We have just spent our last night in the US in a (yet another!) Motel 6. We’re at the throwing stuff out/packing/freaking out about how much stuff we have stage of our trip. Happens every time. We’ve put 10,000+ miles on the car and let’s just say it’s not quite in the same condition as when we got it. It needs a new battery, an oil change and a comprehensive service. That happens every time too.

It’s been a great trip – we’ve seen and done things that we hadn’t expected to do when we started out, the camping has been wonderful and the motel/hotel accommodation has ranged from excellent to very poor. I’d happily stay at the Holiday Inn place in Vegas again, some of the little motels we stayed at in out-of-the-way places were lovely, but the motel in Prince George, BC that messed up our booking and then refused to refund us may regret their actions … and if you feel like voting for our reviews of that place, here’s the link:

http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g154938-d1639986-Reviews-Carmel_Motor_Inn-Prince_George_British_Columbia.html#REVIEWS

Ivanpah Solar Power Facility near Primm on the California – Nevada border – 400 Megawatts

One of the few places we were actually able to get to/park at Malibu Beach

This time we’re doing it a lot more low-key. Staying one block back from The Strip at the Holiday Inn Desert Club Resort which is located on the inappropriately named Koval Lane. I’ve never seen a lane with 7 lanes of traffic before. But then, Las Vegas Boulevarde (‘The Strip’) has about 10 lanes. It’s all bigger and brighter here! So we have a very nice one-bedroom suite at the Holiday Inn. 8 squares of luxury with 2 TVs, king-size bed, great kitchen and a pool & bbqs just a few steps outside the front door. I’ve been baking, roasting and cooking to my heart’s content, and watching a lot of trashy American TV. It’s a bit sad to admit that I know the channel numbers of the Food Network and the Travel Channel of the 90+ TV channels available. Greg has spent a lot of time working on his already-fantastic tan by the pool. Being just off The Strip has worked out better for us to drive to the places we want to go to – much easier getting in and out of this place than places on The Strip with underground parking and the crazy Strip traffic.

We didn’t even venture near The Strip until we’d been here for a couple of days, and then it was to go and buy pastries for lunch from Thomas Keller’s amazing Bouchon Bakery. There are 3 Bouchon bakery shops at the Venetian Hotel, which is one of the closest hotels to us. The pastries were delicious. We bought a few, ate them and then went back to buy a few more. As we wandered along the Grand Canal shops inside The Venetian, we noticed a huge queue of people along one wall and as we got closer, we realised that they were all waiting to buy cakes and other baked goodies from Carlo’s, which is owned by Buddy Valastro who stars in Cake Boss, a TV show about him running his bakery on the East Coast. All the cakes looked un-naturally coloured and full of mock cream. Nowhere near as appealing as the Bouchon treats we’d just eaten, but that’s the power of TV, I guess.

It seems to be off-season in Vegas. Too hot for Americans and not many European tourists around. As Australians, we’re always in the minority. Weather here this week is around 35 every day, forecast for next week is 40+.

We’re off to have a look at some RVs, just to see what’s actually inside these mega-rigs we’ve driven past and parked near for the last couple of months. Greg found one on a website the other day that had a king-sized bed, 2 toilets and 2 TVs in it! We’ll be sure to report back … with photos.

Greg’s dad Ron asked for another song. I think it’s probably most appropriate to feature The King. It would have been amazing to see him perform here

Buchon Bakery Lunch

Only in the USA. A 99cent store that is a supermarket. Everything is 99cents or less.

Inside the 99 cent supermarket, with fruit and veg, and a frozen food section.

We have seen this all over the USA and Canada. Products that have an Australian connection, except there is no Australian connection, they just throw “Aussie” in the name. We have seen food, hair-care, deodorants (“Aussie Male”!), and food. Australia should copyright its name.

At almost 9,000 ft, the north rim is a couple of thousand feet higher than the south rim, so it’s cooler, wetter and gets more snow and fewer visitors. We camped at a campground just outside the national park and had our 17th consecutive night of thunderstorms. Yesterday was rainy and foggy, so not the best day for trying to see the canyon in all its vast splendour, but this morning it was fine, so we drove to Point Imperial and Cape Royal and did a few short walks to see down and across the canyon. Wonderful.

And now we’re in the biggest Sin City of them all … Las Vegas. Our end-of-holiday holiday – 4 nights in a suite at the Holiday Inn Desert Club Resort, a couple of blocks from The Strip, just behind The Venetian Hotel. Last time we were here, it was Easter and there were people everywhere. Seems like there are still people everywhere, although we haven’t been out exploring yet.

The Narrows canyon, Virgin River Zion National Park, about an hours walk into the canyon

The only way up the narrows in Zion is to wade up the Virgin river

HooDoos in Bryce Canyon National Park

The upper parts of the Narrows Zion National Park

The highest lookout on the Grand Canyon rim at 8,803 feet

The Colorado river snakes through the Grand Canyon 1,600 metres below North Rim

Camped at DeMotte Forest campground 40km north of North Rim, at 8,700 feet.

Looking down into Grand Canyon from North Rim, with the Colorado river, and south rim in the distance

More recently, the area was farmed by natives for several centuries until the 1200s, and there are petroglyphs (rock drawings) of animals and alien-looking people. Even more recently, in the 19th century, there were several Mormon settlements in the area, including Fruita which still has its original schoolhouse and a farmhouse which is now a general store. There is still a large orchard with peach and apple trees laden with fruit at the moment. Apparently it is possible to pick the fruit for free, but that’s a bit lost on me as I don’t like most fruit.

Crossing the Colorado River just upstream of Lake Powell

Camped at Whites Canyon near Lake Powell

Pueblo ruins that are 700+ years old

Mesa arch in Canyonlands National Park

The switchback trail down to the White Rim trail in Canyonlands National Park

The multiple guys we needed to hold the tent down when we had a severe thunderstorm when camped north of Canyonlands National Park.

When we camped at Whites Canyon the ground was too hard for pegs, so we had to use rocks to hold the tent down during the night-time desert winds

Our en-suite shower tent. We bought a gas heated shower in Denver, and with some plastic water pipe and fittings from Lowes hardware we made ourselves a shower tent.

After camping for 5 nights, we decided to spend a few days here, to do interesting stuff like eat out at food trucks and not-so-interesting stuff like wash our clothes and ourselves. We’ve seen a thunderstorm every day for the last week, so getting indoors and away from them for a while has been good too, although all the electrical action in Denver has been during the day while we’ve been here.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, there is a Food Truck gathering at Civic Center Park, near the Capitol Building, the Mint and other old and important Denver buildings. So that took care of lunch yesterday. We wanted to do some shopping in the morning, and as luck would have it, we drove past a Sonic Drive In fast food restaurant. We have wanted to go to one for years, so went there for breakfast. It’s set up like a ’50s drive-in burger joint. Car booths, each with a menu board and intercom to order, then a waitperson brings the food to the car. It is also possible to order via an intercom in the covered eating area, but there is no ‘front of house’ order counter inside the store. In some stores, the wait-people are on roller-skates, apparently. The food was cooked when we ordered it, came quickly and tasted good.

And then lunch at the food trucks, almost 30 of them parked in a paved area a block away from the Capitol Building, with lawn areas in between. Lots of variety, plenty of people ordering and a lovely atmosphere. Greg had pulled pork on a biscuit, I had deep fried soft-shell crab on brioche. We chatted with a few stall-holders, including a New Zealander who has lived in Denver for 18 years (and still has his Kiwi accent), and a guy from Maryland who has run his food truck for 3 years – it sells crab and Greek food.

This morning we actually did something that we hardly ever do – lay by the pool in the sun for an hour or so, working on our tans … ha! We found out about a combined Farmers’ Market/Food Truck event being held this evening – Friday –  but it was a bit thin. No produce, a couple of food stalls and some clothes sellers. But there was a BBq stall, so we had smoked pulled pork and a beer. All good.

Back to the wilderness tomorrow – a few interesting-sounding camping spots in Utah, maybe a visit to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and then Las Vegas!

Denver Food truck menu

This is all a long introduction to explain why we went to Ogallala. It featured prominently in Lonesome Dove, and in real life in the 19th century, as one of the major towns on the way to Montana, and in the book, Gus McCrae’s great love Clara lived with her family just outside Ogallala on the Platte River.

Before we reached Ogallala, we spent a night camping at Walgren Lake State Forest campground in Nebraska , not far from the Sth Dakota border. It was a bit strange – little ‘forest’ with a lake surrounded by farmland. Popular with the locals – lots came to swim in the lake in the afternoon. When we registered, there was a sign about budget cuts , and after we had set up camp, Greg went for a walk and discovered that most of the vault toilets in the park had been nailed closed. We were lucky that we had chosen to pitch camp near a toilet that was actually open.

Next day, we headed south to Alliance, Oshkosh and Ogallala. Just north of Alliance is America’s answer to Stonehenge. This one is made out of metal. Old cars to be precise. Interesting, clever and, well, we stopped, so I guess a lot of other people do too. We stopped for a walk around the main street of Oshkosh (not where the kids’ clothing company was founded, that’s the Oshkosh in Wisconsin). Lots of empty shops, it looks like a town that has seen better days.

Fuel in Ogallala is the cheapest we’ve seen in the US, and we haven’t seen fuel prices anywhere close in Australia for close to a decade – USD $ 3.29 per gallon. Less than a dollar a litre!   We went for a short walk around the business district, but the temperature was somewhere near 100F, so we headed out to camp at the Lake Ogallala state campground near Lake McConaughy. The eastern-most point of our trip. It’s all west, and mostly south, from here. We woke up to a thunderstorm, strong winds and lots of rain this morning, and as we drove towards Colorado, we heard a weather warning for a Nebraska county south of where we had been. An interesting tip that made us both go … ‘hmmm’ – ‘if you can hear thunder, you may be in danger and should get indoors as quickly as possible’. Okay, we’ll remember that next time there’s a thunderstorm and we’re in our tent.

Camped at Walgren Lake Nebraska

Carhenge Alliance Nebraska

A train we passed carrying new Boeing 737 fuselages

“The Trail Boss” statue at Boot Hill Cemetery Ogallala

Camped at Lake Ogallala

The Journey so far

On the way to Badlands, we stopped at Wall, a little town on the I90 which is most famous for its huge drugstore, which now sells almost everything and has become a big tourist destination. A couple of guys from Mississippi told Greg about it when we were camping west of Yellowstone, and we had started seeing billboards advertising Wall Drug hundreds of kms away. Apparently they spend $400,000 on advertising per year. Huge, touristy, entertaining.

We camped at the Sage Creek campground, a ‘primitive’ campground with a lovely mown grassy area, vault toilets but no water. It was free to camp there and as you can see from the photo, there were plenty of people camping there.

The sharply eroded buttes, pinnacles, and spires of Badlands look like something from another planet. We drove through part of the park early in the morning and colours of the rocks were beautiful. The park has a herd of 800+ buffalo, and we drove through a couple of hundred of them – the ‘wildlife jammers’ in Yellowstone would have gone crazy over seeing so many! We also saw prairie dogs, a white-tailed deer and a pack of pronghorn.

In addition to visiting the Minuteman Missile Command Centre, we went to see a sod prairie homestead and Wounded Knee, south of the national park. So much history. so much heartbreak

The Bison/Buffalo heard we drove through in Badlands National Park

Bison up close (taken from safely inside the car!)

Pronghorn sheep in the Badlands

Badlands

So, to touristy stuff, sort of … we visited Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse monument-in-progress yesterday. Actually, ‘visited’ might be a bit misleading. We parked a few hundred metres either side of the carpark entrance to Rushmore and looked at it from face-on, and then at the profile of George Washington. As it was a Sunday, the queue to get into the carpark was long, and we didn’t want to pay $11 . It’s ‘free’ to get into Rushmore, but they get you by charging you to park, and there’s no parking anywhere outside near the monument.  I really liked the profile, and it was much closer than the face-on view would have been, even from inside the monument’s grounds. The Crazy Horse monument was started in the late 1940s, and is expected to take many, many years to complete. So far only his face, the upper edge of his outstretched arm and part of the horse’s head and mane have been done.

And here’s the song you’ve all been waiting for – the lyrics are there so if you don’t know all the words, you can sing still along

Camped near Nemo in the Black Hills ( we got lost but someone told us how to find Nemo)

Mount Rushmore with George Washington in profile

The free view of Mount Rushmore

Crazy Horse memorial , a few hundred years from completion.

I didn’t think we had much to say about yesterday – we just spent it driving further east through Wyoming. Quite varied landscape – a high mountain pass that reminded me of ‘Brokeback Mountain’ country, then dry, flat plains. We camped at a nice little campground in a state forest, and just after midnight the fun really began.

A huge, bright, loud thunderstorm that woke us up and had us scuttling to take shelter in the car .. twice! The first storm went for about 90 minutes, with lightning flashes that lit up the whole sky. We kept listening to, and counting for the thunder to work out how far away the storm was, and when it got close we got in the car, figuring it was safer in a large tin box than out in the open near tall trees that could get struck by lightning. It rained a bit, but that didn’t last anywhere near as long as the lightning. We headed back to bed at around 1.30am, then it all started again at 3am!

So we’re feeling pretty wiped out this morning. We visited the Devil’s Tower National Monument, which Greg will write about soon. An amazing rock formation. Heading to the Black Hills to see some things and have an afternoon sleep! The locals are delighted with the weather – high 20s, fine. We just overheard someone comment that they wait 8 months for this weather.

Powder River Pass at 9666 feet, with snow still on some of the mountains in the background

A small RV (caravan) at a roadside stop on the I-90 in Wyoming