Viva Las Burgers

Leaving SanFrancisco for Las Vegas and our trip across the US began.

C kept the drive interesting by spotting successively bigger Monster trucks than can squash a normal car. C required us to have hotel accommodation at this point to avoid the threat of bear attack. Yosemite was awe-inspiring and cold as the pictures attest. The groves of sequioa trees were as amazingly huge as the views.

It was here I saw one of my favourite holiday tshirts in a nice orange with 'Club Gitmo (i.e. Guantanamo Bay), your tropical escape from the stress of jihad' on it. Oops! Now Echelon will have picked jihad up as one of their terrorist (oops there I go again) keywords and we'll all be trailed through cyberspace and have our phones bugged.

We did a twilight sprint of 150km across the National park and drove down through an enormous gorge where C freaked me out by repeating “If you go over the edge we’re going to DIE!!!”

We somehow cheated death and that night we stopped in a little village called Lee Vinning, over the Sierra Nevada mountains and went to the sort of diner you see in movies about places in the middle of nowhere.

Mt Morgan Valley

Just in case we forget where we were...

Keep on truckin

An early start opened a day of majestic desert vistas as we followed the Sierra Nevada mountain range down through eastern California to the Panamint Valley and then Death Valley, the hottest and lowest point in North America, about 200ft below sea level.

One for Adam´s series

C measures up the green at the Devil´s Golf Course

Zabriskie Point

To cap off some of the most spectacular scenery of our whole trip we drive into the Disneyland of Las Vegas, drove the strip and checked into the MGM Grand, www.mgmgrand.com but not before a very very long walk to find our room. We'd like to say we stayed in the fancy pants Skyloft suites but we didn't the the 'West Wing' was fine.

What a smorgasbord! The small print below offers bikini bullriding, dirty girls, cold beer, mud wrestling, steak and shrimps

The next two days we threw some money at the slot machines and C got on a roll betting black on the roulette table (which I ruined by suggesting it might go red soon) to be up a whole $80 at one point. We checked out all the big places like Wynns, Bellagio, Caesars, Paris, New York, Treasure Island and the Venetian which includes fake sky, gondoliers, carabinieri and accordion wielding buskers.

Our little B&B

Inside the Venetian

We also saw the worlds largest cubic zirconium and $500000 costumes at the Liberace Museum and crossed the road to shoot a Glock at Osama under the watchful eye of a guy dressed like some mercenary called Sgt Slaughter who had been to Sydney and lamented Australia’s wussy gun laws. To his disbelief C turned down a free go on an MP5 machine gun – the shame!

And what a shame it’s now too late to give your loved ones some guns for Christmas and as the NRA says ‘Put some Freedom under the tree this Christmas’

www.nra.org.

Get your NRA infants bib here http://www.nrastore.com/nra/Product.aspx?productid=SS%20363 and your Charlton Heston 'From my cold dead hands' t-shirt http://www.nrastore.com/nra/Product.aspx?productid=SS%20369%20A-O and look out for his Defender of Liberty memorial coin.

Osama's goin down!

Next stop back to nature and the wilds of Utah.

Me, pretending to look contemplative of nature's beauty

Utah, land of Mormons www.mormon.org, wilderness and… well not a lot else. But the natural beauty compensates for the cultural desert. Consistent with the missionary zeal of the Mormons is the aptly named Zion National Park, a large gorge with attractive falls, autumn foliage and deer taking refuge from the hunters prowling the surrounding hills.

It was about this time that we started listening to the radio a lot and trying to digest the right wing diatribes of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh www.rushlimbaugh.com. Most of their time is spent haranguing all them wimpy republicans holding back George W from being the greatest president that ever lived and those lefty scumbag hippies the Democrats for just existing. The formula is: freedom = guns = the right to shoot trespassers on sight and drive a V10 SUV = oil is too expensive at about 50c a litre = why can’t we drill national parks and Alaska = because them cheese eating surrender monkey Democrats and “Europeans” don’t appreciate what we did for em in WW2. And these guys are amongst the top radio personalities in the nation with millions of fans…

Bryce Canyon, 5pm and about 5 degrees.

Nice sunset, shame about the tourists

Camping areas were nicely looked after and not too busy but cold as both Zion and next stop Bryce Canyon are high up. A campfire helped warm up a bit before wrapping up in sleeping bags like cocooned moths but at about -2 we were still cold. An early morning thunderstorm, fear of lightning strikes and a snow and ice shower meant the usual hour to get going reduced to 3 minutes – throw all the crap in the back and lets go!

Congrats if you got this far. In one blog entry we've managed to mention guns, machine guns, jihad, George W, freedom, liberty, Liberace, slaughter, shooting, Zion, oil, Osama, lightning strikes and terrorists and offended Republicans, Mormons and Democrats alike. We're screwed now, the real life Jason Bourne is probably on his way here now. See you at an unnamed prison in Poland.

Of plastic, freaks and tacos

LA is our nomination for ‘most overrated city in the world’ – huge, dirty, car dominated and as plastic as its most celebrated inhabitants, the movie, tv and music stars and all their wannabe hangers-on.

Melrose Ave

We had a couple of days at Santa Monica and Venice Beach followed by a couple in West Hollywood at The Standard www.standardhotel.com, pretty good value and they’re ‘so hot right now’ you can even get a tatt at their hair salon / drug store.
Highlights were: the buskers including one who just played a tape and stood there swaying and the Jewish Orthodox rap crew; the Getty Museum; shopping Melrose Ave; newspapers, taxis and billboards covered with advertising for every type of plastic surgery imaginable; pharmacies with DIY botox and collagen injections.

We had dinner and cocktails on Sunset Boulevard and saw “Goodnight and Goodluck” in Santa Monica (which got ovations from the lefty audience).

Taxi: $20; shirt: $15; finding Chuck Norris' star: priceless. If only we’d had a concrete saw, oh well, make do with http://www.chucknorris.com/

One of the most entertaining moments was chatting to our airport shuttle drivers who were either Chef’s parents from South Park or the Klumps. We weren't sorry to be leaving; LA had seemed like a good idea at the time.

We hopped up north to San Francisco to test Dan’s generosity (of course he passed with flying colours) and deposited ourselves in his place in leafy Fremont. It’s more like the mid west there than SFO but he seems pretty comfy, throws himself into his work and everything is convenient and clean and of course SFO is not far away on the BART.

Chinatown

Dan’s technique for dealing with the blandness of Fremont is to spice up the evenings with as much blood as possible by watching gorillas pound each other to death on TV in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, while he offsets his work stresses during the day by hitting on impressionable young office staff.

Our approach to Fremont was to sleep in and watch trash television like Judge Extreme Akim decide who gets the baseball bat of justice to bash their opponent while Kato Kalin (OJ Simpson’s houseguest) adds sideline comments. Oh and we discovered that we have Restless Leg Syndrome and there’s a medication we need to take to treat it.

Extreme hands down judgement

Dan took us on excursions to the Napa Valley, bars and nightclubs, Haight / Ashbury (original 60s hippy area a la Newtown), North Beach (Italian area), golf at Berkeley and drinks at Berkeley Marina with Ines and Luis (Spaniards working with Dan); and to the Castro and Mission areas (a la Darlinghurst) for Halloween.

Dan, C and Anya waiting for a taxi at about 4am

Dan captures C looking happy and me with a stupid expression while going for a hike near his place

For Halloween, all the streets were full of costumed freaks. C borrowed the spider hat below from a friend whereas I’ve been growing my hair for a while now. Here we are in a Mission taqueria (taco shop).

All that and some preparations for our road trip kept us busy for about a week.

We then picked up the car from San Jose, bargained our way into a Chevy Trailblazer SUV, thanked Dan and tried to convince him to visit us here in Spain and headed off for a town called Mariposa (butterfly in Spanish) next to Yosemite. The pic below is when we set off, little did she know the starvation and trials that lay ahead on our three week journey to the other side of the country!