2 December 2009
Arizona
Two hours later and we were still stuck on the freeway, mostly at a complete standstill. There was some important person being escorted up the freeway ahead of us and the police were taking up all the lanes around whoever this person was, so the rest of the traffic was totally backed up behind. We were thankful that it wasn't summer here as I would not like to be stranded on the freeway in the summer heat here. So anyway, eventually we came to the Hoover Dam which took forever, and I mean forever, to get across and it didn't even look that impressive anyway!!
From there, the drive to Flagstaff, Arizona was pretty straight forward although as we drove through the desert it began to snow. It was strange seeing snow falling in the desert but it didn't cause us a problem as we were nearly at our hostel. Having left Las Vegas in the sunshine, wearing shorts and T-Shirt, we then got out of the car in Flagstaff to below freezing temperatures – it was a bit of a shock to the system. We checked straight into the hostel to get warm!
The hostel was an odd little place, it reminded us of a huge student house. All the furniture was old and it was super hippy, but it seemed OK (as OK as anything was going to seem compared to the Bellagio). We decided to head straight out for lunch and were pleased when the guy behind reception recommended a place called Beaver Street Brewery – he knew us well already! Te brewery was just round the corner and we instantly knew we would like Falgstaff. It's an historic small town in Arizona and you can actually walk places rather than drive, which is so nice! So we walked in the light snow to the Brewery and sampled some of their home made beers – my favourite being Bramble Berry, which tasted like squash! We had the most awesome meal and we were having good feelings about Flagstaff. We came out of the restaurant and saw that the snow was coming down really heavy now. The ground was covered with more snow that I think I've ever walked in and it was all Christmassy and beautiful. For the first time I felt Christmassy – you can't feel like it's Christmas when you're in hot countries!
We walked back to the hostel and settled down for what would be the first of many sleepless nights, as this hostel turned out to be the noisiest place we've ever stayed. I don't know what it was about this hippy house but it just seemed to attract noisy hippies, old and young. I think somewhere on the website it must have said, please only stay here if you are really inconsiderate and loud, and we must have missed that when we booked it! Not only were the walls paper thin and the hippies really loud, but to add to it, the pub outside attracted a rowdy bunch and there was certainly no double glazing. I tried the earplugs that we had but they didn't help! Nevertheless, we stayed at that hostel 4 nights because it was nice to stay in one place for a long time and the confine of our little room did begin to feel like home.
As for the rest of our stay in Arizona I'm afraid that, while it was awesome, I don't think there's going to be too much to say really on the blog. I feel Kev's role will be more important here and the pictures will speak for themselves, but never one to give Kev the staring role that he perhaps deserves, I will continue to bore you with some written blog first anyway!
So the first morning in Flagstaff we had a lie in and then just spent the afternoon wandering around the town and getting to know the place. This is the sort of America I had wanted to come to...really old cattle ranchy style buildings and just a really welcoming lovely atmosphere. We went back to the Brewery for lunch again and even popped to Walmart to get some supplies. We declined to pick up one of their many guns in Walmart and I was disappointed that we they didn't sell fruit and vegetables. Then we headed back to the hostel for yet another sleepless night.
The next day we went over to the Grand Canyon. I'd wanted to visit the Grand Canyon since I was little, so I was really looking forward to it. We could only visit the south rim as the north rim is closed in winter, but that was OK. It was about a 2 hour drive to the south rim and it was awesome. As I say, there's no point me being cheesy and trying to describe it, the pictures will show you. We used the shuttle bus to take us to a few different view points. It's really high in the Canyon (and in Flagstaff), 7000ft above sea level so it feels like you're out of breathe all the time, even when you just do a little walking. Anyway, the best one being the Pima Point (or something like that) – that viewpoint really gave you the chance to see the scale of this place and the Colorado river and the Grand Rapids below, it was absolutely beautiful.
Once we had breathed in the sights we began our trip out of the national park. We were driving down this huge road, which seemed like a main road, and were searching for a sign to tell us the speed limit. We saw the sign for 45 mph too late and by that time we had the police behind us and yep, before we knew it they were flashing their lights and we were being pulled over. Neither of us have ever been pulled over by the police before so it was kind of exciting and I totally felt like we were on a TV show. So the guy in his sherrify uniform and little cowboy hat came and tapped on the window and Kev rolled the window down. He informed us that we had been going 61mph in a 45mph and asked if we had any reason for going so fast. Kev explained that we didn't realise we were speeding and then we heard that line, ha, I would have loved it if I hadn't been worried about a fine...'License and registration documents please'.
The Sherrif guy took away our passports, vehicle registration and driving licenses and made us sit and wait for like 15 minutes. Then he came back and told us he was going to let us off with 'no fine, no nothing!'. He handed Kev the documents back and noticed that Kev was shaking like a leaf. 'Why you so nervous, why you shaking?'. It was hysterical because we'd seen that on 'Police, Camera, Action' where they pull people over and they're shaking so the police search the car and find like stash loads of drugs in the vehicle. So immediately, I'm thinking, ah great, they don't know that Kev shakes like a leaf all the time and now they're going to search the trunk!! But it was all fine and Kev explained that he'd never been pulled over before so he was a bit nervous. The police man could not believe that by our age we'd never been pulled over before, but he bought it (good, as it was the truth) and he let us go after having a bit of a joke with us about how he should make our first time a bad time so we don't do it again. We assured him that we'd learnt our lesson and I restrained myself from advising him that American roads really should have more signs to tell people what the speed limit is – I don't think that would have gone down too well! The fact that he found it hard to believe we'd never been pulled over might go some way to demonstrate to you how many traffic cops there are here. You're constantly seeing people getting pulled over – I'm sure they're just there, waiting at the side of the road, so that they can make more American Road Cop TV programmes!!
Back at the hostel we chilled out and then headed to a place called Maloneys, another pub in the town centre. We couldn't stay in for the entire evening, even though we were trying to save money. We had no TV in our room and that hostel was so god dam loud. And in addition to it all, just through the centre of Flagstaff is this railway line and every 15 minutes or so (maybe it's more like every ½ hour) a huge huge huge train goes by and toots it's horn for ages, while the crossing bell tolls for even longer. It's deafening whenever it goes by and it does that 24 hours a day!
The next morning, we got up and headed to Sedona. Sedona had been totally recommend to me by Dominic and so I was keen to go there. The drive was only about an hour and it wasn't even that many miles, but it was a road full of switchbacks, which are like windy roads, so it took ages. When we arrived in Sedona, it was beautiful, although very geared up for tourists. But it was nice because at this time of year there's hardly any tourists in these areas – too dam cold for most sane people – my Fiji suntan is now well and truly gone, in fact, Kev was almost black when he left Fiji, that's no longer the case!
We stayed in Sedona for a couple of hours, browsing and buying my final ring and then we headed back up the switchbacks to the hostel for our last night in Flagstaff. We didn't actually do anything that night, just watched a couple of films on the lap top and put up with the screaming children that had come to stay in the room next to us for the night. We made a good plan of what we intend on doing and where we plan to go over the next couple of weeks, but that's changing all the time. For example, the plan was to wake up today and drive to Page. We did that, and then we kept going, so the plan's changed already.
So today we did drive to Page. The drive was desolate and kind of freaky – it's wierd to drive for hours and see literally nothing but desert. It made me a bit funny to think how far away we were from a coastline, probably further than I've ever been from a coastline. Kev couldn't understand why that mattered, and I don't know why really, just feels strange. We passed through many little native townships, which were strange too. They have these little huts, almost like shanty town huts along the road and then there's other townships which you know are just full of rednecks with their millions of wrecked trucks out in their ranches. We stopped at the Colorado Horseshoe Bend point near Page and wee parked the car to walk the ¾ miles over the dunes to the lookout point. It was an awesome sight, but neither me or Kev could bring ourselves to get close enough to the edge to take a really good photo! That point is super high and there's no railings or barriers, just a huge drop of about 5000ft to the Colorado River.
We drove on to the entrance to Antelope Canyon, which people had said we should see. It's a beautiful sand dune that has been petrified and sculpted by the wind to form this beautiful scenery. But when we got there they weren't letting people through on their own and we would have had to get in a truck with this woman who would have charged us about £40 to drive us the 3 miles to the canyon and then she would have waited an hour for us to look around and then drive us back. For one, we didn't want to pay £40 and two, we didn't want to spend an hour there. So we decided not to bother, we'll probably regret that, but there we go, plenty more to see.
We then drove in to the centre of Page to find out how we get to see Lake Powell. We were directed over a big dam and there we found the view point. Lake Powell is huge, but it's not the same of like Lake Taupo in New Zealand. In Lake Taupo it looks like a sea, you can't even see the other shores, but in Lake Powell, it's a different shape, it's long and so it doesn't look that impressive, I'm sure many people will disagree with me, and we have started to wonder whether we've seen so much on this trip that now things aren't standing out to us like they should do!
We drove back into Page to check out where we were planning on staying, but when we got back to the centre we decided we didn't really want to stay there. There was nothing wrong with Page, but nothing that really kept us there either. It was only 1pm and we didn't know what we would fill our time doing if we stayed. Page was only founded in the 1950s, so it's not the most beautiful of towns (although obviously the surrounding scenery is nice). And it really seemed like the only thing there was millions of churches – seriously, I've never seen so many. So we decided to drive on up to Kanab, which was where we had planned on staying tomorrow night.
An hour and a half later we had crossed the Arizona border and were now in Kanab, Utah. Again, this was a small town, but nicer than Page, but still, not a huge reason to stay. It was now only 3pm and the drive to Bryce Canyon (which was the point we wanted to get to eventually anyway, Page and Kanab were just stop off's in case the drive was too long) was only another hour and a half. I wasn't keen on spending a night in Bryce Canyon as it's 9000ft above sea level, which creeps me out, so we agreed to stay in the nearest town – a place called Panguitch.
Panguitch is a strange place, but nice enough. There's nothing here and the people have super strong accents and the guy who checked us into our motel seemed like a total redneck, but it's a sweet little place. We popped to the shop, got some dinner and settled in for a night infront of the TV – we've been 4 days without one, so it's nice to have normality back in our room, even if outside is totally alien.
Tomorrow we'll head to Bryce Canyon and then up towards Moab to see the arches, but for now, I'll let Kev show you what I've been talking about in a visual form. xx
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