I'm sitting outside the General Store at Furnace Creek Ranch in Death Valley. It's just after 9 at night, the temperature is 36 degrees, the stars are bright and the crickets loud. An awe-inspiring place; we've spent the day visiting the huge dunes north of here, the salt flat at the lowest point in America (84m below sea level) and watching the sun set over Death Valley from a high ridge. At the hottest part of the day we experienced 44 degrees, beating my previous record of 42 degrees in Sydney in 1979 ! Simon has been taking his new camera for a serious test run, and something over 120 photos await viewing and editing. We were winners in Las Vegas, scoring Simon's camera for a bargain price and having the cheapest meal out so far.
Lots of photos of mine for uploading but it may have to wait a few days as we're out of interweb range for the next day or two.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Driving to Las Vegas
It's what I imagined but bigger. Driving away from Los Angeles was like one of those perspective things on the interweb where you start with a quark and pull back until you see the whole leaf, then the tree and the town and the continent and the planet and you keep going until you are Zaphod Beeblebrox or some such. Anyway, LA is vast and all-encompassing until you see the desert beyond. We drove four and a half hours through a brown rock-strewn moonscape punctuated with water towers, abandoned trailer parks, a prison and tiny settlements, broken signs on high gantries advertising long forgotten venues and events, the occasional fenced compound housing assorted trucks, sheds, shacks and old cars. It could have been another Disney creation for all that I was able to connect with the scale and reality of it.
We talked in the car about all those people who inched across this shimmering dustbowl in carts, looking for a better life; what we will endure to find what we want, to find a home worthy of us. What a privilege to sit in our (huge) refrigerated steel ship listening to the Eagles (sorry, but what else ?) and glide along our smooth desert corridor. A rich experience, I loved it; the incredible scale of the desert, the album-cover Joshua trees, the dead-straight roads, the expressions of awe from the kids as each new sight rolled past.
After 200-odd miles of this there was a road sign: Las Vegas 63 miles, Salt Lake City 560 miles. I thought about it, but only briefly.
We talked in the car about all those people who inched across this shimmering dustbowl in carts, looking for a better life; what we will endure to find what we want, to find a home worthy of us. What a privilege to sit in our (huge) refrigerated steel ship listening to the Eagles (sorry, but what else ?) and glide along our smooth desert corridor. A rich experience, I loved it; the incredible scale of the desert, the album-cover Joshua trees, the dead-straight roads, the expressions of awe from the kids as each new sight rolled past.
After 200-odd miles of this there was a road sign: Las Vegas 63 miles, Salt Lake City 560 miles. I thought about it, but only briefly.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
To begin at the beginning
No such luck. Here we are already on our final night in LA and an unexpected treat was seeing the Disney fireworks display from our bedroom window. A contrast to last time (2004) standing on Main Street in Disneyland with two tired little kids, one asleep on the pavement and the other watching the fireworks with vague disinterest. Somehow just as special from the window, with the added bonus of hearing all the neighbourhood car alarms sounding off in response to the shock and awe of the explosions. Presumably it's just part of the wallpaper if you live in Anaheim.
I understood only hazily that Anaheim is not Los Angeles. This week my plan to see the Getty Museum was sunk by the sheer difficulty of getting anywhere in LA - sorry, Anaheim - without a car. As it happens I rearranged the car hire and got it today instead of tomorrow, so had my first experience of driving in the US on the Friday afternoon freeways of Anaheim as we shopped for food, cameras (!) and tried to find anything to eat that wasn't fried. I bottled out of driving 40 miles through central LA on a Friday afternoon to see the Getty. It'll still be there next time.
Oh yes - food shopping. Big portions, high cholesterol, low prices. Say n'more.
I understood only hazily that Anaheim is not Los Angeles. This week my plan to see the Getty Museum was sunk by the sheer difficulty of getting anywhere in LA - sorry, Anaheim - without a car. As it happens I rearranged the car hire and got it today instead of tomorrow, so had my first experience of driving in the US on the Friday afternoon freeways of Anaheim as we shopped for food, cameras (!) and tried to find anything to eat that wasn't fried. I bottled out of driving 40 miles through central LA on a Friday afternoon to see the Getty. It'll still be there next time.
Oh yes - food shopping. Big portions, high cholesterol, low prices. Say n'more.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Arriving back where you started
September 23rd:
Left the ground in Auckland at 5.55 this afternoon and arrived in LAX at 11.15 the same morning, at last reclaiming the day we mislaid on the way over in 2004. We are changed people for our four rich years in New Zealand but returning by the way we came has a strange concertina effect. Also air travel is a great leveller, at least in cattle class.
September 25th
The other great leveller is Disneyland. I get into those shops and realise my own fundamental shallowness. That Fantasyland sweatshirt and black plastic ears combo set is just the thing to keep out the cold and raise a smile on Peebles High Street in February, isn't it ?
Even so, we had a great time on the rides and in the park; the kids are a great age for Disney, with Sara managing to ride a few of the more syrupy attractions with balanced irony.
Coming this way again gives us an odd sense of the familiar as we were here just before arriving in New Zealand and now just after leaving. It settles our knotted stomachs, or mine at least. Shallowness has its place.
Left the ground in Auckland at 5.55 this afternoon and arrived in LAX at 11.15 the same morning, at last reclaiming the day we mislaid on the way over in 2004. We are changed people for our four rich years in New Zealand but returning by the way we came has a strange concertina effect. Also air travel is a great leveller, at least in cattle class.
September 25th
The other great leveller is Disneyland. I get into those shops and realise my own fundamental shallowness. That Fantasyland sweatshirt and black plastic ears combo set is just the thing to keep out the cold and raise a smile on Peebles High Street in February, isn't it ?
Even so, we had a great time on the rides and in the park; the kids are a great age for Disney, with Sara managing to ride a few of the more syrupy attractions with balanced irony.
Coming this way again gives us an odd sense of the familiar as we were here just before arriving in New Zealand and now just after leaving. It settles our knotted stomachs, or mine at least. Shallowness has its place.
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