Today we decided to get up early at around 6.45am to go and watch the sunrise from our local beach. It was a bit of an early start but worth it, right opposite our Airbnb so we quickly grabbed our beach chairs and walked over after the alarm went off. That same day we had booked on to one of Hawaii’s most popular excursions, a “mounting tubing” trip which takes you down a former irrigation system of the Līhuʻe Plantation….
On a bit of an overcast day, we went out to see Pearl Harbor which is, surprisingly for America, a free National Park site. They had a series of museums there talking about the attacks and subsequent war with Japan, and various monuments and memorials. The most busy and poignant monument required a short boat ride out to the USS Arizona (we had to pre-book a ticket for this), which remains sunk at the bottom of the harbor and now…
On our second full day on Oahu we took a guided tour around the island, which was a good way to see a lot more of the area and loads of the highlights when we don’t have a rental car here. The tour was only a small group of 7 of us, and it lasted around 8 hours total, picking us up near our Airbnb and then circling the island. Here’s various pics from the stops we made: Sunrise on…
In case you haven’t seen it yet, we wrapped up our time in the National Parks by writing a post covering our “best highlights” – check that out here if you want to see what we each thought in various categories. After an early morning start in LA we flew the “short” trip between nearby US states to get to Hawaii – it only took 5hr30 on the plane here 🙂 We arrived in Hawaii at around 1pm local time,…
Having finished up the National Parks leg of our trip we are now in Hawaii, but before we start bombarding you all with photos from here we thought it might be fun (maybe even interesting to some people!) to each do a round-up of our highlights so far, without conferring. We decided on a few different categories which are below. Si’s picks Favourite Park I think overall my favourite park was Bryce Canyon. It wasn’t the biggest in terms of…
On our last full day in Tucson we travelled about an hour to the nearby town of Tombstone, Arizona which faithfully maintains its traditional wild West image and history. It’s the location of the O.K. Corral, and used in loads of movies including the film from 1993, ‘Tombstone’ with Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer – we’ve not seen it before but we’re going to watch it since it’s set in the town we’ve now seen, and based on real people…
We are currently in Tucson, Arizona so I thought I’d post an update on our last day in Sedona before we left, and our travel day to get here. On our last day in Sedona we went out in the morning to do another hike along the ‘Soldier’s Pass Trail’. This had a few different spots to stop for photos and see the sights, before culminating in a “hidden” cave. First stop was at a sink hole, which last collapsed…
Today we drove from the Grand Canyon to Sedona, Arizona which is the next place we will be staying at for a few nights. On the way we stopped at two places we were keen to check out. The first was Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument, a pretty large National Park-type area around an extinct volcano, which apparently last erupted around 1085. There was a really interesting and different landscape here, with large black lava fields of very jagged rock,…
On our second full day at the Grand Canyon we hiked one of (apparently) the World’s most famous hikes, or rather we did a portion of it as it’s a multi-day hike if you do the full thing from the South rim to the North rim, down in to the canyon and back up the other side. Anyway, we went around 2 miles down in to the Canyon on the Bright Angel trail, before having to climb back up again…
Today was our second day in Glen Canyon and we had booked on to a tour of Antelope Canyon, one of the famous “slot canyons” in the area which is only accessible via a guided tour. We opted to do the lower part of the canyon which was a longer section than the upper canyon, and also included some fun climbing up and down ladders to get in and out. This canyon is quite famously used for various screensavers and…