We’ve all been in New York lots so this was a good opportunity to do some shopping and visiting sights that we already know. We had a long visit to the Natural History Museum which was, as always, entertaining and informative.

I’ve been telling the kids about Churrascaria Platforma (the place where you can eat a huge amount of meat) for years so we went there for dinner and it was great as always. We had a fabulous brunch with friends on Sunday and then made a run to J&R today to buy the usual gadgets and computer programs.

Monday morning was “travel to Fire Island day”. After an extremely frustrating and annoying exchange with Hertz (more the fault of the grumpy assistant than Hertz) I found myself piloting the gigantic Ford Explorer through the rush hour streets of New York. Everything I said about driving in the US being easy and enjoyable is totally rubbish. It’s like piloting a troop carrier through enemy lands at 8.30 on a Monday morning on Madison Avenue. Unlike the western cities, New York was a city long before freeways so exits, entrances and signs are all cunningly hidden behind subway lines or strange piles of concrete. Thoughts of Bonfire of the Vanities were hard to dispel. However, we only got lost in Queens once and only an hour after leaving the city, we were at the Fire Island Ferry. Fire Island is a thin strip of sand off the coast of Long Island about 50 miles from New York City and it’s our most easterly point in the US. In total, from Los Angeles to here, we’ve travelled 4200 miles in the US but haven’t seen anywhere like this. It’s extraordinary that you can be so close to one of the world’s largest conurbations and find such a beautiful, quiet and serene place. We are staying at Marty’s (Hannah’s godfather’s) beach house on the island and without much hyperbole, it is the most beautiful beach house in an outstanding location.


As you can see, we’re relaxing, getting some sun, cooking our own food (which is a real joy) and preparing for the flight. We walked down the beach today. With the early morning mist and the watery sun it reminded me of the scene in William Gibson’s Neuromancer where Case is trapped in a beach like “construct”. As we walked along the beach, I expected our house to suddenly reappear in the distance out of the fog…

In general, the people staying on Fire Island are urbane, witty, quiet and….well European. This has been the perfect end to the holiday and, BA permitting, we should be back in Cambridge tomorrow. Total trip distance including all flights and driving has been about 29,000 miles….

We stayed in the middle of the South Dakota Badlands at a small guest ranch called the Circle View Ranch. It’s run by the nicest couple in the USA called Phil and Amy Kruse and we had a great time relaxing there. The Badlands are yet another area of fabulous geological formations which are so unearthly that there have been a number of sci-fi films shot there.

The ranch is next to the tiny town of Interior,SD. It’s very hot and very quiet. We saw tumbleweeds rolling down Main St! Here’s the “city jail”.

We explored Wall, SD home of Wall Drug an incredibly kitch store which is one of the biggest tourist magnets in the area. The history is quite interesting though and they really do still sell coffee for 5c a cup. There’s also some weirdly interesting signs in this part of the world. Spelling can be a bit random

and in a country which combines odd businesses like Casino and Second Hand Furniture Store this must be the strangest combination of businesses….

We decided to split the 950 mile journey to Chicago into two bits. Day one was a relatively short 300 mile drive to Sioux Falls. Or a “Grandma” as we call it. (It’s 300 miles from Cambridge to Grandma and Grandpa’s house near Berwick so a “Grandma” is a useful unit of distance).

Once you cross the Missouri River, it’s just corn all the way. Huge rolling fields of maize stretching as far as the eye can see and going on for 300 miles. Since we had some time, we turned off at Mitchell, SD to see the Corn Palace which was truly awful. It used to be a huge building made out of corn cobs. Now it’s a concrete convention center with some corn cobs stuck on the front. Sioux Falls was a bit disappointing. The falls themselves are kind of uninspiring and the Sioux River is pretty polluted. We did some shopping in a mall and then just slept.

The following day it was up early for the “two grandma” drive to Chicago. Minnesota was, once again, just corn. Lots of little identical “toy town” farms amid the rolling fields. This was a long drive and as we started to get closer to Chicago, everything I’ve written in a previous blog about the driving being enjoyable evaporated as the roads suddenly got busier and harder to negotiate. However, we made it without incident and spent a night in Chicago. We then dropped off our trusty Chevrolet Trailblazer (not Tahoe as I said earlier) after 3400 miles of driving or 11 “Grandmas” and flew to New York on the consistently and reliably awful American Airlines.

This is just a general entry on driving in the USA. We will have done about 3300 miles in our Chevrolet Tahoe and we’ve experienced pretty much every type of driving from LA freeways to dirt tracks so it’s about time to summarise the whole experience.

The first thing to say is that driving in the states is actively enjoyable. In general the roads are incredibly quiet. The Interstates which are the equivalent of British Motorways appear very quiet to those of us who have been on the M25 at rush hour. They’re easy and fast at the broadly observed speed limit of 75mph. However, they’re a little soulless and the real enjoyment is to be found on the highways which are the equivalent of UK “A” roads. Generally just one lane in each direction they’re straight and they go through towns and villages. Compared to “A” roads in the UK, they’re virtually deserted. Although you meet the occasional RV (of which more later), passing them is easy and non-stressful. This is definitely the right way to travel in the US. We drove from Rapid City to Interior (a distance of 76 miles) without passing a single car. Before now, I have never really understood the point of “Cruise Control” on a car. Why would I in the UK where it’s a constant stop start and jockeying for position in various lanes? Here, you just set it for 65, stick one arm out of the window and cruise along.

Compared to roads in the UK, the roads are also clean. I assume it’s due to the extremely popular Adopt-A-Highway programme where businesses and families take responsiblility for removing the rubbish and cleaning up a stretch of a road. In return, they get a little sign beside the road saying that “The Kirk Family” or “Goldman Sachs” is responsible for this stretch of road. It is, apparently, very successful.

An additional thing that makes driving in the US easy is the almost obsessively complete and correct signage on every stretch of road and every junction: Every cross road is marked no matter how small; every mile is numbered and marked; every passing place is signed. Once you understand how it works, it is very comforting and almost impossible to get lost.

In the west beyond Las Vegas, the road users split into four groups

• SUVs. We’ve got an SUV (see above). But, they’re comfortable and large and easy to travel long distances in. They come with 4 wheel drive which is useful getting out of the WalMart car park. These are the cars that look so huge in the tiny medieval streets of Cambridge and in the UK, we think of them as enormous gas guzzling behmoths. However, that’s because we don’t have…..
• Monster Trucks. I thought our SUV was a big car until a Ford F350 Superduty pulled up beside us at a set of lights. Even our giant SUV looked like a BMW Mini next to this car. There’s something about these cars that’s some sort of supernormal stimulus for men (well, for me anyway). I’ve started dreaming of owning a Dodge Ram (5.7 Litres guys!) so I can drive over other cars on the school run. However, on the giant car stakes, there’s one thing that dwarfs even the monster truck….
• The RV. The recreational vehicle is basically a mobile home on steroids. They’re huge. We’re not talking a Volkswagen mini bus here, we’re talking a giant single decker tour bus. They’re so big that you can’t use them for anything else so the RV drivers humiliate the monster truck drivers by towing a monster truck behind them to use as a runabout while they park their RVs in an RV park. It’s not clear to me what percentage of the RV owners are using them as a holiday vehicle and how many actually live 365 days a year in the RV but a significant percentage do live in them all the time. The drivers are almost exclusively over 60 and seem to be having an awfully nice time just pottering around this gigantic country. But, they seem to annoy our final group…..
• The Bikers. We’ve been passing through the high plains just before the annual Sturgis Bike Rally so it’s not surprising that we’ve seen a lot of bikers. They’ve got cap sleeve leather vests, leather chaps and no helmet. Almost exclusively, they ride Harley Davidsons. Sometimes you see the occasional Honda Gold Wing but you know that they’re just saving up for a Harley. They move in packs, they’ve got their babe on the back and lots of leather pack and frills. Unfortunately, the whole image is somewhat spoiled when they stop and arthritically creak off these beautiful bikes and the pot bellies bulging out the leather vest and sagging bottoms cupped in frilled leather chaps become so obvious. It’s a lot less of this and a lot more of this. But as long as you don’t notice the gray hair, the bikers are definitely the hippest people on the road and it’s got to be the best way to travel. Not for them the buzzing insanity of a race tuned Ducati or Yamaha, just low end grunt and growl at 55mph along the deserted highways with the wind blowing in what’s left of their hair. Time to lay my cards on the table: I want one of these…really want one. In fact, I have to buy one complete with all the associated gear and cruise up and down the streets of Cambridge in the summer. Before people post comments about “midlife crises”, I’d just like to completely agree with them. It’s a sad, fortysomething thing to do to buy a giant Harley but one of the nice things about being fortysomething is that I can afford to not care.

We’ve stopped a lot in little roadside diners. We’ve completely avoided the chains (of which there are just so many). Not for us McDonalds, Burger King, Arby’s, Hardee’s, Dairy Queen, Taco Bell, Taco Joes, Pizza Hut and all the rest. It’s the A&M Diner or Dirty Annies truck stop (no, really). This is also a great way to eat and see things and is one of the reasons to avoid the Interstates. The food is fairly standard and relatively good. The portions are large and for breakfast, it can’t be beaten. It’s also very very cheap as is all food in the US. We can easily eat ourselves stupid for $30 and famously, we can buy a 64oz diet coke for $1.29. To put that in perspective, that’s 1.89 litres of coke for 74p. Fabulous value!

So, besides discovering a previously hidden desire for a 5.7 litre truck and a Harley Davidson, what else is there to say? Not much really. If you’ve got 2 weeks or more in the USA, there’s really no better way to see the country.

Our email is down. Hopefully it will come up again in the next few days but there’s not much we can do from here to fix it. If there’s anything urgent, add a comment here.

We spent a few days in the Grand Teton national park. Jackson Hole ski resort is right in the middle of the park and apart from getting some sun, we did some hikes around Rendevous Mountain. The Tetons are a beautiful range of mountains and it certainly looks like the skiing in the winter is great. We stayed in a nice hotel in the Teton Village for some much needed R&R.

The Grand Teton National Park is right next door to Yellowstone which was the USA’s first national park. The park is sitting on top of a gigantic “supervolcano” which has blown 3 times in the last 2m years. It’s still geologically active (3000 mini earthquakes every year) which accounts for the geysers, hot springs and bubbling mud pools which dot the landscape. Of course, Yellowstone’s most famous feature is Old Faithful which blows every 25 minutes or so. We arrived just in time to push our way through the throngs of gigantic people munching food and get this photograph.

Old Faithful is “Tourist Central” and very very busy. Even the drive round Yellowstone was pretty busy. We stopped at all of the main sites and some superb pools and geysers. Although compared to Zion, Bryce and the Grand Canyon, the scenery isn’t quite as dramatic and breathtaking there are some absolutely beautiful sights. This is Prismatic Pool.

On the other side of Yellowstone, we exited down a steep mountain pass towards Buffalo Lake and Cody. The landscape flattens out and turns into the classic USA small farm land in the fertile valleys. Past the Buffalo Dam, we dropped down into Cody, the self styled “home of the cowboy”.

Cody is a town unlike any I’ve ever seen. The air has a constant Hydrogen Sulphide smell which must be blown through from Yellowstone. Main St is lined with shops selling unlimited cowboy tat and every resident appears to wear a cowboy hat and spurs. It’s hot, dusty and the home of Wild Bill Cody (Buffalo Bill). We stayed at the hotel which Bill Cody started called the Irma Hotel. It’s trying to be a traditional hotel but it’s staffed with room temperature IQ (celsius) people and nothing really works properly. It’s a slice of the old west but not a slice that you really want to see. They run a “shoot out” re-enactment every evening which is undoubtably the worst piece of amateur dramatics you will ever see although it is punctuated by some very loud bangs and a very wishy washy “don’t touch guns kids” message. All in all, not something to drive a long way to see. However, in the evening, we went to the Cody Rodeo which was actually really good. None of us had ever seen a real rodeo before and it’s was good. There was the small town announcer rattling on about “America’s Number One Sport” (which I’m a bit skeptical about) and making jokes at the expense of Texas and generally doing a great job getting the crowd of about 1000 going. The events are exciting: they’re dangerous, quick and skillful. For the British people reading this, the closest thing to Rodeo in Britain is probably something like Speedway Racing. It’s got the same excitement but also the slightly down at heel, past its prime feel to it. Not only is it dangerous but nobody wears any padding or helmets and they’re sitting on top of 1400lb bulls which could crack your skull with a single kick. I was surprised to see the junior events: Kids as young as 8 being strapped to bucking bulls for 6 seconds without helmets or padding. But, we stood up with everybody else for prayers and the national anthem and generally went with the Cody zeitgeist. The idealised “cowboy life” existed across the western USA at the turn of the century and at its zenith in the 50s, the entire world knew of the cowboy through countless avidly watched movies and TV shows but there’s no doubt that the experience of a town celebrating a 50 year old idealisation of a life that existed 100 years ago is somewhat odd.

To our surprise, on our way out of Cody the following morning, we passed a bookshop and Isabelle got her copy of “The Half Blood Prince”! It goes without saying that it took her less than 24 hours to finish it and Trish and I are now fighting over who will read it next.

This helped to keep Isabelle occupied during the 450 mile drive to Rapid City. This was a great drive. Long straight roads across the great plains through towns, large and small. The larger ones are living embodyments of “Small Town, USA” complete with Main St and soda fountains in the center although they tend to be surrounded by ugly strip malls. The small ones (my favourite being Emblem,WY: population 10) are just a tiny aggregation of farms. The names are great too: Crazy Woman Creek, Dead Horse Creek…it goes on and on.
Finally, the highway ran out and we joined I90 (which is going to take us all the way to Chicago). Before the border with South Dakota, we turned off to see Devil’s Tower. If you’ve seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you’ve seen Devil’s Tower. On the road there, we all started singing “boo bee boo bee booooooo” and pointing out strange crop formations where all the grass had been gathered together into strange square “bales” by alien forces beyond our ken. It’s an amazing natural feature and was worth the 50 mile detour. If you look very carefully at this picture, you can see a tiny climber on the skyline preparing to abseil down the tower after climbing up.

It’s not far to Rapid City, SD from Devil’s Tower and we reached the Alex Johnson Hotel in the early evening. This is a great traditional hotel and Rapid City has a certain cosmopolitan charm…compared to Cody anyway. It’s a center for exploring the Black Hills of South Dakota which house (amongst other things) Mt Rushmore. Up early, we drove out to Mt Rushmore along Mt Rushmore Road which is lined with places designed to trap and fleece the tourists who are there to see Mt Rushmore. We managed to avoid most of them but stopped at the truly excrecable “National Museum of Woodcarving“. Atrocious crap. Mt Rushmore is odd: clearly we don’t have the cultural background to find it as emotional and patriotic as the thousands of Americans who were there at the same time as us so it’s hard to see it as they do. The monument itself is strangely smaller than one expects. During the entire trip, everything I’ve taken a photograph of has appeared smaller in the picture; Mt Rushmore appears a lot bigger. Spooky.

We then moved on to the Crazy Horse Memorial. There’s a lot of political stuff surrounding this but after 50 years of carving without Federal support, it hasn’t really got that far which isn’t made entirely clear in the various promotional leaflets strewn around South Dakota. A rough guess based on the volume of material removed, it should be finished sometime in 2450. Visits to Wind Cave and Jewel cave were interesting but the Borneo caves were larger and a lot more impressive.

Visiting all these sites and monuments has given us an opportunity to peruse the visitor books. It appears that the US education system is in worse state than I had thought. There are only two adjectives in use: “Awsome (sic)” and “cool”. Nobody appears to be able to think of anything else to say. Very occasionally you get light relief from the “awesome”s and “cool”s with comments like “It wuz cool to the maaaxxxx” or “intiristing (sic)”. My favourite comment at Jewel Cave was simply “I pooped”. Ah, the lyrical language of Shakespeare is alive and well.

Our day in the Black Hills wasn’t going well and we didn’t have very high expectations of the Mammoth Site at Hot Springs when we pulled up in the carpark next to the inevitable “Gift Shop”. However, it was absolutely great. 26,000 years ago, a sinkhole opened up in the prairie of South Dakota and over the next few thousand years, mammoths jumped in the pool seeking water and vegetation but couldn’t get out. Strangely, all the mammoths in the sinkhole are young males so it’s possible that the sinkhole was the mammoth equivalent of buying a motorbike or drinking 8 pints of lager in a night: plus ca change… They estimate that there’s over 100 mammoth skeletons in there and they’re perfectly preserved. The Mammoth Site Center is a big building build over the active archeological dig site. You can watch giant bones being literally brushed out of the rock in front of your eyes. The supporting information surrounding the site is extensive, intelligent and thoughtful.

Finally we drove up through the Custer State Park which houses one of the few herds of buffalo left in the US. When Columbus arrived, it is estimated that there were 120 million buffalo in the continental US. By 1900, there were less than 1000 but a herd of 36 was preserved in the Custer State Park which has now grown to nearly 1500. This truly is one of the few places where “the buffalo roam and the deer and the antelope play”. The park is relatively small but is a beautiful mix of prairie and woodland. On a small gravel road we found ourselves literally in the middle of the buffalo herd. A fantastic experience.

Over the last two weeks, the western USA has been suffering a heatwave. It has been amazingly hot. In Las Vegas last night, the lowest temperature recorded was 92F. It’s been 120 in the shade during the day. We haven’t experienced quite as hot temperatures but it’s rarely been below 100 during the day.

We’re off tomorrow to a Ranch in the South Dakota badlands for three days before we drive 900 miles to Chicago. It’s unlikely that we’ll have internet access until Friday or Saturday so no blogs until then. There’s no GSM phone access anywhere in the regions we’ve been in and email access is very spotty indeed.

We drove out of Las Vegas on I15 and eventually turned onto Highway 89 (of which more later) towards the Grand Canyon North Rim (much less visited than the South Rim). As you drive up from the desert, the landscape gradually changes to an alpine meadow and ponderosa pine forest and even as you get very close to the canyon, there’s no indication in the landscape of what is about to unfold. We stayed at the Grand Canyon Lodge which is the only place to stay in the park and it was definitely worth it. The standard of the accommodation and food was pretty bad but the view was superb. It’s difficult to capture it all in a photograph and the sheer scale of the canyon is remarkable. This is the view out of the dining room window!

There are lots of other good photographs on this site but none of them really do it justice. We did a mule trek down into the canyon which was very steep in places and was slightly worrying for Isabelle and I who don’t ride. Being below the rim gave us a very different viewpoint on the canyon.

We moved on after two days to Zion National Park. Once again, it was on Highway 89 until we turned off onto Highway 9. This road must be one of the most beautiful in the USA. After driving through a weird set of sandstone mesas (each of which is as impressive as Uluru) you go through a 3 mile tunnel and come out onto the most astonishing sandstone canyon; 3000 ft cliffs dropping vertically into the river and massive peaks of all sorts of different colours. Here more than anywhere else, the effects of foreshortening make the photographs much less impressive than the real thing.

There are also some good photographs here. One of the startling things about the USA is that we had never heard of either this park or of Bryce (see later) until Jen Wheary told us to come here but it’s absolutely stunning. In any other country it would be a wonder of the world. Once again, we stayed in the national park accommodation and this time, both the rooms and the food were excellent. Altough they’re all run by the same company the standard varies considerably. We did a long hot trail up to the Upper Emerald pools and then took the bus up to the head of the canyon. Zion is different from the other parks we went to in that private cars are not allowed so all transport is by a very efficient propane fueld bus service. It makes it a lot more relaxing and pleasant. The walk up to The Narrows was beautiful.

The following day, it was up early to go to Bryce Canyon. Once again, along Highway 89 (which will feature in later blogs…) through scenery which was beautiful in its own right. Bryce is a bit more…commercial? The national park lodge is definitely the right place to stay and the food and accommodation were fairly good. Bryce isn’t really a “canyon” since there isn’t an other side to it. It’s just a very weirdly eroded “edge”. The sandstones and limestones weather due to freeze-thaw fracturing into ridges and then “hoodoos“. It’s quite extraordinary.

(There’s another geekily good photograph of Bryce here). We walked down the Navaho trail and Queen’s Garden trail into the canyon where you walk between sheer walls of hoodoos some of which are topped by natural bonsai pine trees. It’s hot and dusty and a great experience.

Yesterday we continued up Scenic Highway 89 for as long as we could enjoying the experience of being on the highways. There will be a forthcoming blog on “Driving in the USA” but it’s enough to say that it’s a fabulous way to travel. Unfortunately we had to get on Interstate 15 to go through Salt Lake City which appeared to be a fairly unpleasant city with too much industry and bad housing. Leaving the Interstate, we rejoined H89 and spent the night in Logan, UT. Then it was up Logan Canyon, past Bear Lake and the Star Valley before hitting Wyoming and getting to Jackson tonight.

We’ve been through 6 states (California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Idaho and Wyoming) and seen extraordinary scenery. People from America often go on about how beautiful their country is but to be honest, they’re probably underselling the beauty of the continent. With all respect to our Australian friends, things like Kings Canyon, Uluru or the Olgas can’t compete. You could drop Uluru into Zion Canyon and not even notice it. Some of our fellow travellers do sometimes cause a misanthropic rant but this can’t detract from the grandeur, scale and sheer power of the landscapes that we’ve seen from the Mohave Desert to the Rockies of Wyoming.

We’re in Jackson at the moment in the Teton National Park and will go up to Jellystone…sorry Yellowstone in a couple of days. More blogs from there.

p.s. Our trip up from Las Vegas was suggested by Jen Wheary who told us to stay on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and also to go and see Zion and Bryce neither of which we would have known about. She also rightly strongly recommended staying in the national parks. Thanks Jen.