A Trip Part seven – Monument Valley

As promised my replacement hat, which I bought during the next part of this trip,
so it is out of sequence, but a promise is a promise.
Click to enlarge any image

The following Morning we headed back up route 89 towards Monument Valley. We passed by Sunset Crater again and debated if it would be worth a visit. I was not convinced it was a good idea, commenting that because it had last erupted only about 800 years ago, I had no intention of going anywhere near it.  It is billed as an extinct volcano but in my mind something quiet for that short a span, short geologically that is, was not in my opinion extinct, only dormant. My argument convinced certain of the others of our party, or maybe they just humoured me, and so we gave it a miss.

Some tumble-weed we passed on our way, often featured in Hollywood Westerns 

The area we were driving through is a part of the Navajo and Hopi reservation and as you drive along this route you pass numerous roadside stalls selling Native American Jewellery and genuine locally made ornaments and souvenirs.  Some stalls consisted of a simple open counter with an awning and others were housed inside a building that could hold several stalls.

A Navajo house we passed

  We stopped for lunch at Tuba City having turned onto route 160 just before this small town, which is famous for its dinosaur footprints. We did not look for these, but ate our lunch and then headed on along the 160.

The entrance to Goulding's Trading Post, which provides accommodation , a store and  a museum.

Goulding's Trading Post, Lodge and and Museum.  We stopped here for a comfort break

Highway 160 has the unique property of passing through, or very close to, the junction of the four corners of Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico’s state boundaries where, because they all have perfectly right angles to their boundaries at this point, the four corners all come together. This is a unique situation and exists only at this one place in the whole of the USA. At the junction, there is a monument that consists of a circle with the state lines passing through it and you can stand in a marked circle and by placing both hands and feet on the ground you can be in four states at once. We did not quite make this landmark because we were heading into Monument Valley which is on the 163, so we left the 160 and joined this road which heads north up across the Utah state line and then curves back around to re-join the 160 after it has entered Colorado just past the Four Corners.

The Four Corners monument

Monument Valley is another WOW! area, all Wily Coyote country with mesas and isolated mountains rising suddenly out of the desert. We did not see any road runners or coyotes either, but what we did see more than made up for this lack of visible wildlife.

Kayenta the start of Monument Valley

Arizona had been suffering some fairly widespread fires in the weeks before we started out on our Grand Tour and we pass by evidence of some of these fires with some hills entirely denuded of trees. For much of the time we had been in Nevada and Arizona, the air was hazed blue from the residual smoke still in the air.

A burnt out hill in Arizona

In this part of the country there was a haze too but it was a different colour and was caused by dust.

A particularly dusty stretch of road

Here and there, there were road signs warning travellers that there could be dust storms.
We saw a few dust devils over in the distance, thin spirals of dust whipped up by the wind like miniature tornadoes. At one point one of these came across the road in front of us. TS slowed down to let it pass but misjudged it slightly and it just brushed us as it went by and it rocked the car alarmingly. I had always thought these things were just a rotating gust of wind and had not realised how strong they could be. I have seen them in the distance before in other parts of the world and they always looked quite harmless but had never gotten this close to one before.

You can only just see the dust devil in this picture as a hazy patch  between the centre two pylons

Seeing a quite promising rest stop, we took a break and had a short wander around one of the small Native American stores. Some years before on a visit to the USA, TBH had bought a pair of Kokopelli earrings and a couple of years or so ago had lost one of them.  Kokopelli is a mythical spirit figure which turns up in many parts of America. He is often depicted with a hump back and playing a flute. He is a trickster but was often worshiped as the spirit of music and fertility.

A typical image of Kokopelli

 He is featured in many kinds of jewellery and appears in most tourist shops in one form or another. He is also the name of many hostelries all over the south west.

One of the many establishments using the Kokopelli name

TBH loved her original earrings and was heartbroken by the loss, so we were interested in seeing if we could find another pair. We did not find anything suitable on that occasion but we bought some different souvenirs and jewellery for family whilst we were there.

Passing into Monument Valley we started to see some of the amazing rock formations that make it a must for a national park.

The climb up to Monument Valley Pass

Coming down from the pass.
This must have been a tricky route before Highway 163 was blasted through this ridge.  

The next place on this route is Mexican Hat, which is down in the San Juan River valley and as we descended we were presented with the most spectacular rock formations, where folding and weathering had created huge wave patterns in the mountain overlooking the San Juan river.

The San Juan River

The spectacular patterns in the rock strata of these ridges

As we drove up the other side of this river valley, we discovered how Mexican Hat had got its name.

The Mexican Hat rock formation

The rippled ridge was still visible some miles after passing Mexican Hat

By the time we got back on highway 160, we had gone from Arizona through Utah and had arrived in Colorado and were now back on Mountain Time, so had to put all our watches forward an hour. We should have done that as soon as we entered Utah but we had not thought of it until we had to check the time of our planned arrival at our next stop. This was to be in Cortez at the Baymont Inn and Resort. We arrived in good time to find an eatery and check in for the night.
Cortez is a popular tourist centre but has nothing much to offer other than its proximity to several famous tourist spots.  It is is the county town for the Montezuma county and boasts a lot of accommodation for a small town of a little over eight thousand inhabitants.
The Baymont Hotel was a probably the nicest hotel of the trip, providing good accommodation and with a balcony outside our room overlooking the nearby mountains.

The view through our hotel bedroom window

One of those weird coincidences that happen when you are on holiday occurred whilst we were staying there, we met a couple who were on a coach trip and who came from a little village adjacent to my old hometown where I lived as a teenager. Not only did they come from the same small corner of England, but the lady had worked in the same offices as my father.

A similar encounter had occurred when we were there on our last visit to the family in 2009. Whilst having coffee in a Borders book shop in Kansas City, a man with an English North Country accent asked us if we were English and we started talking. He told us how he had left England and was now living in the USA and it turned out that when he was last in England, he and I had both worked in the same place for the same organisation, although at different times.

Our next destination was Mesa Verde, an abandoned Pueblo Indian ruin and after breakfast we set off for this fascinating archaeological site.

A trip part six

The Grand Canyon

After the memorable and amusing checkout from the Luxor, we headed from Las Vegas towards Boulder, where we intended to visit the Hoover Dam. This is quite close to Vegas and so we were able to get there quite soon. At one time the main road went over the dam but due to its age and the accumulated vibration of heavy trucks passing over it, it was decided to build a bypass, so the main road crosses the Colorado River on high bridge below the dam and you now have to divert off route 93 if you want to visit the dam itself.

It took four years to build

Looking up  Lake Mead.  Low water levels due to lack of rain

 The old road still passes over the dam but it is blocked from re-joining route 93 on the far side, so you have to turn around and come back across the dam again if you cross it. Once over the far side, you enter Arizona and at certain times of the year the time zones are an hour different each side of the dam, because unlike Nevada, Arizona does not have daylight saving.

From the Arizona side of the dam, you can see the road crossing along the top of the dam

There are car parking spaces on either side of the river and you can then walk down to the dam itself. Whilst it had been hot in Vegas it had been dry heat, here on the dam the temperature was at 110F (43C) but humid so we did not stay very long. We also chose the multi-storey car park, which was one of the furthest away from the dam because there, the car was parked in the shade.
Back on route 93 after our visit we crossed the new bridge and headed for Arizona.

The new bridge below the dam

After leaving the Hoover dam, we stopped at Kingman for our lunch. Kingman is a town which was on the old route 66, now often referred to as the Historic Route 66. This road once ran from Chicago to Los Angeles, a stretch of over two thousand miles. It was removed from the highway system in the 1980s and has been mourned by the people of the US ever since.

It has had a song written for it, a TV show named after it and is trekked on by nostalgia seekers from all over the world. It is now a tourist attraction at Kingman and the town lays claim to being on the longest remaining stretch of the road. Leaving Kingman, the I-40 heads straight east whilst the old Route 66 loops north-east up to Peach Springs and curves south again, merging with the I-40 about one hundred miles east of Kingman. This part of the I-40 then follows the path of Route 66, that stretch having been improved to Interstate standard and renumbered, which means that we have driven along some of Historic route 66 whilst heading from Kingman to Williams.

Williams is a favourite spot for tourists to stay who are visiting The Grand Canyon and there is a railway link from this town to the Grand Canyon Village.
From Williams we headed north up the 64 which takes you to Grand Canyon Village, a distance of about 60 miles.

The scenery along the way was different with mountains covered in small bushes but little grass. The land was still dry and arid but as we approached the Grand Canyon, the trees became larger with more grass and other foliage growing beneath them.

As we approached the canyon, the trees got bigger and more frequent

The Grand Canyon is very long, stretching for over two hundred and seventy miles and we were headed for one end of this vast hole in the ground.
Arriving at the Information Centre we looked at the geological information about the creation of the canyon and the kinds of strata exposed in the canyon walls and then walked to the rim.

The model of the strata found in the canyon

Around this part of the canyon you are around seven thousand feet in altitude, so the air is a bit thin and walking up a few steps became a major challenge for someone as unfit as myself and TBH. However, we spent some time simply walking along and gazing and photographing the incomprehensibly vast ditch we were seeing and felt a growing sense of awe as the sheer size started to penetrate our numbed brains.

After getting our fill of the view, we drove along the rim and stopped at another view point further east and went through the WOW! Factor again and then again.

Walking along another viewpoint, the wind was picking up and it was beginning to get a bit late but we were still looking at the canyon as the shadows started to lengthen and the view changed from pale pastels to hard dark shadows that emphasised the ruggedness. I had been wearing a white hiker’s sun hat which I had owned for some time, it was a good sun hat and entirely necessary for someone of thinning hair whenever there is any sun, because lacking a thick thatch, I now burn easily on top. Standing near the rim, a gust of wind suddenly took off my hat and blew it into the canyon. It fell a long way down and we could see it stuck in a bush but without climbing gear there was no way to get it. So it is probably still there, a lasting token of my visit until is rots away or someone much more agile than me finds it.
Further along the rim is a tower built in the 1930s by the architect Mary Colter to provide a view across the canyon and designed to look similar to the Anasazi Pueblo architecture found in Colorado and Arizona. Anasazi towers are much smaller than this one but exist at several sites once occupied by the Anasazi people but no one sure what their purpose was. They are often referred to as watchtowers.

The Watchtower

We eventually had to leave this impressive place and head for Flagstaff, where we were booked in to a hotel for that night. Driving east towards route 89, the 64 follows the Little Colorado River which has carved a much smaller canyon, but which is still quite impressive scenery. Joining route 89, we headed south towards Flagstaff. It was starting to get late and the sun was quite low as we headed south and the sun created interesting shadows.

The Little Colorado 

We were paced by this shadow car for some miles

On our left as we approached Flagstaff, there is an extinct volcano, known as Sunset Crater. This was very appropriate because the sun was setting as we drove past and it was side lit by the low sun.

Sunset Crater near sunset

We were booked into a Howard Johnson motel and had a little difficulty finding it, discovering there were two in Flagstaff as we searched, but we finally got to the right one.
Flagstaff is not very far from the Barringer Crater, the first terrestrial meteor crater to be recognised as such and something of a turning point in geology. I would like to have visited this but unfortunately we did not have enough time.
We ate in a restaurant called The Cracker Barrel, a chain found only in the south of the USA, which are themed to be a real old time country store and you walked through a scene from a Hollywood western to get into the dining area. Cracker Barrel had the most wonderful menu we had experienced in any of the eateries we had been to so far on this trip.

A Trip part 5

Las Vegas

What can you say about this place? It is larger than life and the capitol of glitter. Every new hotel competes to be the biggest, finest and most extensively themed establishment on the Strip. They most often end up being ridiculous.

Not Lego land, the Excalibur Hotel
Click to enlarge all pictures

In England, the two well-known seaside resorts, Southend and Blackpool, are glitzed up to the nines to make themselves interesting and an ‘experience’ but they are candy floss, an ounce of sugar spun up to make a huge cloud of insubstantial pink, allegedly strawberry flavoured fluff. It looks good, tastes good, but has little substance. Similarly, Disney World and other money spinning resorts are fun and excitement and candyfloss too but Las Vegas whilst it is fun, and candyfloss, it is spiked with cocaine underneath the strawberry flavour.

Some wild architecture

The hotels all have casinos which are their real source of wealth, no one could possibly build and run a hotel at the room prices charged in some of them, even taking into account the numbers of rooms per hotel, and make a profit .

A typical casino

But behind the glitz there is a much more sordid sex industry. Whilst the town is showy and fun with fancy buildings made to look like works of art, there are constant adverts for escort services and adult shows whilst on every street corner there are sad looking people handing out business cards for contacts, promising to get a woman to your hotel room in twenty minutes.

These trucks were driving up and down all day and night

The most impressive part of Las Vegas is the sheer demonstration of wealth it presents.
The glories of Rome and ancient Egypt, took the combined wealth of their entire nations to build their emperor’s and pharaoh’s palaces and temples, whilst in Las Vegas, a property developer can come along and build a complete imitation of their works on a whim and the speculation of making even more money from the resulting work.

The glory that was Rome, duplicated in Vegas at wholesale

We stayed in the Luxor hotel, which is a huge pyramid shaped building with 30 plus stories and a vast open space inside that easily totalled the same amount of space that every single hotel in my home town contains.

The rear of the Luxor with one of the two towers

The balcony outside our room

Looking over the balcony you can see all the lower balconies

Looking further over the balcony you can see all the way down, all twenty six floors

Outside the hotel there is a full sized replica of the Sphinx, an obelisk and several statues in the style of ancient Egyptian art. Scattered around the building are more statues of various Egyptian deities and minor gods, whilst the décor is based on various interpretations of Egyptian structures. All of which must have cost millions of dollars to build.

The Luxor front, complete with obelisk and sphinx

Such a casual display of wealth is impressive but makes you realise that there are more have-nots in the world than haves.

The cityscape in the background is all one hotel, the New York New York.  In the foreground, the grass is astro turf and the hedge on the left plastic but the flowers and palm trees are real

New York New York has a roller-coaster around the outside

Naturally we took in as much of this as our three days we had set aside would allow. Of course TBH would not let me try out the escort services or the adult shows, but I did have a short session on one of the Roulette tables. I have played roulette before and rarely lose and with a certain amount of luck, I managed to retain that dubious claim by doubling my stake. The trick is always to stop when you are winning, a difficult thing but this is the key to my success on the tables rather than any arcane ‘system’. Just common sense, cover your losses and quit. It works.

We noticed that all the major stores and malls had nothing but up market designer goods

One of the aspects that confirmed my impressions of this place were two shows advertised all over town, ‘Menopause the Musical’ and ‘Fantasy’ a show advertised by a group of scantily clad leggy females, with the subscript ‘The show must go on’ with the word GO crossed out and TURN written in.

Two contrasting shows

Whilst a lot better accommodation than our first overnight stop, the Luxor is beginning to show signs of age having been open for about eighteen years. They have recently refurbished the towers but the pyramid is due for an upgrade. We were offered an upgrade to the towers but we wanted to be in the pyramid and it is certainly a strange and interesting experience. I had idly wondered when we first booked a room in the pyramid if we would find ourselves in the centre with no outside view, but as I had mentioned earlier, all the accommodation is in the outer wall. The lifts (‘elevators’ according to Americans) were labelled ‘Inclinators’ because due to the shape of the building, they went up at an angle.
 This meant that every time the inclinator started you got an unexpected lurch to one side, which took me by surprise nearly every time I rode up to or down from our room. We were on the 26th floor and when you leave the inclinator, there is a corridor that forms a square running around the whole floor, connecting all the bedrooms to the lifts. In places this turns into a balcony with just a low wall between you and a 25 story drop straight down to the centre of the hotel mezzanine floor! My first thought was ‘nice, if you have just made a disastrous loss on the tables, what a good place to end it all,’ and decided to keep an eye out for falling bodies whenever I was on the mezzanine floor.

The Egyptian décor was universal throughout the hotel

Inside our room, the Egyptian theme was continued by the large wooden wardrobe, but somewhat spoiled by the rather elderly CRT television it housed.

An Egyptian wardrobe

Our bedroom window was facing west and the view was impressive, because in the morning there was a huge triangular shadow leading away from the hotel and in the evening we saw a splendid sunset across the Desert Mountains in the distance. It also meant that during the afternoon the desert sun baked the room and both the window glass and the window frame were too hot to touch.

Sunrise

Sunset

We had outlined a rough plan of the places we wanted to visit before we left Kansas and this involved a lot of walking. The strip is several miles long and everything looks nearer than it really is. There is a bus service and a monorail but the former is slow due to the heavy traffic and the latter does not always go very near the places we wanted to see, so we walked most of the time. With outside temperatures often well above 100F, this was thirsty work and I acquired a taste for Starbucks Frappuccinos, iced coffee so cold you had to be really careful to avoid the dreaded ‘brain freeze’. We all suffered from this at least once but the advantages were worth the pain.

We managed to visit most of our priority places, Caesar’s Palace, Mandalay Bay bay’s Shark Reef Aquarium, The Venetian, the Mirage volcano, The Secret Garden Zoo and the Bellagio fountains.

Caesar's Palace

Caesar’s Palace has impressive interiors and has some interesting shops, but to my mind the most interesting thing was a circular escalator, something which is quite an impressive engineering feat. Getting something strong enough to carry people, to rotate smoothly in two directions is not simple.

The interior of Caesar's Palace was sumptuous, complete with moving staircases

In the aquarium at Mandalay Bay, we saw the usual display of sharks gliding above and below us, which was one of TG's choices.

I am sure there is some appropriate movie theme music to accompany this picture, but I can't quite remember it...

Another of his choices was the Secret Garden zoo. This place amused me because there were signposts everywhere telling you how to find the ‘secret’ garden, of course there may have been another secret garden, or several, which we never found because they really are secret. We will never know. The one we found had an impressive display of large cats including a white tiger.

A contented looking leopard

So who is king of the jungle?

(Just as an aside, a good book that, The White Tiger)

The Venetian impressed me as an engineering feat too, because on the second floor (first floor to us perverse English) there is a canal system complete with Gondolas with Gondoliers and some pseudo Italian singing. You could take a ride in one and have a well-known Italian song blasted at you if you really wanted. O sole Mio seemed to be favourite and I was expecting to hear Poppa Piccolino or Shut uppa your face, any minute but that never happened.

Hard to remember not only are you indoors but upstairs as well.
The sky is a projection on the ceiling 

The canal outside this hotel was disappointing because it had sprung a leak or something and was innocent of any water but had workmen doing something to it with cement.

An empty canal

We had a look in Paris, but did not do more than pass through the ground floor level where the legs of the half size Eiffel Tower come down through the ceiling and get in the way. You can go up this model tower, which is quite large and although only a replica is actually taller than the Blackpool tower, but we skipped that treat.

The half size Eiffel Tower

We managed to arrive at the Bellagio just in time for the fountain display to start and found a good spot to film it. This is most impressive, and possibly the high spot of the entire visit to this fabled city. Not only was it spectacular in its own right, it was accompanied by Elton John’s Your Song, something both TBH and I like a lot.

The effects produced by this fountain were spectacular

These sprays are going up more than three stories in height

The Mirage volcano was not quite what we expected.  On TBH’s previous visit with the family, it was much more realistic and less of an effects show. She had videoed it and we are able to compare the difference and it was not as good this time.

Good but not spectacular

At one point in our travels, we took a ‘cool cut’ through the MGM Grand, cool cut, as in air conditioning and as opposed to a short cut, and were given the spectacle of two grown men earning their living by sitting in a glass lion cage each stroking a sleepy looking lioness. Neither of them looked delighted by their good fortune but it did draw a big crowd.

The MGM Grand outside, complete with huge golden lion

The MGM inside.  Here be lions

We used the bus on a couple of occasions and the monorail twice but all of this walking, roasting and alternately freezing our brains wore us out and by the afternoon of day three, we had run out of energy and so by mutual consent simply lounged about in the hotel, some of us dozing , some reading, some watching TV or playing Angry Birds.

Desert sun, ancient Egypt and a monorail

But we had seen Las Vegas! One of the fifty things to do before-you-get-too-old-and-the-cost-of-travel-insurance-is-larger-than-the-pension.

On the last morning, checking out of the Luxor was quite an interesting experience. A small wizened creature sat at the desk I approached and having given the room number, I was asked for my name and they could not find it so I told this possibly female creature at the desk that it was probably booked under TS’s last name. She/it did not understand what I said and then turning to someone near on another desk, (who was definitely a human female) asked her something I could not make out and when she got a reply turned back to me and snapped $390!
 I wanted to make quite sure I was paying for the correct room and so asked, ‘Is that in the name of TS or M?’
‘$390!’ was the reply.
‘OK, but is it under the name of M?’
‘$390!’
At this point two things occurred to me. It had been in the back of my mind throughout the encounter that she/it reminded me of someone or something when it spoke. I suddenly realised it was the character from Monsters inc, number one, who constantly snapped ‘You haven’t completed your paperwork!’ in exactly the same way as the creature behind the checkout was asking for the money and secondly I realised that they had been saying the TS’s, name but contracting the second syllable so much I had not recognised it. Satisfied I was paying for our room, I paid and left.

You haven't filled in your paperwork!

We then set off heading South East to Boulder to have a look at the Hoover Dam, on our way to the Grand Canyon.