Vegas and our return to California

We were really glad to get to Vegas as we had a hotel room for 4 nights at the Gold Coast casino. Its not on the strip but close enough for easy access. We checked out different casinos each night. Starting with Caesars Palace where I walked away $140 dollars down within the first hour! My luck didn't get any better the next few days either..but Geo had more luck and ended up leaving Vegas with an extra $100 or so.

As well as the gambling we visited the 'Bodies' exhibition which was in the Luxor. We couldn't take pictures, but its the same as the original Body Worlds with human bodies preserved in various different ways.

The day we left Vegas was the day of our next gig which was Blink 182 again, in Irvine near LA. We hit some pretty bad traffic so the journey wasn't great. It was good to be back in southern California though! The gig was outdoors again but unlike last time the weather was perfect.

They had Weezer supporting this time who were good to see and Blink played great again, including an amazing drum solo from Travis on a flying drum kit.

The next day we had another gig, this time The Killers! They were brilliant as well, and we had a really good view as it wasn't such a huge venue. This was at an arena on the San Diego Uni campus. We were staying a few miles away from there. San Diego has been one of my favourite places. We spent 4 or 5 days there to make the most of our last week. We visited the zoo on the day we arrived which was a lot better than LA zoo was.

The next day we went on a day trip to Mexico which we booked a while ago. This was because we couldn't really drive in because we didn't pay a deposit on the van which would have been about $10,000! It was a typical tourist coach tour. the journey wasn't that long as we were only going to Tijuana. Once we got there we just had hundreds of tourist shops to look around. It was good to have been to see it. Things were a lot different just over the border. We tried some tequila and that's all we bought. The journey back was worse as the queue going into America is 4 times as many lanes and a lot longer.

The next day we went to a football game. (American football). It was the San Diego chargers vs Baltimore Ravens. It was the first game of the season and the stadium was full. It was a pretty good experience and the game was good being fairly tight right to the end. San Diego lost in the end though.

Then one of our worst experiences of the trip...we had parked in a mall near the stadium after having trouble finding a park or even a taxi to take us there. We had been towed away during the game!! Along with quite a few other people who's cars had gone... Apparently they had been watching to see who had parked there for the game. We had to get a taxi over and hand over the fine to get the van back.

We left San Diego today and are now in Oceanside, half way up the coast to LA. We played disc golf again, and then cleaned the van. We now have one day left so have to make sure its in decent condition at least when we drop it off. Tomorrow we're just buying a couple of last things we want to take back and then packing our cases as much as possible. Then on Thursday we drop the RV off at about 10am and then off the LAX for our flight at about 4pm.

We can't believe its gone so quickly. We haven't really told everyone about our change of plans that we had half way. I think most people who read do know, but basically we ran into 'money problems' as we were spending more than we budgeted for at the start. We realised we couldn't really afford all 6 months here so shortened it to 5. We abandoned the 48 states initially, which we're kind of annoyed about now as it wouldn't have cost us much more to do. But we have still ended with a final total of 41 states. We only missed New England and North Dakota, so all but one of the larger states we visited. We have done about 15000 miles.

Monument Valley & Grand Canyon

We had our last long drive to get to Monument Valley on Thursday, and it definitely was worth it! We first had to detour off the quickest route to visit the Four Corners Monument. This is the only place in the country where 4 states meet. There is a small monument on the ground showing where the borders are. Its also on Navajo land so you have to pay a small fee to get in to see it. There isn't much else to see but it was worth a stop!

The detour we made for the 4 corners turned out to be the best route for the scenery. It meant that we headed into Monument Valley from the North. This has some of the more famous views which we stopped along the way to take pictures of. We also saw the 'Mexican Hat Rock' from the road which is a 60ft wide sombrero shaped outcrop.

The campground was a few miles across from the visitors centre. It was in a fantastic setting between tall red rock mesas. We had a good spot as we were at the end of a row and could see out the end of the gorge to the mesas and buttes on the skyline. The next morning I managed to get up for the sunrise which was an unforgettable sight.

We left fairly early for the Grand Canyon, but went for a quick look at the view from the visitors centre at Monument Valley. Again this was Navajo land so we had to pay $5 each to get in. I'd say its worth it though even for the 5 minutes we were there. It was similar to Yosemite in that the view was that good it didn't seem real.

We had a couple of hours drive before we got to the Grand Canyon. It wasn't too busy on the roads until we got to the main visitors centre. They had just started work on the road system so that parking was awful. We had to park a mile away and get the free shuttle bus in. I had been before, but the view was still phenomenal. With more time you could do loads there, but we just had a wander around near the centre and also where we parked before heading off to our campground an hour away in Williams, AZ.

We left Williams this morning and are now in Kingman, AZ. Only 2 hours away from Vegas which is where we will be this time tomorrow!

Missouri to Texas

We left Missouri the day after our brewery tour with a few days driving ahead of us. The first day was a few hours to a park just outside Kansas City. The drive was pretty similar the next day, about 4 hours. We had to detour a bit north to go through the corner of Iowa and Nebraska before heading south again to a place near Kansas City. This time we were west of the city in the actual state of Kansas.

We stayed in Kansas again the next day, a bit further south where it was surprisingly a lot warmer than it had been. This campground was one of the best we have stayed at. It had its own fishing lakes which I enjoyed. I spent a few hours with a bit of luck...good and bad.

Our next stop was in Oklahoma another 4 hours away. We were staying at another good campground which had its own par 3 golf course which I had a go on.

We only had one more drive before our 3 night stay in Amarillo, Texas. We were really looking forward to this partly because we had been doing a lot of driving and not much else for a few days. But also because we had found some good things to do. We had read about a famous steak restaurant on route 66 called the 'Big Texan'. http://www.bigtexan.com

They do a 72 ounce steak which is free if you finish it (and all the side dishes) within a hour. We didn't try it but I had a 24 ounce which was pretty chunky but it tasted amazing. We saw some people taking on the challenge though...

Something else we had wanted to do for a while is play disc golf. Basically like regular golf but with specialised frisbees and instead of holes they have baskets. We found a course in Amarillo so we got some discs and headed there. It was really fun as its pretty relaxed and wasn't busy at all when we played. It can be pretty tricky..I definitely need some practise anyway! Though Geo did lose a disc in the creek which I had to fish out with my fishing rod! We will be going again if we can find a course though.

We left Amarillo this morning with a 5 hour drive ahead of us to our stop just past Albuquerque. We were on the same road for nearly 300 miles and most of it was the historic route 66. So we are now in New Mexico, our 37th state, and in Mountain Time zone. 7 hours behind the UK.

Tomorrow is one of our longest drives but will be well worth it. We are heading to Monument Valley on the Utah/Arizona border. We'll be going via the four corners monument which is the point where Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona meet.

Florida to St Louis! via New Orleans and Memphis!

We left Florida and headed west towards New Orleans. The drive was non-eventful but quite long, in fact, our longest drive of the whole trip! We spent just over 7 hours on the road, something that I wouldn't like to do again!

As soon as we arrived in New Orleans, you could tell you were below sea level; water was everywhere. For the first 2 nights we stayed about 4 miles outside the French Quarter but we didn't have to drive in as the park provided free shuttle drop off and pick up. We spent the first day checking out the city and going to the National World War 2 Museum situated in the centre (I almost spelt that "center"...oh dear) of New Orleans. Cory and I both agreed that it was one of the best museums we've ever been to - probably due to the fact it had a lot of information on the D-Day landings in Normandy. Obviously it focused mainly on America's contribution to the war but was still really informative. The museum had a small cinema where we watched 2 documentaries on the Second World War - one of them was made by Senor Spielbergo, which was brilliant.

The next we moved to a park 1 block away from the French Quarter. This walkable distance allowed us to go out and experience the night life that NO had to offer... We both woke up with killer hangovers the next day as we got absolutely gatted the previous night -



We had to drive to Memphis the day after we got sozzled, needless to say, this was an unpleasant experience.

The main reason for us traveling to Memphis was to visit Graceland, home of "The King" The King being Elvis Presley (Not Eric Cantona, as I was led to believe).

It was amazing, truly exceptional. Neither of us are big Elvis fans but we were still blown away by everything he'd accomplished in his life.



After Graceland we started the drive towards St Louis, we stopped about halfway between Memphis and St Louis to spend a couple of nights relaxing!! Our main reason for going to St Louis was to watch Blink 182 but due to unforeseen circumstances, they rescheduled the show to the 29 Sept, which is useless to us as we'll be back in the UK by then. This was really annoying but could have been worse had we not already got tickets to see them in LA the week before we leave.

We still went to St Louis as we had tour of the Anheuser-Busch Brewery scheduled for today. The tour itself was called the Beermasters Tour. The tour lasted about 2 hours and covered most of the brewery, we went behind the scenes of the bottling plant and the brewing house. The tour guide took us through the history of the plant and showed us how the beer is made, packaged and distributed across the globe. See the bottling line was especially interesting, it was just like you see them in the movies. We also got a lot of free samples which was awesome and also a couple of souvenirs, like a free Bud glass and various other things.

After the brewery we drove west out of St Louis before settling in a RV Park in Bowling Green, MO. Tomorrow we head to Kansas City! We've only got 3 weeks to go but as those 3 weeks include a trip to Vegas, we can't be too downhearted!