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Well, it may not yet be our last blog entry, but it's definitely our last one on the road! So let's go back to leaving Fiji...
We left the island around lunchtime as a storm was blowing in from the sea, and that caused an horrendous ferry transfer to the mainland. The swells were massive, almost everyone on the boat was seasick, the boat itself was shaking from the battering of the waves, and about halfway through the journey, the electrics began overheating and the smell of smoke spreading through the cabin caused serious worry! After all that and an hour and a half delay, we headed for the airport. And the flight took us back in time and really, we were unsettled in our sleeping patterns for about 5 days!
We arrived in Los Angeles bang on time, and after navigating through a frenzied LAX, were so happy to hit our hotel room for a good rest. We didn't do much that day, just tried to shake off the flight time change of 19 hours. The following day we got ourselves some sleeping bags at a local mall and cooled down in a cinema to see Harry Potter. Claire was unhappy with the difference between book and film, as usual, and Chris was unmoved by the whole thing, as usual!
So the tour we had arrived for began in the hotel lobby the next morning. There were 13 of us heading off to explore parts of California, Nevada and Arizona together. In all, 10 girls, 3 guys and the countries of England, Wales, Germany, Sweden, South Korea and of course Northern Ireland were represented, along with our American tour guide Alex.. We spent the two weeks whizzing around in a glorified transit van that was quite cramped, tough to put up with on the 5 hour plus journeys, and just loved baking up everyone inside during the desert drives!!
Our first tour day took us on a hefty drive up the California coast from L.A. to Big Sur with a few stop offs along the way. The first was just a quick lunch stop, but we also had a rest break at a crazy place called the Madonna Inn (nothing to do with the pop star), which has to be seen to be believed. We also had a nosy at an elephant seal colony just off the highway. If we hadn't realised already, this hit home that we were now in America. Any seal colony we'd been to in New Zealand had been understated and virtually deserted. Here though, a full car park and crowds pointing and clicking in a real contrast. Give us New Zealand over America any day! We spent that night sitting around a fire at a campsite getting to know each other a bit. Everyone seemed pretty dead on, so we were good to go for the next few weeks.
The following day took us to San Francisco. It's a beautiful city, dubbed 'America's favourite city', and it's not hard to see why. There's so much to see and do, from the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz, to Chinatown and the Haight-Ashbury area where hippies were born. We took a drive around the sites when we arrived, including stopping to see the 'painted ladies' houses, the most photographed in America; a walk across the Golden Gate Bridge; and then finished our day off on a sunset cruise of the bay. This took us out around Alcatraz, but unfortunately not into it, demand for tickets being huge and two huge ferries unloading hundreds of people as we passed by. Though we did get to sail under a foggy Golden Gate Bridge, the mist seemingly being just part of life and the Frisco charm. For dinner, we sampled some of the famous sour dough, with some tomato soup served in a bowl made of the bread, and soaked with the soup at the end, a great meal, followed up with some excellent Irish coffees and a few other drinks. Our second day was just a free day to roam around and take the place in, so we also took a tram to avoid walking the endless hills of the city to Lombard Street, the 'crookedest street in the world'.
After loading the trailer, we set off on our 4th day for the beautiful Yosemite National Park. This started with a wander through the giant Sequoia trees and then off to set up camp again. We had to be really vigilant at this camp, due to the threat of bears searching for food through the camp grounds! All our food had to be locked away in the bear-proof trailer each night, and even our shower gels, deodorants and toothpaste had to be kept in there rather than our tents so they couldn't pick up the scent to come looking for food. On our full day there we had several options of what to do. Claire set off on a split day of a 3-4 mile hike to check out some of the stunning waterfalls there including Nevada Falls (aka Rainbow Falls as the photos will explain) and then an afternoon of river rafting with some of the girls. Chris decided that the hike to Half Dome was for him, and set off on the 16 mile round trip. The hike began around 8am and those who tackled the track returned around 630pm. It was a really tough walk, but well worth it for the awe inspiring views at the top, over 8,900 ft above sea level. The photos give you some idea, but just don't do enough! Pizza and beer in the park village were a perfect way to round of one of the highlight days of the tour.
Following Yosemite, we stopped for a night in a town called Bishop, which was really just to break up what would have been a huge drive to Vegas. Though just outside town, a short drive from our camp, were some natural thermal springs. So we took a few drinks down there to take a dip before dinner. The slimy mud in parts of the pool provided great entertainment when any of the girls accidentally wandered over to those parts, and it was a soothing experience for the weary legs of the hikers! Another camp fire night followed, Claire eager to take control of the fire as on the first night, the big pyro!
Next stop, Vegas. It's hard to describe this place. For the whole drive practically, we passed through baron desert, with nothing but sand and shrubs around, then suddenly out of nowhere comes a city! We took a drive along the strip as soon as we arrived and then headed for a hotel called the Rio, for a $20 all-you-can-eat buffet lunch. It had everything. Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Indian, Mexican and even roast dinner sections! We'd never seen anything like it. You really could eat for hours if you wanted, and every plate could be made of a different cuisine. Awesome! Everything about Vegas is done to excess, and it's a bit overwhelming on first arrival. We soon settled in though when our party bus arrived to pick us up at our hotel for our Vegas tour that evening! The bus has leather seats, neon light, ice buckets for our beers and even a dancing pole! We took in the Freemont Street light show, drove around the city a bit and were dropped off at the Bellagio where we had a few more drinks watching the fountains (it's the legal to drink on the street in Vegas!!), which were absolutely fantastic. After that we headed to New York, New York to ride the roller coaster then hit the bars about midnight and drunken antics ensued. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas as far as the rest of that night goes!
The next day the two of us fought off the hangovers and tiredness to take an ill-advised wander around the strip in the baking heat of the day. It was hot as hell but it would be our main chance to explore as we went to see Cirque du Soleil in the Bellagio that night. The show was a magnificent display of acrobats, synchronised swimming, dance, diving, synchronised diving, beautiful costumes and strange but great circus performances of comedy and even some token clowns. It is 'Cirque' after all. Neither of us even dare to pretend to have understood any of the story running through the show, but the act was undoubtedly something to behold! We followed up the show with another wander around the strip, and some more of the majestic Bellagio fountains which are worth the trip to Vegas alone.
No rest for the wicked as the morning after, we were up and out by 8am, on the road to the Grand Canyon! That was a pretty hectic, slightly stressful drive as our tour leader Alex pushed the van through it's paces as we raced out to the canyon to make the pre-booked helicopter flights some of us were taking. We had opted for the 45 minute flight, the longer of the 2, and we didn't regret it. The first view of the canyon was stunning. The first part of the flight followed the forest right to the edge of the canyon where the trees suddenly stopped and the landscape plunged down towards the Colorado River below. The scale of the canyon is almost impossible to grasp, but a good indicator was that at times we felt like were just hovering over it but actually we were travelling along at almost 100 mph, feeling like we were hardly moving! It was awesome, truly awesome. And for 2 geography geeks it was even more compelling. Couldn't get enough of it! We took in the Grand Canyon IMAX movie that night which allowed us to see what the bottom of the canyon would look like. There was no way we were going to hike down there because the temperatures often rise to above 50oC, and that's just silly.
We weren't finished with the canyon there though as the next morning we woke at 3.30am to head to see the sunrise over the canyon. It was awesome. We didn't sit at the usual tourist spots, we instead walked down through the plants onto the edge of the canyon itself. It was a little bit unsettling at first as we shuffled slowly over the rocks with our torches not sure how far the plunge below us was in the darkness. But wow, it was worth it. Over the next hour and a half we watched the light change and warp and gradually reveal the enormity of the canyon which started literally beneath our feet as we sat on the edge of the cliff. An awesome place to watch it, and thanks to Alex for making us get up so bloody early to get there before the other tour groups. Well worth it.
Next destination was a campsite at Lake Havasu, another overnight stop to break up a big drive, this time between the canyon and San Diego. This drive was like being back in the Australian Outback, except a little bit hotter! Neither of us have ever experienced heat like it. Though it did take us along a stretch of the famous Route 66, including stopping at Delgadillo's Snow Cap for burgers and shakes for lunch. But the day just got hotter and hotter. And as we explored a little wild western town called Oatman, a place where there are as many donkeys on the road as there are cars, the heat exhausted us! At 6pm, the temperature was still over 40 degrees. We'd been in the van for over 6 hours that day, so when we got our tents up in the heat, we all jumped straight into the lake right by our campsite for some sweet sweet relief! It wasn't the greatest night's sleep that night, but getting up at 530 to set off before the sun began to bake us again was very welcome!
San Diego came next. As with Frisco and Vegas we began with a drive around the city, taking in the sites of Oldtown and Balboa Park. Then we headed for a true American experience with the San Diego Padres taking on the Atlanta Braves in our first baseball game. It wasn't a very well packed stadium, or even a particularly exciting game, but it was cool to see how it's done. Though Chris managed to miss the only home run of the game while out getting a beer, idiot! After the game we hit a bar which Alex had a half price discount card for, so cheap drinks flowed, and the main entertainment in the bar was a Nintendo Wii, where people where able to sign up, karaoke style, to play Rock Band. Some of the girls from our tour got up when the drink took over and to be fair, did pretty well. Cool night. We decided to use our free day in San Diego to check out their famous zoo, and it was pretty cool. One of the best either of us have been to. It's also worth mentioning the 'campsite' we stayed at in San Diego. 'Campland on the Bay' was basically a wide open space with toilet facilities, a cafe, bar, grocery store, games room, beach, watersports and a hundred million R.V.s bigger than some people's houses...and Americans call it camping! What the hell. If you're ever in San Diego, don't stay there!
Our tour rounded off a on Wednesday back in L.A. with a tour of Hollywood. We checked out Beverly Hills, Rodeo Drive, Bel Air, the Walk of Fame, Mann's Chinese Theatre and the Hollywood sign amongst other things. It'd be interesting to know what any of you who have been here thought, but we were both fairly underwhelmed by the whole area, not at all what you would expect. The paving slabs on the Walk of Fame were dirty and cracked, the shops in Beverly Hills were so snooty in some places that they look at you through a security camera and decide from that whether to even buzz you inside or not and generally the whole place had an arrogance that just doesn't appeal to us. Maybe it's just us, but this place isn't really all it's cracked up to be!
So that's hopefully a short enough whiz through what was a busy and very enjoyable 2 weeks, a great way to round off the trip, and now we're in Santa Monica, one of the 88 or so mini cities that L.A. Is comprised of, and we're just relaxing, shopping, and getting ourselves sorted for the long journey home. Doubt we'll stray too far from here cos getting around L.A. Seems to be a royal pain in the ass!
Just 2 more days and we get to start seeing everyone again, which really, we're looking forward to. But we do have serious mixed emotions about it as although we've missed so many people so much, we haven't half enjoyed this, so many memories and experiences but hey, all good things come to an end!
So until sometime over the course of next week, cya all very very soon!!
Love Chris and Claire xx
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