We got up bright and early after a not so great night sleep! US trains like to toot their horn quite a lot, especially when passing through towns or cities, no matter what time of day or night! It would be fine, if they weren’t trying to alert everyone in a 20 mile radius!! Unfortunately for us, a train line runs behind the hotel so we were woken at least 5 times by trains, including the one we are catching in a few days! Anyway, we got free breakfast and head...

Not much to report today! We picked up our hire car, called Izzy (posh one this time, Chevrolet Impa), in Las Vegas and made our way to the Hoover Dam. Stopped to see Lake Mead on the way, was beautiful. The dam was interesting to see, but not worthy of staying too long! We continued our journey to Flagstaff which is where we are staying whilst visiting the Grand Canyon. It is hard to find accommodation nearer, and cheap enough, to the canyon. As you will see f...

After our late night, a late morning was only expected!! Time just seems to fly by! We got the bus to the end of the strip and went for a mooch in Mandalay place hotel which has a shopping centre within it! We wanted to mooch at the shops and Mark got some new flip flops! The hotels are the sort which you wouldn’t need to leave if you didn’t want to; they all seem to have restaurants, bars, clubs, casinos and shops! Very snazzy! From there we headed to MGM ...

We got up quite late, partly because the bed was too comfy and we were watching tv! We had seen on the weather that it was going to be windy but nothing prepared us for what awaited us outside!! With the 30’c heat came up to 25mph winds!! Was an interesting day, took us twice as long to walk anywhere!! Anyway, we are staying on Freemont street which is further down than the main strip and is like a mini version of it with lots of things happening, entertainmen...

We got up early and filled up on breakfast before sadly making our way to the train station to leave San Diego! Humf!! The train was on time and we got seats on the ocean side! We had some amazing views of the ocean and managed to a get a few pictures. There were so many people running or surfing! We got delayed about an hour into the journey as they were doing work on the lines and we had to wait for other trains to come through. We were also informed that there...