Bunces in SW USA - Sept - Oct 2015

As is our wont, we turned up after our spectacular drive, reservationless at a small town to find every motel and hotel full.  It was Friday night and unknown to us until now, Columbus Day Weekend.  Americans tend to get what we would consider appallingly short holiday leave and it seems that a three day weekend is a good opportunity to go and stay where we want to.   A kindly receptionist/waitress found us a room fifteen miles down the road.  All’s well etc…. and anyway it’s quite exciting really, not knowing what’s going to happen next. The following day we took a high level mountain route heading towards Bryce Canyon with further great sheets of Aspens littering the countryside with colour.  At one point we were on a pretty narrow ridge about twice as wide as the tarmac with precipitous drops either side of us.  The scenery has been tremendous and Utah appears to have a lot of the very best bits.  There is a lot of bare ground on s...

On our relatively brief swing through New Mexico we now turn the front of the car north and head to Taos, a smallish town with as usual an overabundance of ‘art’ shops.  A little outside of town lies a community called ‘Earthships’, where all the buildings are self sufficient for power, water and a reasonable amount of food.  The buildings have very thick walls made up of old tyres (for stability) filled with rammed earth which are then covered in mud.  The buildings are aligned to catch the sun so north sides have soil backed against them and southern sides are glass.  The heavy walls soak up heat which then escapes slowly when the outside temperature drops.  Even in winter when the desert around has snow, there’s enough warmth to keep the buildings warm.  When it is hot, natural convection through the buildings acts like air conditioning.  It was very hot when we were there but very comfortable inside.  Rainwater is collected in 10,000 gall...

We did a bit of a loop south and back to Tucson in the hope of finding some birds at what were described in Lonely Planet as good birding spots which weren’t.  One was at a lake with an attached lightly wooded campground.  Now those of you who are not familiar with English Caravan Club sites need to be informed that most of them have warning notices about the dangers of rabbit holes.  The aforementioned campground next to lake went a little further, warning that a Mountain Lion had been seen in the campground and a rabid Skunk was on the loose in the vicinity plus some ‘Africanised’ Bees.  These are the so-called killer bees which are rather aggressive.  Not a mention of rabbit holes though.    Heading eastwards into New Mexico now, where we had just learned that the week long Albuquerque Hot-Air Balloon festival was due to start in a few days.  This is the biggest in the world and we want to see what we can of it.  Despite all those...

  Following our visit to the Grand Canyon it would be easy to suppose that the rest of the trip would begin to anti-climax but there were adventures and excitements to come after all.    To start with, we passed through a few places that could probably claim that since the beginning of time until now, nothing has happened.   Then we happened upon Flagstaff, Arizona (as featured in the song Route 66) which turned out to be a delightful little place.   It’s a University town which always seems to add some life and vibrancy to anywhere, it has a centre to it and is full of little shops and a decent selection of restaurants.   Flagstaff lies just north of the centre of Arizona and when we arrived the temperature was in the high 90’s.   A most unlikely place you might think to be a winter sports town but the highest peak in Arizona lies a little to the east and this is the winter sport area.   Close by is a chair lift which we took to 11,500 feet, r...

I imagine that many people who have never been to Las Vegas just think of it as ‘The Strip’ and the neon but of course there has to be a whole city infrastructure to support the workers and their families and the workers who support them and so on, which is why the population is about two-thirds of a million.  Flying in over the desert that appears to be Utah there’s the sudden appearance of Lake Mead which is all Colorado River water held back by the Hoover Dam.  To give you an indication of size, the lake is said to have a shoreline of over 700 miles and without that lake there would be no Las Vegas.  I doubt that it would take long to shrivel up in the desert heat. Las Vegas is everything you might imagine, garish, gaudy, wildly over the top and heaps of really bad taste.  It also has many tremendously impressive pieces of free outdoor entertainment from the Hotel Bellagio’s spectacular dancing fountain show every 15 to 30 minutes to the Mirage’s ‘volcano...