Day Seven: Oklahoma City to Amarillo
Day Eight: Amarillo to Albuquerque
Day Nine: Albuquerque to Flagstaff
Day Ten: Flagstaff to Las Vegas (via The Grand Canyon)
Day Thirteen: Las Vegas to Los Angeles
We are back in Australia and I got lazy and didn't blog about it every day. Over promise and under deliver. CHECK!
So rather than post one by one you're going to get a mega post last week of the holiday recap.
In Oklahoma we went to a waterpark. I've been wanting to go to one for ages (years) and consider myself a bit of a thrill seeker. I've bungee jumped off this bridge so always thought I was cool with heights. Guess what stops you from being cool with heights? Age. Add another 10 years and the fear goes up exponentially and I'm not sure if I could actually bungee jump again. There were a couple of slides that I decided I couldn't go on, they looked like one wrong move and you're dead type of slides. Steep, fast and on some occasions people seems to be some airtime. Some of the slides were up on 7 or 8 storey high constructions. One had me worried due to its rust and general thinness on the stairs. The other had Gareth feeling a little more secure, telling me wood doesn't rust. No it rots Gareth, it rots!
In Amarillo we met a woman who could have organised a meet with one Barack Obama, but alas we were not in the same town at the same time. Gareth's response to the possibility of meeting Bamy: We might need to get better outfits.
We hit Albuquerque early and drove around looking at Breaking Bad sites. This was exciting, but also creepy. Oh look it's Jesse's aunts house. How dare they built a garage, that's where the RV goes.
On the way to Flagstaff we stopped off at a few national parks, including the Petrified Forest and Walnut Canyon. The high altitude didn't get us any Brownlow Medal wins, but we did find pints of PBR for $1.50 each during happy hour. They were normally $2. Bless the cheap beer.
The Grand Canyon was interesting. Sure it was one of the best, most surreal views you will ever see and you will struggle to take it all in. Then there are the people. It isn't till you leave Australia you realise how safety conscious it is. If that hole was in Australia there would be 10 meter walls around it. We saw so many people getting very close to the edge and got a bit freaked out by it all. We wanted our secure wall, we didn't want to see people die! Then found a book in a gift shop detailing all the deaths at the canyon. It was arranged in sections for the different types of death and would have taken up half our allocated luggage weight had we purchased a copy. My morbid curiosity didn't quite beat having to offload all my clothing just to get it home.
My people highlight however was a couple we saw just as we arrived at the car park. They walked towards their car, opened the door and began baby talking and I started to get concerned they had left a baby inside. But then we saw them putting a cat into the man's backpack. They took their cat to the Grand Canyon and put it in a backpack with its head popping out. I'm only guessing so it could take in the view.
Las Vegas was something I was super excited about but found it a bit blergy. We were there on the weekend, there was a heatwave going on (44 C degrees) and our poor precious baby lungs had a hard time dealing with the indoor smoking so we felt like cranky old people tut tutting at everything. It wasn't all bad though, we did get to eat at some nice restaurants including Craft Steak, Tom Colicchio from Top Chef's place, an epic meal that beat the both of us down.
We got to LA with an extra day as we ended up skipping Fort Smith on the road trip (sorry Arkansas). We did a few dorky tourist things, took a drive along Mulholland and walked along Venice Beach. That end of holiday feeling, a mixture of sadness it is over plus a huge desire to go home coupled with the dread of a long haul flight kinda loomed over us as well. The flight home wasn't too bad in the end as we left late at night which meant we slept pretty well and arrived home again in the morning.
So that is the end. Back to work work work!