We have just checked into the Hilton hotel, which is next door to the airport in LA where we are flying to Hawaii from in the morning. Here is a quick run down of our last few days in Joshua Tree. We had two full days in Joshua Tree and both were spent walking in the National Park. The Park is huge and lies between the Colorado and Mojave deserts. The first day we did a hike in the western…
This was our first full day in Tucson and it was nice to wake up in our own apartment (and eat our own food) rather than a hotel room with a buffet breakfast. After fuelling up on Eggo’s and green tea (I had to have green tea because we weren’t able to find milk to purchase the day before – it wasn’t bad!) we headed out into the glorious sunshine. Temperatures were due to reach 27 degrees today so we…
We have been in Sedona for 2 days now and the first thing of note is the change in weather. We finally have some warm weather with temperatures reaching 20c. It is positively balmy and nice to be able to ditch the clothing layers! Yesterday we went to Red Rock State Park in the morning. It’s like a nature reserve that has a lot of trails running in and around the park. It was a very peaceful place and even…
I thought I would title my post with this for two reasons. One, we just witnessed Rob Cross winning the Dutch Darts Masters (and this is a well known darts chant and he’s our favourite player), and two, because when we awoke on our travel day to the Grand Canyon it was snowing. The latter was a complete surprise because it was not forecast at all. We decided to get on the road early in case the snow got any…
On Sunday we left Durango and headed back West to Glen Canyon, Arizona. We shared the driving as it was the longest drive between places we’d done thus far. The drive basically consisted of one long straight road after another, with very little traffic, so it is very easy. We did go through Monument Valley on our route which is full of towering rock formations. It is often used in Hollywood movies to depict the American West. In fact one…
We left Moab today to travel to Durango, Colorado. This will be the 4th state we have been since this part of our trip began – the previous ones being Nevada, Arizona and Utah. En route there was another National Park we wanted to visit – Mesa Verde, which is home to archaeological sites and mesa/cliff dwellings of the Puebloan people who lived in the area for over 700 years. As we only planned to stop for a few hours…
Today we said goodbye to Capitol Reef and travelled to our next destination, which was Moab. Here we were hoping to crack two parks – Arches NP and Canyonlands NP. The journey to Moab As always we saw lots of stunning scenery on the drive, although the majority of the time we were seemingly driving on a straight (never-ending) road in through the desert, which at least made for an easy drive. En route we did go through a place…
Today (17th Jan) we moved onto our third National Park, as we headed to Capitol Reef Canyon. It was only a few hours drive, which we did at a leisurely pace with only an occasional stop on route to take photos. It felt like we were the only car on the road as we weaved our way through the canyon and past the ‘Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument’ area. As we got higher we started to see lots of snow which…
We split our day into two parts today – a scenic drive to start with and then the Queens/Navajo Loop trail, in reverse this time. Southern Scenic Drive This is an 18 mile drive that starts at the Visitor Centre and takes you all the way to the park’s highest elevations at Rainbow and Yovimpa point. There are numerous stops along the way – some are merely viewing spots where you park up and take some photos, and others have…
Today was our last day in Zion so we decided to tick off a few more of the suggested hikes. We had a leisurely morning at the hotel (to give our legs a rest after our uphill trek yesterday) and then did two more walks in the afternoon. Sand Bench Trail The first was Sand Bench Trail, and it had quite a different feel about it compared to the others we’d done. For one thing the majority of the route…