Back Home...

...They'll be thinking about us, when we are far away...

Sorry, dropped into World Cup mode for a minute. We arrived home on Tuesday morning, we had a great trip and no major problems (although I have just discovered that my bank card was cloned in Brazil, but I should be covered for that).

Not quite the end of the blog: if you've read this far, I hope you'll come back for our Chicago write-ups soon. Then, because we quite fancy doing it, I think we'll do some kind of wrap-up/best-of. One of our main motivations for blogging was to have something to look back on and remind us of all the cool things we did.

Finally, 2 more things when I have time: I'm going to tag every post by country so if you're going to, say, Vietnam and want to read our tips, you can find them easily. And second, I'm going to try to add some best-of photos to a lot of posts so that they're a better reminder for us. I'll post here when I make progress on that in case anyone wants to see them (I'll make the updated posts easy to find), and also when we put photos online on Picasa and/or Facebook.

Thanks for reading and thanks to the many people who made suggestions, put us up, took us out or otherwise helped make our trip so brilliant.

Sweet Home Runs, Chicago

What's wrong with this picture? Oh, right: you can't see the batter. He's behind the big metal girder. And in case you think you might just lean to the left: yes, they've stuck a camera on the girder at pitch height.
There are two baseball teams in Chicago, but we went to see the Cubs because Wrigley Field is supposed to be a classic stadium. And it is nice, if you have a seat with a view. I'm pretty annoyed that they didn't list these tickets as restricted view when I booked them. Cubs: for that reason you suck, to use the local terminology.
They play a *lot* of baseball here. We went on Thursday, the Cubs' third consecutive day in action against the Oakland A's (and they played against the LA Angels the next few days). It was an afternoon game, a lovely sunny day (not that we got much of the benefit underneath another stand) and Wrigley Field was full - a good effort for a 1:20pm game.
Despite the full house, it felt more like a day out than a sporting event. Apart from the occasional vocal A's fan, the crowd chatted amongst itself, and I didn't get the impression that anyone was watching every ball. Not that you can really see the pitches, they go so fast - if the batter hits it, the satisfying crack echoes around the ballpark and you generally have plenty of time to look up and locate the ball even if you weren't paying attention. The crowd is always getting up and wandering about, so to add insult to injury our aisle seats meant that we had to stand up a lot, and there were people standing in the aisle blocking our view more often that not - if not spectators, then the many food and drink vendors. Still, watching it live you do get a real sense of just how far a home run has to travel - a long way - and how easy it is to catch with a big glove on - high balls made to look easy, and a few impressive catches from fielders that initially looked too far from the hit.
The game meandered along, Cubs scoring first, A's getting two back, until the seventh inning, when the crowd suddenly got a bit interested and in between innings the whole park stood up and sung 'Take Me Out To The Ball Game'. The Cubs tied it up in the eighth and in the ninth, with bases loaded, the pitcher walked a batter and the Cubs won (a rare event, I am assured*), and the crowd was very happy. But not much of an atmosphere - a full house, a tight game, but a 10% full Maracana for a match that the teams were treating as a friendly had a better atmosphere.
* In fact I think their next two home games were lost 12-0 and won 12-1.
Not a bad afternoon out, but I would have enjoyed it more if I'd been able to see properly. Don't worry, though, Chicago is great! More soon.

Lilly's Highlights & Recommendations # 29 (San Diego & Orange County, California, USA)

First iPad top 5!

1. Balboa Park - the real highlight of SD. This enormous park is not only a lovely and large park but it also contains a ton of excellent museums and general arty goodness (including a replica Globe theatre). We didn't have time to see it all but we did go to the SD Museum of Art (a small collection, so not overwhelming and some classic pieces), the Photography Museum (a selection of stuff by recent SD artists, a lot of it interesting and thought provoking) and the Timken Museum (a tiny museum with a few pieces by famous names and a strangely large collection of Russian religious pieces). All the museums are housed in historic buildings in various styles and from different periods and the overall effect is oasis like.

2. San Diego Zoo - a very good zoo (considered by some to be the best in N. America). The layout is confusing but in some ways the better for it - makes the experience a bit less structured and a bit more safari. The biggest draw is the pandas (including a 10month old!) but they have also have lots of different monkeys, a very impressive jaguar and a lone polar bear and a couple of animals we have never seen before despite having done a lot of zoos including a strange yak type thing which lives at ridiculous altitude in freezing conditions in the Chinese mountains the proper name of which I have forgotten! It is not a depressing zoo either and seems to take research and conservation seriously so you can assume the animals are well cared for. Not a cheap day out ($37 for an adult) but fun. Not as good as Oz Zoo though!

3. San Diego Old Town - the historic part of the town, less than 10 miles from Mexico and a bit like Mexico-lite for tourists. Having said that I really enjoyed it (and didn't have to take my life in my hands crossing the border!) - the old buildings are carefully preserved and in some pedestrianised parts there are almost no signs of 21st century life (the buildings mostly house olde style shops and restaurants). We had dinner in a beautiful courtyard with Mexican dancing and yummy fajitas and margharitas. A really atmospheric evening out.

4. Gaslamp Area - the centre of SD nightlife, there must be around 100 restaurants and bars in the small downtown area known as the Gaslamp area. It doesn't retain much historic gas lamp feel but it is a great place to eat and drink. They make a lot of craft ales in SD - we sampled a fair selection and so were more than ready to enjoy a steak at the Gaslamp Strip Club (named after the steak not strippers despite the cool and retro boudoir like interior). Be warned though it is a cook your own steak place so you need to make sure you get your timings right if one of you likes your steak alive and the other likes it cremated (any guesses?) A really fun night out area.

5. Beaches - after leaving SD we decided to drive back up towards LA via Orange County (largely inspired by my brief obsession with The OC television program - sad I know!) It doesn't quite live up the the drama and glamour of the TV show (at least not on an end of trip budget!) but the beaches are great. We visited Laguna, Newport and Huntingdon beaches. Laguna has the cutest associated seaside town, and Newport the friendliest sea (perfect for body boarding!) but the best beach is probably Huntingdon which has a cool surfy vibe too it. The only disadvantage of Surf City, USA is that the sea is awesome for surfing but absolutely vicious for the 'swimmer'. I put that in speech marks because I was mostly trying to avoid drowning rather than swimming. SD also has its own beaches and Coronado seemed nice but it was too grey to really enjoy so I would recommend the OC for a beach break if you are ever fed up (as if!) of LA.

I have also seen a few films since I last wrote so here are some brief reviews Twitter style.

Kick-Ass - the geeks really are taking over Hollywood. Silly and funny. Can't wait for Scott Pilgrim now.

Get Him to the Greek - it's all about Russell Brand, so of course I loved it! Some great comedy from P-Diddy too. Really!

Sex & the City 2 - fabulous! The clothes, the interior decoration, the locations, the positive friendship message and Liza! Anyone who doesn't enjoy this is a misery. (Paul refused to watch it!)

On a Chicago bound flight now (final week - sob!) after a couple of days in Pasadena and Santa Monica (districts of LA). No top 5 for those days which I must admit were mostly spent watching the World Cup and the NBA finals! I would say that Pasadena is a really nice area to base yourself in LA but only if you have a car as it is a bit of a way from the bright lights. The Pacific Asia museum in Pasadena also has a small but interesting collection of (mostly) ceramics.

Pasadena on the left hand side

A couple of days to kill around LA took us first to Pasadena, a pleasant suburb with an 'old town' that doesn't look remotely old but has decent nightlife and plenty of chain stores to keep Lilly happy, though it might drive you mad if you spend much time on foot as crossing streets takes a geological age, and of course jaywalking is illegal. I must admit that watching the World Cup has taken up a bit of time, but a 7am kick-off doesn't eat into your day, and if England are playing at 1130am then a long lunch seems justified (particularly if, like me, you had predicted we would struggle against the US and need to check that you were right). There is a lot of World Cup hype over here, it's being shown in plenty of bars and restaurants. We tried to go to a British pub but it was full, so we settled for a bar/restaurant. We'd been to another in the same chain to watch the LA Lakers a couple of evenings earlier and it had been rammed and noisy. Here, at quarter past eleven, there were about a dozen people at the bar obviously here for the match and a few more at tables who probably weren't interested. But the place quickly filled up and was full of TV screens and the crowd gradually got more involved and noisy. Even people walking in in the 89th minute stopped to watch the end of the game, and over the next couple of days I heard quite a few people talking about Robert Green's moment of infamy.* The next day we watched Germany annihilate Australia over lunch, in a quiet bar in a quiet area (in Glendale), but there were still a few German supporters in there.

* Yes, they all had it in for him.

The one cultural thing we did in
Pasadena was visit the Pacific Asia Museum. Only small but a fun eclectic mix, including a display of cricket cages (used for transporting crickets to cricket fights, apparently) and a very modern exhibit of miniature paintings from Pakistan.

Finally, we followed the last bit of Route 66 down to Santa Monica (via a small diversion for a huge gay pride weekend). We've clocked up just over 2,500 miles on our road trip and handed in our Nissan for a well-earned service at the biggest car rental agency I've ever seen, Hertz at LAX - so big that it runs a dedicated shuttle bus to the airport every 3 minutes. Our flight has already been delayed because of bad weather in Chicago, which doesn't bode well...

Who is Theo C?

Grey skies greeted our first day in Orange County (just south of LA, noted for its beaches and swanky shopping).

We started in San Clemente, a little town that's really just a long T-junction leading down to the beach and a long pier, where the grey evening didn't stop the surfers coming out for some impressive waves.

For token sight-seeing, we stopped off at the oldest of the local Spanish missions, Mission San Juan Capistrano. They finished building a by all accounts impressive church in 1778 - so properly old by local standards - only for it to be mostly demolished 6 years later by an earthquake. Failing to get the hint, they stuck around and at some point put in a nice flower garden, which makes the place scenic if not fascinating.

Newport Beach, best-known as the home of TV's The OC, was a bit of a let-down - nice enough stretch of beach, fairly run-down in the vicinity. Some welcome sunshine, too, so Lilly hired a bodyboard.

We stayed a couple of miles away in downtown Costa Mesa - a strange vision of hell where every road is 4-6 lines wide and nobody goes anywhere without a car. We foolishly walked 4 blocks to find a bar showing what turned out to be the last game of the NHL's Stanley Cup final (pleased to see Chicago win in overtime), and the next night found somewhere much closer to watch the Lakers play in the NBA finals - a much more popular and well-attended event.

Finally on to Huntingdon Beach, probably the best and longest beach, and not for nothing known as Surf City USA - we didn't see surfers on our stretch but the waves and current threw Lilly around when she tried going in. Cloudy when we arrived, which was a good excuse to watch the lunchtime World Cup match (day 1) in one of the many local bars - that brought the sun out for the rest of the day. Miles of beaches out here if that's your thing...

And then for the first time we made the mistake of driving through outer LA in rush hour. Uurgh... 2 more days in greater LA, then on to Boston.

Where does the sun go in San Diego?

San Diego feels a bit like a small-scale LA - low-rise and split into distinct neighbourhoods. The weather is also similar. It claims to have a great climate, but our experience was that every day is sunny with clear blue skies until mid-afternoon, at which point it immediately clouds over for the rest of the day. This happened for 3 days. The fourth day we wanted to go to the beach in the morning; that day was just gray throughout.

The best thing about San Diego, and it is excellent, is Balboa Park. As well as the park space itself, it is littered with museums, all in great ornate stone buildings, and all the ones we went to were curated with some care (i.e. even if I wasn't mad about the art in them, the special exhibitions seemed nicely chosen). There's also an attractive church, a roundhouse theatre, a Crystal Palace-esque botanical garden... You could spend a couple of days seeing it all, and then another day for the zoo.

San Diego Zoo is pretty good. It has a great organic feel to it, in the sense that it's in a park on a hillside so it's on more than one level, and it feels like one big habitat rather than just a path with a load of cages arranged round it. The downside is that there's no logical route around it, so if you want to see everything you'll have to walk past some bits three times. But they have a really good range of animals and birds, including some giant pandas (always my favourite, and rarely seen). They take endangered species very seriously here with a lot of proactive breeding programmes. We decided to rank this as our third favourite zoo, behind Singapore and Australia Zoo.

We also undid any progress the English may have made undoing cultural stereotypes at the Photographic Museum here. The guy at the entrance desk told Lilly that she had a 'pretty fresh watch' in a friendly and complimentary tone. Lilly didn't actually reply, 'Goodness gracious, my good man, what on earth can you mean by that curious turn of phrase?', but she did manage to be sufficiently confused that the guy felt obliged to translate.* By the time we got to the gift shop by the exit it was clear that every member of staff had heard the story.

* Being a nice guy, he didn't point out that 'The Fresh Prince of Bel Air' debuted in 1990, so this is a meaning that has been around in popular culture for at least 20 years.

Outside the park we had less luck with museums - we went to Contemporary Art, which had an unmanned front desk and two waste-of-space pieces of 'art' and we declared it the worst museum ever. Then we found that it was just an annex, and went up the road to the main museum. On the grounds that we had to pay for that, we re-allocated our 'worst museum' award (main exhibit: some towers of stacked pallets). In fairness, the same ticket later got us into the third branch in La Jolla which had a whole range of stuff that was only 90% rubbish - not a bad ratio for contemporary art.

The heart of SD is the old 'Gaslamp' district which has been relatively recently gentrified. It's not much to look at but it is heaving on a Saturday night. We very much enjoyed cooking our own dinners at the Fifth Avenue Strip Club (as in New York strip steak), and trying a few craft beers at places like the Strauss brewhouse.

A few more neighbourhoods for completeness: we had a great Vietnamese and browsed for books in Hillcrest; we drove through Coronado Island with its naval base and expensive housing and long stretch of beach; we popped by beachside La Jolla; and we had dinner in the Old Town, which reflects SD's close links to Mexico (the border is just a few miles away, and it's possibly the only city in the US to have bilingual signage as standard) with Mexican-style courtyards, bands and food - very much for tourists but quite fun if you're not heading to Mexico itself (not the safest place in the world right now).

To summarise: San Diego is a fairly fresh place, nice stop for a few days, not worth a long trip on its own.

Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas

Fabulous indeed!

Lilly's Highlights & Recommendations # 28 (Las Vegas, USA)

Must try and get these top 5s shorter. Should be easy as we have been to Vegas before and so I don't need to cover the obvious. Here goes...

1. CityCenter - the most expensive privately funded construction project in the US's history ($11billion) this enormous hotel, shopping and resi complex has pulled it off. Beautiful architecture internally and externally (especially the inside of the Crystals shopping center (beautiful geometry)) and very understated decor. It's so understated it's almost not Vegas but it would certainly be my hotel/mall/home of choice if I were super rich! (Holiday home only obviously, my primary residence is in Beverley Hills!)  

2. Premium Outlet Mall - minutes from the strip and massive. Roughly 150 shops of the mid to high end type. Brilliant reductions, so better than shopping on the strip (although less fun - no themes here) although largely outdoors (Bicester Village style) so can be very hot work. Best bargain: True Religion jeans for $79.

3. LOVE by Cirque de Soleil - the Beatles themed show is short on the acrobatics but strong on staging and atmosphere. The staging really is awesome (360 degree experience) and very imaginative and they really do succeed in bringing the Beatles to life in parts. And of course the music is the best there has ever been. A recipe for success! The Revolution Bar next to the theatre (in The Mirage by the way) had enough sense to play Beatles music the entire time we are in there which makes up for the stupidly expensive drinks (the decor is pretty fun too). A top night out.   

4. Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas - didn't get round to seeing the iconic sign (I'll put up a photo) last time as it is beyond anything you might want to visit on the strip. With the benefit of the car we were able to see it this time and it summarises the retrokitschy feel which is slowly succumbing to the sleek CityCenters and Wynns of the world. A piece of pop culture history (with handy parking spaces in the middle of the highway so you can stop and look at it for a bit).

6. Elvis Exhibition at Imperial Palace - ok, so  I am sure this isn't that exciting if you have been to Graceland but in this unprepossessing hotel is a really excellent collection of Elvis's personal effects. The collection includes his golden gun, his letter to Nixon basically asking if he could spy on the many dissident elements in 60s USA (I didn't know  the King was a Republican!), the handwritten notes for his funeral service and a great selection of Elvis sunnies. You get the picture. An excellent collection if you like celebrity effluvia! 

The Atomic Testing Museum also deserves mention. Basically educational and the cinema where they try and simulate viewing an atomic bomb test was never going to be anything other than lame but the content is genuinely interesting although very pro-bomb. I learnt a lot of new stuff about the Nevada Testing site and would definitely recommend it if you are looking for something non-kitsch and non-consumerist to do in Vegas!

Final recommendations:

- Go on a weekday. Accommodation was the cheapest we have experienced in the US (especially Bill's Gamblin' Hall & Saloon - on the middle of the strip and $42 inc tax in the week!) and the city is still buzzing so why pay weekend prices?

- You don't need to spend a lot on booze. If you go to some of the lower tier hotels or off the strip you can get really cheap drinks. A couple of examples: Ellis Island (off strip and $1.50 for a pint of brewed on site beer), O'Sheas (Irish themed Casino on the strip; 99c for a small draft beer).

Be warned though Paul did leave Vegas with a mystery black eye, so I guess what they say about Vegas is true....

PS. No blogs from me about the amazing scenery in the Southwest as they don't really lend themselves to a top 5 but hopefully the photos (and Paul's excellent blogs) speak for themselves. Quickly though - Bryce Canyon - wow, wow, WOW!  

Reeves à Las Vegas

So, a quick stop in Vegas to break up the journey, and because Lilly loves Vegas.

I don't. Vegas is too hot (probably shouldn't go in June, granted); getting around is a pain (everything around the Strip is further than you think and frequently involves diversions through casinos, and for anything off-Strip you need a car); and because of the US's pathetically over-paternalistic gambling laws, everything in Vegas revolves around gambling (try following signs for something inside a casino/hotel building. 9 times out of 10, the signs will lead you into the casino and then vanish). All the normal rules of the US cease to apply - for example, free wifi has been ubiquitous at every single hotel we have stayed at, no matter how small or remote. Not in Vegas.

But let's not be negative. You can have fun in Vegas. You can stay at Bill's Gamblin' Hall & Saloon - great location, the biggest and plushest room we've had in the US, and also the cheapest at less than $40. You can drink at Ellis Island, where they brew their own very tasty beers on-site and sell them for $1.50 a pint. And you can put all those savings into seeing a show - as I mentioned in Hong Kong, we saw Cirque de Soleil's Ka here 3 years ago, and it's spectacular, so we took the opportunity to check out one of CdeS's six (?) other Vegas shows, Love.

Love is a Beatles-themed show - basically a succession of Beatles songs play, almost uninterrupted, to accompany lots of varied acrobatic and other acts. It almost looks as if there should be a story to it - it opens in "Liverpool, World War II" - but basically it's completely insane and defies description. It is, however, very entertaining. The permanent custom-built stages in Vegas are amazing - every couple of minutes part of the floor will disappear for a while and something else will come up, maybe a giant clock or trampolines or skate ramps. And the sheer imagination behind the acts, sets etc is very impressive - I have never been to another show that covers the entire audience with a giant bedsheet. I reckon there must be at least 80 performers involved and at times the whole stage is awash with people doing different things. It has fewer memorable set-pieces than other CdeS shows but the overall effect is brilliant. I think Ka is still my favourite - it has a plot - but Love is great.

After the show, it's worth a visit to the Love-themed Revolution bar - try to get one of the plastic tables in the far corner which has its own ashtray-activated light-show (seriously).

We 'did' Vegas last time (walked the length of the Strip - a stupid idea - saw the Bellagio fountains, hit the main themed casinos and shopping etc) so we didn't need to cover that again, fortunately. A few visuals will give you the idea...

 Bass? Seriously?

We went to the Atomic Testing Museum - interesting in places but *very* thorough - and the King's Ransom Museum - a display of Elvis memorabilia that Lilly reckons was impressive.

We also checked out a couple of Vegas' newer residents, the City Center complex (Lilly liked the architecture, I enjoyed the fountain) and the Hofbrauhaus (an off-strip recreation of the German original, not as bad as you'd expect - though only in Vegas (or possibly Dubai) would you find an indoor beergarden with blue-sky-and-clouds-painted ceiling).

And finally, after a quick drive up and down the Strip laughing at numerous wedding chapels and the 'world's largest gift shop', we went to see the famous 'Welcome to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada' sign. A nice touch - they have parking in the middle of the street so you can stop and see it. And then we left.

 Next stop: San Diego. I am leaving with a small and mysterious black eye, which appeared after a sober night at Love. How very Vegas.

Keep your eye on the lions in Zion*

Zion Canyon is a really attractive place - a valley surrounded by strong stone mountains in a great palette of red ,orange and white, with plenty of greenery. Unfortunately that makes it a slight disappointment after the last few days, because it doesn't feel particularly special and our standards are now very high.

In fact the best bit of the national park is the drive in from the east, where all the rocks come in wafer-thin plates, looking from a distance like broad brushstrokes on an oil painting.

There's also an impressive 1.1 mile tunnel to get through before following switchbacks down to the valley floor, and that's the difference from Grand and Bryce Canyons: you're on the ground looking up.

Until you climb, that is. We took on a hike to Angels Landing, 2 miles long and 1500 feet up. The first bit is easy, and then you hit a *long* rise up evil, neverending switchbacks to the first plateau.

The remaining section feels more like mountaineering, albeit with the help of the occasional chain: not for the vertiginous, and I wouldn't fancy it in wind or wet either.

Yep, we have to walk along that very narrow bit there. Yep, it's quite high up.

Great views from the top in two directions, which is good, because your legs will want a breather while you feel a bit of genuine achievement. And that, plus the previous day's exertions, pretty much finished us off for walking, so we just rode the shuttle bus for a while.

We also took a drive up nearby Kolob Terrace Road, through a sinister forest of leafless trees and past some more great geology - cone-shaped rocks this time, for variety. At the top is an overlook with a distant view of the whole canyon.

A good few days round these parts, then, with Bryce definitely the winner, Grand Canyon and Monument Valley terrific, and Zion still well worth a stop, especially if you fancy a climb. Hopefully our legs will forgive us soon...

* We didn't see any mountain lions. But there are some here apparently.

Bryce, Bryce baby

Click for bigger version and more detail

The third and surely the best of our outdoorsy stops here is Bryce Canyon. In fact it makes my top 2 of world canyons (along with Kings Canyon, Australia).

Set at altitude - about 9,000 ft - and mixed with pine forest, there's a wonderful fresh, clean feel to the air, and it feels like you can see forever off into the distance from the rim*. Even the distance is beautiful, with more mountains and plains.

* You can certainly see mountains 82 miles away.

But the real winner is the canyon itself. Mainly limestone, but with iron deposits, you get a whole range of colours from white to orange to red, and in places other minerals lend some localised yellow or blue. And the wonderful formations come from a mix of the easily eroded limestone with dolomite capstones, which protect some bits, forming 'hoodoos' - thin columns of stone, sometimes wider at the top than lower down. From the best viewpoints you can see hundreds of them in neat formation, looking like China's terracotta army.

Unlike the Grand Canyon, the best views here are around the central area, and the scenic drive further down the canyon is a mere after eight mint*. It's all about the Bryce Amphitheatre, and the views from Inspiration Point and Bryce Point are amazing.

* Still worth seeing, especially Agua Canyon for a couple of ridiculously top-heavy hoodoos that should surely not be still standing, and Natural Bridge, the best of a few arches in the park.

But wait, we haven't finished yet. It claims to have 'the world's best 3-mile hike', and it may just be right (although the last part was closed so we had to detour). The first part, Queens [sic] Garden, is like descending into a giant fairytalle-style sandcastle, past hoodoos and many strange formations, through the occasional man-made arch, and finally down to see a formation that looks more like Queen Victoria than any novelty rock formation has a right to.

I didn't say it was perfect, but for a natural process of rocks + erosion...

In fact the beauty of these crazy bits of rock is that lots of them look like something, and not just in a squint-and-turn-your-head-sideways-and-shut-your-eyes-and-maybe-I-can-sort-of-see-what-you-mean way. What a great place. Grand Canyon gets the hype, but for my money Bryce is better.

And if all that wasn't enough, the road out of the park to the east runs through Red Canyon, with more giant red rocks and two huge man-made arches to drive through. Brilliant.

Monumental

American geological phenomenon #2: Monument Valley. Veteran of many Westerns, you've probably seen it in films without necessarily knowing the setting: great red stone buttes rising improbably from the desert.

Even the drive here is impressive, with many a stunning rock formation during our long drive up from Route 66 (see below), but MV itself tops them. Basically, you can drive yourself around the valley or pay to take a tour, and when your car rental agency has forced an all-inclusive insurance premium on you, what could be more fun than driving around rocky dirt roads?

Before you descend into the valley, there's also a good overview from the entrance. You can also get a horseride, as Lilly did - complete with brief gallop, occasional jump and 3-day bruising - or buy jewellery from the natives. Highly enjoyable.

The entrance to MV is in Utah, although most of the valley is in Arizona. Shortly afterwards we left Arizona for good, which reminded me: no cacti! The traditional tall cactus with two 'arms' is on all the signs in AZ, it's on the souvenirs, but we haven't seen a single one. Boo.

 The road to Monument Valley

(Dull postscript: fun with timezones. California is on Pacific time. Arizona is on Mountain time, an hour ahead, except Arizona doesn't use daylight saving time, so it's actually the same as California; apart from Indian territory, including MV and surrounds, which does use daylight savings. All of which means that when you think you're turning up late in the evening to a small town on what you belatedly realised was a bank holiday weekend without a hotel reservation, it's actually *very* late in the evening. Got away with it due to a cancellation.)

Don't move... this is a hold-up

Zion National Park 2

Exhausted after reaching Angel's Landing. Only surpassed in difficulty
by climbing Ayres Rock in 30 degree heat!

Zion National Park 1

View from Angel's Landing.