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.
