Travel Tourettes from our Road Trips
Six weeks and counting till we head stateside for our next big road trip and this time we will be California dreaming as we set out on a 1200 mile round route of the Golden State.
Our roadtrip will be taking in city’s, alpine forest’s, deserts, ocean views, state fairs, prisons, and a certain American mouse !
Ive finally got round to editing a few more videos from the hours and hours of footage i took whilst driving Route 66 last summer.
This one takes in our trip from Heathrow airport London to the Chain of Rocks bridge just outside St Louis.
Feel free to have a watch and comment
Well a few months have passed since we got back from our epic Route 66 adventure. Work has been busy and i never did get round to finishing the last few days of the blog unfortunately.
Its taken a few months but i have finally started to upload the many hours of video we took and the thousands of photographs so over the next few weeks i plan to at least edit a few videos and upload them to the site along with adding some more of the photographs we took.
A refreshing nights sleep and a nice, but expensive, breakfast in the hotel left us raring to go exploring
what delights Las Vegas had to offer. As we are only here for three days it was decided that today we would have a good look around the hotels and explore the strip.
We are not big gamblers and even if we were, having a 13 year old child with us meant only one of us could head on to the gambling floor at a time so we weren’t going to be spending a fortune in the casinos. I did however hope id be spending a fortune in the malls and outlets of Vegas. I was left a little disappointed.
The road has obviously been covered in fresh tarmac recently as you can still see the original road creeping out from underneath the thick layer of black that had topped it but that didn’t make it any less breathtaking as it winded its way over the mountains.
Along the way we passed a number of settlements, some of which looked abandoned. I cant imagine its great fun living miles away from anywhere in the shadow of mountains in the desert, especially when winter sets in
I was standing on the corner in Winslow Arizona, and such a fine sight to see, It’s a girl, my lord in a flat bed ford slowin’ down to take a look at me ” sang the Eagles in 1972, so it would be rude not to find the corner they were singing about as we started todays travels in Winslow.
As it happens they were not singing about a particular corner but that hasn’t stopped the local tourist office dedicating the corner of Old Highway 66 and N Kinsley Ave to the line in the song Taking it Easy. Its a very popular photo stop on route 66
Today was a more leisurely drive of around 200 miles. We could of taken the freeway to Winslow and our next hotel but we wanted to try and and do a bit more of route 66 and see some must see attractions along the way such as the wigwam motel in Holbrook, the Meteor Crater and the town of Williams, Arizona.
We headed out of the Grand Canyon Village relatively early still slightly disappointed at the village ( but not the canyon i must add). We made a huge mistake at stopping at a McDonalds just outside to sample their breakfast thinking it would be quick and cheap and that they would have decent wi-fi – we were wrong on all three unfortunately but it was sustenance and saw us through to our first stop in Williams, Arizona.
Another day and another iconic scene and one of the seven wonders of the world – The Grand Canyon in Arizona. After breakfast overlooking Monument Valley we stuck the go pro camera to the outside of the 4×4 and headed down into the basement of the valley to drive the 17 mile dust track around the bottom of the buttes.
It was an awesome experience, we saw so much more of the amazing rock formations and i got to drive over some real rough dust tracks in the middle of nowhere.
Today’s drive to Monument Valley was a long one. In my normal day to day life i eat up 360 miles with ease up and down the motorways but 360 miles through winding pine forests and over barren rocky deserts is another thing all together.
We started the day with a drive up a windy mountain road to visit Los Alamos.
The name of the town may not mean much to many but its one of those towns that once held a very dark secret that pretty much changed modern warfare and the world we live in.