California: Road Trip
During December last
year, it seems so long ago now, we spent 15 days on a
road trip visiting the states of California, Nevada
& Phoenix in the U.S.A. In all we travelled over
2000 miles from a few feet below sea level to
elevations around 8000-9000 feet. Our trip started by
driving from our home down to London where we boarded
our flight to Los Angeles. We picked up our vehicle
at LAX and drove a short distance to our first hotel
in Newport beach. It doesn't look much like what you
watch on the TV show 'The O.C.'
During our stay at
Newport we managed to visit Hollywood, Mulholland
Drive, Bilboa Island and we even drove a couple
hundred miles to visit Palm Springs. Having spent a
couple of days around the L.A. area we took to the
road and drove out across the desert into Nevada to
spend a couple of nights out in Las Vegas. I'm glad
we visited Las Vegas, so we can say we've been but it
wasn't really our thing. To be honest we couldn't
wait to move on. To help time pass during out stay in
this amusement arcade in the desert we decided to
take a drive back into California for the day to
visit Death Valley.
I think for me Death
Valley was one of the highlights of our trip, and
wish we could have spent more time exploring. One of
the places I was hoping to visit whilst there was of
the many old ghost towns. We tried to get to one, but
the track turned bad and we were running out of day
light. The place was amazing with so many different
coloured and interesting rock formations with
elevations ranging from below sea level to over 5000
feet. It's amazing to see that people have also
decided to settle down and live in this beautiful but
unforgiving location.
After leaving Nevada we headed over the Hoover Dam
and onward to our next stop, the Grand Canyon. You
have to see the Grand Canyon to believe it. It's
really hard to grasp that from the rim what opens out
in front of you was forged by a river. We took both a
helicopter flight and National Geographic tour. We
would have loved to spend more time to take in the
sights and again amazing colours and rock formations.
We even experienced snow fall which gave an extra
special feel to the awesome views.
Moving on we headed into Phoenix and to our hotel in Scotsdale. The weather was amazing here, you would never have guessed it was December. Our final destination was to travel back a long the Mexican border into San Diego, California. During our trip we took hundreds of photographs and over 5 hours of video footage. As always when time permits I hope to post both some photographs and video to this web site. I can't promise when, but I will promise to post them.