Long time no write...

D: Hello there!


We're not dead. 


We've not been drafted into a Vegas show (even though I tried... my inner Stewie was trying to get into one of 'specialist' shows, We didn't fall into the Grand Canyon, we didn't bake crossing Death Valley.


No. What happened was MUCH more interesting...


Where to start? Death Valley would be as good a place as any...

Death Valley... in a word - HOT. In two words - VERY HOT. It'd been described to me thusly: "You'll step out of your car into the worlds largest hairdrier" - that doesn't do it justice. It was a heat that I've never experienced before, a heat that will will stat with me for qute some time. 


The landscape was interesting, going from snow-capped mountains to a dusty seabed, all within a single glance.


L: We left behind the Sierra Nevada mountain range, with Mount Witney as the highest point in the continental USA and swept down to zero elevation at Death Valley itself. We didn't make any detours as it was the middle of the day and just getting out of the car to walk across the road was an enormous effort. It was the hottest place either of us had ever been. Like being inside a gigantic hairdryer. Also we had to turn the aircon off for much of it so we just wanted to get to the glitz and glamour of Vegas!

D: Ah, Vegas - a hateful place that I really wish we'd stuck to my original plan of only having an overnight stop there, instead of two nights. Sorry to those that like it, I didn't. After the splendour of Yosemite, the wonderous vinyards of Napa the unconventional beauty of Death Valley, it was like I'd been thrown into a very hot and very tacky '80s hair-metal video. Anyway... 'nuff said about Vegas.


We got out of there as quickly as our poorly-geared car would let us, because the Grand Canyon was beckoning... and that would prove to be the perfect antidote to the disappointment of Vegas.