We wondered how best to celebrate our successes (my Doctorate and Ruth’s Bachelor of Laws) and decided that we deserved a damned good holiday. Our last trip abroad was in 1995, when we toured Germany, Switzerland and France on our 800cc BMW motorcycle, so distant climes called like sirens. Where to go……? On a drive, I asked Ruth a simple question "What would you most like to see?" Her response was immediate "the Grand Canyon". As that was pretty close to the top of my list, as well, it gave us the starting point for planning our trip.

It evolved into a fortnight’s tour of California, Arizona and Nevada that, it has to be admitted, leaves us open to the same comments we give stereotypical American tourists ‘doing’ Europe. "If it’s Saturday, it must be Milan" translated to "San Diego"!

Our car-parking, flights and car hire were booked through Worldwide Travel (http://www.wtravel.co.uk) whose service was excellent and all went extremely smoothly. Accommodation was booked through the Best Western internet site (http://www.bestwestern.com/) and, again, that all ran very smoothly with no glitches. Although booking ahead is not usually necessary in the States, it proved vital in this instance as we arrived just before the Independence Day weekend and all motels near the Californian coast were booked solid.

We flew from Heathrow to San Francisco on Virgin service VS019, aboard Tinker Belle, a Boeing 747-400. One pleasant surprise for a longshanks like me was the legroom between the seats. Another was the quality of the food and entertainment via the mini-screens set in the headrest of the seat in front. All in all, the ten-hour flight passed quite comfortably.

Our transport for the trip was a Dodge Stratus ES, a 2.5l V6 powered beast that initially seemed very wide compared to my Ford Sierra Sapphire! It proved comfortable and, much to my surprise, quite economical for an automatic. Away from the Californian coast, its air-conditioning proved invaluable, too!

The first full day was spent in San Francisco and you can't go there without riding on (as the old song has it) "those little cable cars, climbing half-way to the stars", can you? SF has Forty Three hills and they're all steep so the cable cars are a great way to cross the city from Powell Street, near Union Square, to Hyde Street, not far from Fishermens' Wharf and Mason Street. Not only are they cheap (get a passport that covers all the MUNI systems from one of the terminae) but the staff are helpful and, even better, characters so a trip is enormous fun. The photo was taken next to the Cable Car Museum and Power House, at the junction of Washington and Mason Streets. A great place to visit and, amazingly for such a commercial place as the USA, free. You can see the ropes passing over the guides, wheels and tensioners from the exhibition floor and the moan of the gears and motors is a constant background hum. The exhibits themselves cover the whole spectrum of the cable car network, of which the remaining three lines are but a tiny remnant. Even they only survived by the skin of their teeth. The City authorities had plans to do away with them about 1947 but public protest changed their minds and I think we can be very glad they succeeded. Some of the views over SF as you crest the hills on the route are quite mind blowingly beautiful.

We spent the next two days driving down Route 1, the Pacific Coast Highway, to San Diego. If you take a stereotypical American highway and think of the exact opposite you may be quite close to this gem of a road. Once it gets outside San Francisco, it hugs the coast almost all the way to San Luis Obispo, about half way. And hug is almost the wrong word as it sometimes seems to cling to the edge of the land as it snakes along the cliffs but always with the magnificent Pacific Ocean off to one side. There are few towns on the northern half. Monterey is the first we found but we were a little disappointed. There isn't a lot to see except for the large aquarium but massive queues meant we had to miss it. South of Monterey you can divert onto the 17 Mile Drive (actually a mere 10!) which is well worth the few dollars it costs. There are numerous and varied viewpoints and, when you leave, you can drop by the town made famous when Clint Eastwood was mayor - Carmel by the Sea.

Once you get south of Carmel, you have to drive all the time. The road never gives up! Route One, at least the part south of Carmel and north of San Luis Obispo, is a driver's delight. Well, a European driver's delight at any rate. We heard a lot of complaints from American drivers about the hazards and difficulties of "two lane highways" but I suppose if you're used to the long, straight runs that form the great majority of American roads you'd hardly be able to appreciate this one with its winding curves. The views are magnificent and the sweeping bends make this an ideal road for a steady motorcycle trip.

Hmm...... That gives me an idea!

What I would not like to do, though, is run out of petrol on that stretch. There are none of the "miles to go" indicators to service areas you get on British motorways and it would be a long walk before you reached the nearest pump! This view was from an isolated building that turned out to be an art gallery and café, which was very busy despite its remoteness. The café was on the top floor and the seating area looked back out over the road and onto the Pacific. The light balance doesn't do it justice, unfortunately, but it does give a vivid impression of Highway One.

At San Diego we were a few miles out of the city itself on "Hotel Circle". That street is aptly named as there are no other buildings there! There is a lot to see around there so it was impossible to do more than make a decision which we wanted to see most. We plumped for the Zoo and what a super choice that turned out to be. We winced a bit at the entrance fee but came away knowing it was worth every cent.

We originally intended to spend only the morning there and then browse San Diego itselfbut we spent about ten hours wandering round the site and didn't see everything we could have. It's hard to choose the highlights because the whole park is well maintained and most of the paddocks were designed with the animals' welfare in mind. If I had to choose, it would be the walk-through aviaries and the panda research station but one I couldn't miss out wasn't one of the Zoo's own attractions. We came across a wild humming bird darting amongst the flowers at the side of the path, oblivious to the hordes walking by - and some of them just as oblivious to this tiny speck of green fire.

The turn inland towards Phoenix and Arizona soon saw a massive change in the scenery. It's very pleasant near the coast and not as hot as you might think. All that changes as you drive east and start to climb rapidly. It isn't long before you're at 4,000ft above sea level (and above) and things get much hotter and dryer. With an air-conditioned car you don't notice the change, obviously, so stopping for a break at a rest area came as a real shock. The heat really did hit like a physical blow as you stepped out of the car and you stood in any shade you could find - even with a hat on!

The road in this photo is much more typical of the American norm. Four lanes wide, with a massive gap between the carriageways and straight as an arrow. Fine for getting from place to place - and with the distances involved that was a definite consideration - but not at all satisfying to drive along. Stick the car in cruise control, put your brain in neutral and let the time just pass by. We tried listening to the radio but found it hard to find many stations broadcasting the kind of thing we wanted to hear. Those broadcasting middle of the road music seemed to be local and so lost after a few miles. The syndicated stations that were easy to find wherever you were seemed to be most often pumping out Doctor Laura or Rush Limbaugh. We did find them entertaining, if only from our incredulity at many of the views they were expressing. Both these broadcasters have nationally syndicated shows, so they must be popular, but you can judge for yourselves at: http://www.drlaura.com and http://www.rushlimbaugh.com

There are many sights to visit and it was nice to be able to include one or two as driving breaks. Montezuma's Castle National Park is (a) nothing to do with Montezuma and (b) isn't a castle but it certainly is a romantic ruin so it probably counts. After all, that's what most British castles are! It's actually a native American pueblo that is thought to have been used for about 400 years before being abandoned. Although it was hot in the valley, it was certainly a very beautiful spot and the 'castle' must have had even better views from high up in the limestone cliff.

A tip: American National Parks charge for entry but you can buy annual passes that give you free entry to all of them at a bargain price. Ours more than paid for themeselves in the two weeks we were there alone. If you're staying longer you'll almost certainly be getting a real bargain.

After Montezuma's Castle, we visited Sunset Crater, an extinct cinder-cone volcano in a still-active area. The last eruption was rich in iron so the debris around the vent has rusted to a golden orange, hence the name. It felt slightly spooky to read on one of the notices around the site that every peak you could see around, and there were a lot, was a volcano. Only a few hundred years ago, it would have been spectacular in an altogether different fashion! I'd spotted a chains of volcanos as were flew down the west coast towards California, a geological product of the Pacific plate sliding under the American Plate. Odd to think how plate techtonics has become so widely accepted in the last forty years. When I was first doing geology, as a teenager in the sixties, it was still highly controversial. Some ideas just need to happen at the right time, I guess.

The Grand Canyon.

What can you say that is going to prepare anyone for the sight. We drove up from Phoenix to Cameron and turned west to enter the Grand Canyon National Park. There are several viewpoints along the road into the Park and a number of Indian trading posts but the early viewpoints were no more than 'interesting'. The last one gave a much better impression of what was to come the following day, though it was rather spoiled by Ruth becoming quite ill through dehydration. Although we'd bought and drunk what we thought was plenty of fluid, the dryness meant you didn't notice the sweat being lost. It wasn't until I was editing the video if the trip that I picked up on an item on the radio as we drove out of Phoenix. A local weatherman said the temperature had been 110 Fahrenheit the day before and humidity had been in single figures! Almost unbelievable to an Englishman, used to rain being an ever present threat for most of the year.

I'm a lousy sailor but I can normally cope with sea trips if I take a couple of pills and hoped the same would let me see the Grand Canyon from the air. You really don't get the full picture of the Canyon's sheer scale until you're above it so Ruth was insistent that we should take a flight in a small aircraft. I think it has to rate as one of the worst experiences of my life! As soon as we reached the Canyon itself the thermals, rising from every vertical surface - of which there are a very great many - meant the plane shook like a wet dog for the whole 90 minutes. To give you some idea of just how bad it was, in over thirty years, I have never known Ruth be travel sick before but she was that day! If you have a cast-iron stomach, take the flight because the views are fantastic. If you're like me, don't waste your money.

Click on the picture to get the full sized one and let's leave it at that.........

Although we stayed overnight in Las Vegas, we didn't linger as it did nothing for us. That's probably as much down to the long drive and terrific heat as anything els, though the decidedly off-hand receptionist at the hotel did nothing to help our mood. Heat! That's my abiding memory of Vegas. Our room faced west so it had the full force of the afternoon and evening sun (this was July) and the air conditioning never stood a chance of keeping the room comfortable. I did get one smile, though. As we explored the place to find the laundry, we passed a couple waiting for a shutle bus to take them to the Strip. The bus arrived as we did and they stepped out of the air conditioned foyer to the furnace of the forecourt. Within seconds, their immaculate evening dress was soaking. I was struggling with just a shirt on. How the husband was coping with a dinner jacket I'll never know!

Even knowing that Vegas is the gambling capital of America, if not the world, couldn't prepare us for the intensity that the operators worked to take your money away. Our hotel was several roads off the strip but even that had a group of around thirty one-armed bandits whose arms were being heavily twisted by a steady stream of punters at all hours of the day and night. You weren't even safe in the bar! There was a video screen let into the counter by every seat so you could drink without having to stop throwing your money away.

Of the whole trip, only Vegas and the Grand Canyon felt less than welcoming. I suppose it's hard to stay sharp when people will come no matter what (we were told that average hotel occupancy at Vegas tops 80%) but there was none of the eager-to-please service we found everywhere else, even a big city like San Francisco.

Another wonder of the natural world we visited was Death Valley. Although less obviously spectacular than the Grand Canyon, I found it more impressive. I suppose my mining background may have helped me appreciate the formations we passed but I think the main difference between the two is that Death Valley is much more variable. It has the most amazing erosional features, oases and a stretch of true desert with rolling sandstorms and truly vast dunes.

We dove in over the Black Mountains, cresting at 8,000ft, and the dropped steadily down to the Valley floor, which is a couple of hundred feet below sea level at one point! You feel more more a part of the landscape here than at the Canyon because you're very much more within it whereas, at the Canyon, you're pretty much restricted to the very top - for obvious and understandable reasons. The image to the left is Zabriski Point, a signposted viewpoint on our way into the Valley and, of course, made famous by the novel of the same name. You park at the base of a slope and then walk a few hundred yards to a flat, tarmac area with an information board that points out the main sights. It all sounds quite picturesque and it is - if you can ignore the howling, furnace hot wind!

Death Valley has a rather inappropriate name. Native people had been living there for centuries before the Europeans first set foot in it but they knew where the water holes were. A group of settlers named it after they managed to cross it - losing most of their animals along the way - but it can be lived in, make no bones about it.

One of the natural oases we passed was at Furnace Creek, the spot where one of the hottest surface temperatures ever recorded was noted. It wasn't in the 130s Fahrenheit the day we were there but it was quite hot enough for me, thank you very much. The site has a trading post that sells food, drinks and souvenirs but there's also a hotel next door. If I ever return, I think I'd like to spend a couple of days there, hire a four-wheeled drive vehicle and explore. With the Stratos we were restricted to the blacktop and the guide books said that a lot of the really amazing sights were down dirt tracks. If they were much more spectacular than those we saw from the road then they must be something else! The colour variation in the rocks is incredible. The Grand Canyon is mostly red-brown and white. This has everything from white though cream to yellows, reds and even black. I doubt if it would be very comfortable to sit and paint the scenes but it would make a fine painting if you did.

The site was settled by miners, originally, who had the serious problem of getting their product the 140 miles to the nearest railhead. The first solution were the "40 mule team trains", actually 38 mules and two horses in the shafts as mules were too small to make the huge wagon turn! One wagon of ore, two men, forty equines and a water tanker must have been a sight and you have to admire the men who managed to survive it all.

The next solution, that survived until the railway finally arrived, was steam power. This three-wheeled behemoth - believe me, it's gigantic - is known as 'Old Dinah' and replaced the horses and mules and allowed the hauliers to take two wagons instead of one. After it was displaced at Furnace Creek, it was used elsewhere in the Valley until that mine closed, after which it lay abandoned for years. The dry air preserved it to be brought back to Furnace Creek for display, much as it must have been in its heyday, the railway having vanished again. It's not in working order and, if it were, I wonder if they'd be able to find anyone to operate it in the heat of the Valley. Makes you wonder how they found people to run it as a job. It can't have been comfortable standing against the boiler, with the air temperature as high as it gets.

After a visit to the nearby tourist information centre - well worth a visit, by the way - we continued along the Valley floor to Stovepipe Wells, another oasis, and then turned west. The ride back out was every bit as spectacular as the ride in. We drove over a small spur of high ground, dropped back onto some desert and then hit the Panamint Mountains, the Valley's western boundary. It's a long and steady climb to the peak, again around 8,000ft, before you drop down again into some unprepossessing salt pans. Thankfully, that didn't last long and we found ourselves in a much more attractive location.

Lone Pine was chosen as a stop, purely by chance, on the basis of its distance from Las Vegas but what a lucky chance it was. People everywhere were friendly but the folks in Lone Pine seemed determined to take it to another level. For example, as we sat on the grass by the pool, eating breakfast, a man walked onto the motel forecourt carrying a couple of plastic shopping bags. He went from table to table and I wondred if he was selling something but no, it was quite the opposite. He'd stripped his trees and the bags were full of ripe and juicy apricots, which he invited the guests to help themselves to a couple of handfulls.

And they were delicious!

The whole area is quite spectacular. To the east you have the Panamints and to the west the Sierra Nevadas, with the main highway running along the floor of the valley between them. This photo was taken looking towards the Sierra Nevadas from the motel entrance and looked incredible in the early morning sunlight. We found that the area had been widely used for Western films and that many of the canyon scenes in tv shows such as The Lone Ranger, with Clayton Moore in the title role, were made there. They're quite proud that the first and last work John Wayne did were also at Lone Pine and they were fund raising to build a museum to record their part in the Californian film industry.

From Lone Pine we moved north and turned west into the Tioga Pass. Even the 2.5 litre engine of our Dodge didn't feel any too small as we headed up this long drag towards Yosemite National Park. The view to the left shows us looking back east aboput half way up the pass and you can see the steepness of the road on the left hand side of the picture. This was a sight that was well worth seeing. Almost throughout the entire length of the run up and over the Pass - you enter the Park at 10, 000 feet above sea level - and then on the run down towards the Yosemite Valley the views are constantly changing and always spectacular. The variations in temperature between summer and winter are very clearly defined here, since this pass is only open from May to October each year at best.

The Valley itself is, like the Canyon, incredibly popular and tourists have to be controlled. The controls are not too onerous, though, and the frequent, free buses that circulate around the site make leaving your car some distance from the main attractions no trouble at all. One of the attractions that's best seen from the road in, though, is El Capitan. Something like 3,500 feet high along the vertical face on its right hand side, it dominates that part of the Park.

Yosemite takes its name from a waterfall, one of many but probably the most spectacular. Three falls take the water to Valley floor level but, amazing as they look here, this is nothing compared to the sights that must occur in April and May. All the falls are fed from meltwater so the first rush of melting snow in spring must be fantastic, if the huge boulders in the stream bedas are anything to go by.

The Half Dome was shaped, like all the other incredible features at Yosemite, by glaciers in the last Ice Age. You can see this mountain from many parts of the Park but it's just too big to take in from up close. This is taken from Cooke's Meadow and at least makes it look like it's of a scale we humans can comprehend.

If you were inany doubt that you weren't away from home, some of the signs nailed to the trees would have made you sure. You don't see too many around Derby or Nottingham that say "You Are Now Entering Mountain Lion Country" and giving tips on how to avoid being attacked! We didn't see any lions but did see a lot of squirrels, chipmunks and several groups of noisy, squawking jays.

Home Again

Yosemite was our last call before we returned to San Francisco for a couple of nights and then came the day that we both dreaded - leaving what we'd come to love. Virgin 747 "Ruby Tuesday" lifted off from the airport bang on time and we landed at Heathrow, safe and sound, in the early morning. After collecting our luggage and finding our car we drove to our daughter's home for a rest and then made the trip back to Derby.

Would we go again? You bet but I think we'd try some other parts of California. After all, I'm a mining engineer and didn't see anything of the gold mining areas - nor the wine growing areas to the north of the Bay area. Both would be on my list for our next visit. 2002 is earmarked for a return visit to Canada but who knows what 2003 and 2004 will bring?