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…
We are slowly getting used to the hot weather and masses of people, although I’m not going to lie the hike we did yesterday was very busy and I found myself longing for the quiet nature of the National parks, where seldom did you see anyone. The hike we did today was recommended in our guidebook and was named Diamond Head Crater Trail. You have to book a permit to be able to do it (at no cost) which seemed…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…