Las Vegas, Nevada to Good Old NZ

We left Vegas at 9.30am, with at 4.5 hr drive to LA, even though our flight wasn't until 10:30pm.  The guy at the time share thing said the good traffic window in LA was between 10am and 3pm, so we though we'd play it safe and make sure we didn't get any hiccups on the way.
So we drove through heaps more desert, although it got slightly more greener the closer we got to LA.

There was a lot of traffic on the roads, but it was moving quite fast, not too many hold ups.  We were going a bit slow in LA, but we moved in to the car pool lane (2 or more people required in the car), and then we were racing again.  Which is crazy, because all those other cars only have one person in them!

This was a very clear piece of the interstate.  The roadways are so good (as long as you take the right exit), you can move from one freeway to another very easily.  The state of the roads sometimes isn't so good though, sometimes you are bumping along for miles.  I think it is because of the extremes of temperature they have, especially up north, it is freezing in winter and cooking in summer, and the roads just buckle up.
Anyway, we made to Hertz in 4.5 hours, which was due to Richards good navigation.  He understood the Navman better than me, so I drove and he told me where to go.  Less stress all round.We were very sad to say good bye to our Mustang.  It was a great car, we had no problems at all, and managed to get it back in one piece.
So we had a really really long wait at the airport, but we were in the Air NZ lounge, so that made waiting a lot more pleasant.  Richard upgraded me to business class!!  So now I really know how the other half live.  Very nice! Glass of champagne when you get to your seat, seat in the reclining position  at take off if you want, flash meals ordered off a menu, seat that turns in to a full stretch out bed.  That's the life!

Here is Richard and I having dinner together on the plane.  How mad is that!
We both got about 7 hours sleep, which I have never done in economy.  So I don't know if flying business class is worth all that money, but it definitely makes the trip a lot easier.

Las Vegas!

Richard woke up with a huge headache, which wasn't from the drinking the night before apparently.  It was the heat (dehydration) and not having any dinner.  That's his story and he's sticking to it.
So we had a bit of a late start to the day.  We wandered down the road to get another memory card for my camera (we have so many photos to show you!!) Then we went to a time share presentation that we got sucked in to going to. Actually, if it wasn't for the time share thing Richard may not have got up out of bed at all.  We didn't buy it (but it sure looked good), but we got our US$125 worth of vouchers in the form of $100 spa voucher and $25 amex card that Richard was going to buy some drinks with (but that never happened - funny that).  I really really enjoyed my massage, it was just what I needed before the flight home.
We went to Vegas! The Show, at Planet Hollywood.  It was all singing and dancing, showing the history of Vegas, with a few entertainers in the middle bits (a magician, hoola hoop girl, balancing guys).
Then we had dinner at a Brasil style restaurant (lots of BBQ meat- yum) and walked up and down the strip.

This is looking down part of the strip. (There are lots of walkways over the roads, to keep the crowds away from the traffic.)

 This is the Luxor Casino/ Hotel.

I think this is outside the New York, New York.  You can see the huge roller coaster in the background.

Fountain show outside the Bellagio, just spectacular.  The fountain "played" along to the song they were playing.

Inside one of the casinos.  This is just a tiny portion of it.  They are all so huge, and there are so many of them!

The flamingos at the Flamingo Casino/ Hotel where we were staying.  Crazy.  But then that sums Las Vegas up, crazy.  So many places all trying to attract the thousands of people who visit to part with their money.So with the $125 vouchers and Al's (surprisingly limited) gambling we ended up $25 up. Apparently only 7% of people leaving Vegas make money, I'll take this as a win, yeah baby!

Tusayan (Arizona) to Las Vegas (Nevada)

We went back to the Grand Canyon rim, but headed east this time to a watchtower.

It looked crazy to have this tower at the edge, but it worked.  There were better views from the top of the tower!  You could see the top of the other side, that you couldn't see from the ground.

Then we drove to the Hoover Dam, and along the way drove a little of route 66.
The dam was another huge impressive feature.

When they made it, they poured concrete constantly 24/7, for 8 days short of two years.  At the base the concrete is 660ft (201m) thick.  Just incredible.
We went for a little tour inside, down an elevator that dropped 550ft in 1 minute.  We walked though tunnels like this.  Scary, when you think of all the water around you.

They did a bit of a talk about how it was made, and then showed us some of the generators.

There are 8 generators here, and 9 on the other side of the dam.  (This looked much much tidier than NASA!) Then we drove to Las Vegas.  By the time we'd driven around in circles a few times to get to our hotel we had to leave straight away to get to a show we'd booked.  Luckily it was only about a 15 min walk from the Flamingo, where we are staying.  The show was Blue Man, and it was great.  It's hard to explain what the show was, but it was these blue guys (not smurfs) who didn't say anything, there was lots of drums, and little skits.  They were so deadpan.  It was hillarious.
After the show we walked up and down a little bit of the strip, another vast thing.  We went in to quite a few casinos, they are just enormous.  Little cities all on their own.  You could get lost for days in Ceasars Palace or the Bellagio.  The Bellagio water fountain show was fantastic.  I took a video of it, but it filled up my camera card and I couldn't take any more photos. (Richards card is full too, we'll have to get another one.)  We'll get some photos tomorrow night.
Only lost US$28 on the pokie machines.  Didn't actually do much gambling, it is just so interesting to wander around and see all the sights.

Phonix, Arizona to Tusayan (Grand Canyon) Arizona

We start our day with a drive through the Prescott Valley, and the town of Jerome.  Jerome was set on the side of a really steep hill, it was a crazy place to have a town!  Great views though.
Then we drove on to the meteor crater in the middle of Arizona.  It was really huge! And really interesting.

It was quite hard to get the perspective of how big it was, but just by Richards should you can just see where they were mining in the early 1900's, and there is a 6ft cutout of an astronaut that you can't even see without a telescope!
Then we were driving to the Grand Canyon when we came across Bearizona.

It was US$20 each to get in, but it was great.  Part of it was driving around in your car (with doors locked and windows up) through enclosures with animals like mountain goats, buffalo, wolves and bears.  It was mid afternoon so some of the animals were sleepy.  But the bears were quite active.

The other part was a zoo that you could walk around, with animals like racoons, porcupines, beavers, but the real stars were the bear cubs.  I think we just got there at the right time, because the were so playful. By the time we stopped watching them they were getting tired.

So from there we went to the Grand Canyon.  When I got my first glimpse of it I just said WOW!  It was spectactular.  I could have just looked at it all day! We were on the south side at the Grand Canyon Village.  We took the hop-on, hop-off bus that drives along the rim, stopping at different outlooks.

The colours were amazing, and the size was hard to comprehend.  

We walked about 2.5km along the rim, we were at altitude (nearly as high as Mt Ruapehu) so I got a bit puffed (well, that's my excuse anyway).  We stayed for the sunset which was beautiful.

Las Cruces, New Mexico to Phonix, Arizona

This morning we headed to Tombstone, site of OK Corral, and home of Wyatt Earp.  It was a real cowboy town, definitely well set up for the tourist. 

They did reinactments of the show down at OK Corral, but you had to pay for these shows, so we just went to a bar instead.  We sat at the bar for our drinks and Richard got talking to the guy beside him who happened to be the owner of the Tombstone Gazzette.  He was really neat to talk to, he gave us a copy of his paper, some matchbooks with his website on them, and a US$1 commemorative coin.  (I only had a NZ$2 coin to give him in return!)  So we were just sitting there and they said come outside the parade is just about to start.  Apparently this parade only happens once a year, and we were there for it, bizarre.  The parade was celebrating the Buffalo Soldiers who were an African-American regiment of the US Army that fought against the Native Americans.  The Buffalo Soldiers in the parade were all on their motorbikes, and there were a couple of other groups on bikes too.  Unfortunately I only took video of the bikes, but there were other groups too, these ladies were all dressed up.

There was a band too, and I was just saying to Richard that it wasn't a parade if there wasn't bagpipes, and there was a lone bagpiper!!  So it was a parade after all!!
We got the dress up photo!

Apparently the bounty is out on me, not Richard.  We loved it that the props they had were JD's stuff.

Then we drove through more desert to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum south of Tucson, which was pretty cool.  Along the way there, and while we were there we took a lot of photos of cactus (which reminds me of the slide show of my Nana and Poppa's flower tour of Australia!). Can't wait to show ya'll the pics.

The scenery was pretty spectacular.  So different from anything in NZ.
They also had some animals in enclosures.  There were a bit manky, but I suppose zoos are like that.

Too hot for the cougar to come out, about 40degrees C. (Richard - taking time to scope out the prey for later that night. Cougar time!)

Gophers didn't seem to mind the heat though.  They were cute!
There were also beavers swimming around.  I'm not going to write Richards comments.
Then we drove a couple of hours to the north of Phonix, where we are staying in a Motel 6.  They are the cheapest motel chain, but they don't do breakfast.
Only four more sleeps until we are heading back to NZ.  The time has gone so fast!

Clovis, New Mexico to Las Cuces, New Mexico (Friday 8th June)

We left Clovis reasonably early, and headed south to Roswell.  Roswell was quite a big town, and they did have some quirky things. Like this at KFC.

And all the lamp posts were like this.

We went the International UFO Museum and Research Centre.  They had lots of displays, and it was actually quite factual, as well as being fun.

The we headed further south, to Carlsbad Caverns.  We went down 750ft (about 250m) down in an elevator to these enormous beautiful caves.  They had pathways set out and we walked a big loop around these caves.  There were other guided tours you could do too, but some of them were pretty hard out.

This photo makes it looked a bit closed in, but they were actually really enormouse caves.  Not a glow worm in site though.
Then we had a 3 hour drive through the desert.  We had the top down, but had the air-con on our feet.  The temperature topped out at 106 degrees F (just a touch over 40 degrees C) at 5pm.  Needless to say we really enjoyed a dip in the pool when we got to our motel.

Houston to Clovis NM

While in Houston we went to the Johnson Space Center (JSC) which we found quite underwhelming. We went there thinking we were going to see some really cool stuff, rockets etc. the low down it's a big kids park with heaps of educational stuff to make the most of this we would have to spend a shit load of time there that we didn't have. The JSC was full of acronyms such as the ATF (Astronaut Training Facility) the SVF (Saturn V Facility), the BT (blue tour), the RT (red tour). We went on the RT to the JSC ATF and SVF the BT went to MC and the SVF. The BT took us 90 minutes and consisted of a train ride to the JSC ATF for the walk through where we saw high fidelity mock ups (sorry HFMUs) of the space station and the space shuttle (see space station HFMU below)

Everything in here was cover in plastic and it was no wonder why the place was a friggin mess. Apparently there is 14,000 people working on the JSC campus and it is set up similar to the university campus to aid in collaboration, we saw about five people working while we were there, I didn't want to ask when the next mission was planned to take off.

Our next stop on the BT was the SVF this is where we saw the coolest thing on the tour the massive Saturn V Rocket, even though it was 40 years old it's still pretty cool. Amazing to think this massive rocket was used, 17 separate missions 17 separate rockets to get three people each time into space.....where's the  pay back on that?

After the JSC we rode off into the heat, averaged about 100oF all day today 8:30am to 7pm.  We stopped the  night in Brownwood TX, our first hotel we stopped at will remain unnamed but after being in the room for 5 minutes and seeing 2 large cockroaches we packed our bags and got our money back and went down the road to the Holiday Inn Express. Alison insisted that we have a room on the top floor as she was adament that the roaches can't climb that far. We woke in the morning at about 5am to you quessed it.............(or did you) a massive thunder storm.

Got on the road early as it was raining and we didn't know how the weather was going to effect our travel plans, after about two hours we had driven into fine weather again.

Gas here is so cheap, about a third of the  price of NZ, considering we're filling the car up every day this is a good thing for the bank account.  (This is the price per gallon.)

Cheap gas prices because of several factors, pumping it out of the ground, lower taxes, corn ethanol subsidies etc. who cares it's cheap and I'm getting screwed at home.

Cheap gas + big car = crazy women driver. At home all the time I get "it's not a race you know", I said this to Al today and the answer I got was "oooooh yes it is!" 

Have to go now, the swamp people is on TV, I might see Troy's dad.

Note: (MC - mission control (freaks)

New Orleans, Louisiana to Houston, Texas

Had breakfast at a Wafflehouse.  Mmmm, it was good!  But I did eat too much!
We stopped at Henderson and went on a swamp tour from McGees Landing. There was a large black and white picture of Jamie Oliver on the wall with a gator over his shoulders and a framed photo of him with the waitress.

We had to wait a bit before the tour, so we had a drink.  You can just see a bit of the boat tied up to the dock on the right.

The levee we were on is a flood catchment area for the Mississippi River, covering an area of about a million acres. From the marks on the trees you could see where the water had been up to 15 feet (4 - 5 meters) above the current level, that's a heap of water and this happens quite regularly.

In the levee north of I-10 there is a reserve where we went into a little cove and the Tom the cruise Captain, I'm pretty sure he was was Troy's father the guy off swamp people, banged on the side of the boat and called out "come on peewee" (apparent Troy lives about 20 miles from where we were). Tom turned the engines off and we just sat there and with in 5 minutes we were surrounded by about five alligators, pretty cool, one of the local tourists call out out "shoot em Troy" it was quite a laugh.

Here we are on the boat, when we turned up at the dock there was only us then another couple turned up, they were from the Netherlands (they didn't know Roger though) and a family of local tourists. In this photo you can see we are in the middle of the I-10, pretty impressive, built in the late 60's early 70's and was over 20 miles long and this was one of many similar roadways in this area.
After the cruise we had some local fish from the lake and Al had some more Jack Honey on the rocks and then we took off for Houston with the top down, temperature got to 100. Ended up at the Airport Suites Inn for the night, a very interesting place.

Memphis, Tennessee to New Orleans, Louisiana

Went to where Google maps said their would be somewhere for breakfast, but it was closed down!  They really need to update their maps.  But we found somewhere else nearby.
Then we went to Gracelands.  We got there quite early, but there were a lot of people there already.  It was US$32 just to do the mansion tour, so they must sure rack in the money (although we did get a little discount with our AA card).

They take people by shuttle bus across the road to the mansion, and take in one group at at time.  Just as our group was standing on the porch and the guy had just said we could go in there was this huge clap of thunder! Very creepy!

Looking through Graceland was very interesting.  We're not the biggest Elvis fans, but it was fascinating to see how he lived, and there were lots of displays, and interesting commentary on the audio tour.

This is where he is buried, between his Dad and his Grandmother (his mums grave to to the left of his Dad).
We left Memphis, heading to New Orleans.  As we got closer to New Orleans there was miles and miles of elevated freeway.

We were driving over lakes and swamps for miles.
We drove straight down to the river and and got on the paddle steamer Natchex with half an hour to spare.  Once again, we didn't get a picture of the boat! But it was quite a big, actual paddle steamer, and it just did a bit of a tour up and down the Mississippi River. 

The sunset behind the city skyline was very beautiful.
The boat tour finished at about 9pm, then we walked up to Bourbon Street.  It was a crazy place.  There were people everywhere and it was Monday night!

So we didn't get to a motel until about 10.30pm, but we slept very well!

Franklin, Kentucky to Memphis, Tennessee

We left really early from our dodgy hotel and had breakfast at a local diner.  We thought we'd try the cooked breakfast that had eggs, bacon, grits and biscuits with gravy.  Grits is an corn meal like porridge.  Richard didn't like it, but I mixed butter in mine (like the waitress said) and it was okay.  Biscuits with gravy is scones with a white peppery sauce, which was okay too.
Leaving early meant that we got to the Jack Daniels distillery in time for the second tour of the day. 

The tour was awesome!  Here's a picture of us by the statue of Jasper Newton Daniels, otherwise known as Jack Daniels.  This is in front of the cave where they get their perfectly pure water from.  The tour took us through how they get their maple charcoal, the mash and whiskey making, the mellowing of the whiskey through the charcoal, the barrels, and the bottling.  You can buy a barrel of JD's from between US$9-12K and they will bottle it and send it to you along with the empty barrel.  We were tempted, but no.
The distillery is in a dry county, so we weren't allowed to even have any tastings, but we had a quick dram when we got back to car.

Then we went to downtown Lynchberg (population 374) which consisted of mostly JD's centred shops.  We had to wait until 1pm for the official shops to open, seeing as it was Sunday.  So we had lunch and looked around the other shops, which also had a lot of JD's merchandise.  We managed to spend quite alot of money in Lynchberg.  Did our bit to boost their economy.

It was a very busy place, heaps of motorbikes. 
I forgot to say that we drove the whole day today with the top down.  We started off the day at about 18 degrees C (which is probably the lowest temp that's comfortable) and it got up to about 35 degrees C (which is probably top temp).  We had our sun block on today which worked, thank goodness.