The epic drive and The Rock

Tuesday 7/1/14

Mental note: Buy flowers for hair...

We had an early check out, after some challenging shuffling of the many new items we had to try and find room for in out bags. Finally we set off on our longest drive from Vegas to San Francisco. With Stephen's (Fry) help we began our 8 hour journey across Nevada, into California and towards our second to last stop on our tour. We drove for a few hours and decided a break was needed, so we stopped in a place called Bakersfield for some lunch. We had some very average food at a burger place called Carl's Jr and, unsatisfied, I took the wheel of the car for the first time and after some practice laps of the car park, we headed onto the highway. It seemed that Andrew got lucky with the traffic, because as soon as I was behind the wheel, all of a sudden it was bloody trucks and heavy traffic for a hundred miles!

I eventually became somewhat relaxed with doing ludicrous speeds on the wrong side of the road in heavy traffic, but it's not something that felt comfortable and after two hours or so it was time for another rest. The most challenging thing for me was trying to adjust my sense of how wide the car was and the road position, as everything is reversed. We wanted to buy cowboy boots at some point, so we asked the GPS to find us a Boot Barn (the recommended boot shop) and we made our way to one that was en-route to San Francisco. We found it and, after much humming and ha-ing we both decided on some boots. It was also dinner time and Andrew wanted to try In-and-out burger. With one close by we went in and had perhaps the best fast food burgers of the trip so far. They only have about three items to choose from on the menu and they appear to do them well. Rested and satiated it was time for the final haul, which Andrew completed (the traffic magically disappearing) and we got into San Francisco at about 10.30pm that night. We were both exhausted so we went straight to bed, ready for our first proper day tomorrow.

Wednesday 8/1/14

Today was all about The Rock. We awoke in our (very basic) room early and printed off our tour passes for Alcatraz. The wharf to catch the ferry is about 3km from our hotel, so we decided to walk the streets and get a feel for the city on the way, and what a lovely city it is! The architecture is very similar to that of New York, but the addition of trams and the crazy streets make for a very different feel. People appear to be slightly more relaxed here (you can smell the 'relaxant' regularly) and the pace is calmer, with everything less crowded. It didn't take us long to find the dock and soon we were on the ferry to one of the most notorious islands in the world.

We disembarked, having taken some lovely shots of the bridges and bay area, to spend about three hours learning about the surprising history of the island, which began as a military base, before becoming a prison, then hosting a political protest which lasted for over a year, until finally being taken over by the National Parks and Wildlife people and being turned into a tourist attraction and bird sanctuary. Our tickets included the audio tour, which was excellent, and I'll admit a little part of me was slightly disappointed that Ed Harris and Sean Connery didn't feature more during our visit :) We wandered around ourselves for an hour or so before heading back down to the dock to catch the ferry back to the wharf.

A short ferry ride later and we were back on the mainland and looking for some food. We made our way to pier 39 and spent some time wandering from restaurant to restaurant deciding what we wanted. We settled on clam chowder (the local speciality) and fish and chips. The chowder was excellent, a bit like cream of chicken soup but slightly more seasoned and of course with seafood in it, plus potato, served in a sour-dough bun. The fish was a bit weird, no idea what kind it was. We had a great view of the marina whilst eating and Andrew pointed out that there were hundreds of sea lions gathered at the end of the pier. Very excited, we finished our meal and headed towards the viewing platform. It was lovely. Apparently, following the earthquake of 1932 the sea lions turned up and never left, no one really knows why. We watched them for a while then wandered the shops, grabbing some cinnamon doughnuts on the way, before heading back to our room for a brief rest (and to type this up). Now it's time to go and grab a light dinner and drink.  

Sin City: Vegas Part 2

So after a much needed rest (I'm feeling much better now) we headed to Burgr (sic), Gordon Ramsay's restaurant at Planet Hollywood for dinner. While Andrew waited in the considerable line, I went to the V theatre to pick up our tickets for Evil Dead the Musical. Almost a hour later we were seated and ready to order. We both got a milkshake and burger each and it was absolutely phenomenal. The shakes are served in a giant tall glass and consist of thickshake on the bottom, about six centimetres of pudding/custard on top, with whipped cream and a biscuit on top of that. Amazing! The burgers were also brilliant, on par with Fancy, but slightly greasier and bigger. (They were amazing - Andrew)

From way too much food we made our way to the musical. Sooooo glad we weren't in the splash zone, those people were horribly drenched in watered down fake blood. It was very funny and thoroughly enjoyable. You would need to have seen all of the films, as well as having a fairly sound knowledge of Raimi and Campbell's work to get all the jokes, but as we do we really enjoyed ourselves, and were close enough to the splash zone to get a few errant sprays ourselves. We stayed afterwards for a quick photo with Ash (the main character) before heading back to our hotel. A really fun night in Vegas. (I wish we were in the splash zone - Andrew)

Saturday

Today was a special day – we went and picked up our car. Andrew's Christmas present was that we upgraded the car to...a black Mustang convertible with all the options. So we now had a ridiculous American muscle car with which to traverse the country (I'm sure many photos will follow). We decided to use the new found car freedom to go shopping at the north outlet mall that day, so we set up the GPS (best invention in the world) and drove to the mall, a stressful experience that Andrew handled exceptionally well, with help from Stephen Fry. We spent about 4 hours shopping, buying Levi's, shoes and other cheap clothes, before heading back to pick up and do washing prior to my most anticipated show, Zumanity. 

We dumped our shopping, grabbed the laundry and went to a local laundromat, where we had some delicious Vietnamese food whilst waiting for our washing to be done. An our or so later it was finished and we made our way to New York New York for the seven o'clock show. Wow, it was stunning! It's a Cirque du Soleil show that I thoroughly recommend everyone see if given the chance. Sexy, funny and amazingly well put together with a live band as well as the performers, it's definitely one of the most incredible shows I've ever seen.

From the show we wanted to do some more driving so we headed to Caesar's Palace for a wander, having not visited before, and spent some time admiring the shops before heading back to our hotel. A brilliant way to spend an evening.

Sunday

We had a sleep in and then decided to do some more driving. To get in some practice we went to check out a WalMart, having heard a great deal about them but not actually having seen one. It's basically Big W, Bunnings, K Mart and Woolworths rolled into one giant store. We bought some socks and undies, some snacks and had a look around, but it's really just basic boring shopping.

We then headed back to the strip for more of a look around. We went and got some lunch and had a look in Marshall's, a cheap designer warehouse, but we didn't get anything. We had a general last wander of the strip and then went back to our hotel for a show.

Finally it was time for our final Vegas show, The Blue Man Group! They were excellent - it's hard to describe what they do - it's a mixture of performance art, audience participation, musical theatre and comedy, plus percussion fused with electronica. It was thoroughly immersive and really brilliant, I'd really recommend it for everyone, families included (there were many children present) and we were allowed to take some video (which might help to clarify my rather useless description).

Our last show done, we went upstairs to our room (it was in our hotel) and had an early night in preparation for tomorrow.

Monday

Road trip time! Today we began early, getting up and about, ready to head to Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon. We hopped in the car, put the roof down (who cares that it's cold, right!?) and headed onto the open road.

Hoover Dam is around 40 minutes from Vegas, so we made our way there through the mountains and had a relatively brief look around at this engineering marvel before getting back on the road. From the Dam it's approximately 4 hours to the South side of the Canyon in Arizona, the best part for the view apparently. What a giant, geographically spectacular place Arizona is! With music blaring, and flying along at 80mph (around 130km per hour) we passed up into the mountains, wound through the desert, back into scrub, up more mountains until reaching forest and (finally) getting to the canyon at about 4.15pm in the afternoon. I will say we pulled over around three hours into the trip to put the roof on when we saw that there was SNOW on the side of the road. It clearly gets very cold in the desert at 7000 feet.

We were panicked about losing the sun and practically ran to the lookout where we were greeted by a vista that is so breathtaking your mind has to expand to try and even conceive of it. You expect the canyon to be big, but it's very difficult to capture the vastness of the expanse and depth of the ravines in words. It's a truly awesome experience and one which was well worth the long drive. With the light fading we made our way onto a small 'path' and took some photos on an unprotected ledge we were able to (relatively) safely get to before we lost the light entirely and had to make the long drive home. It was freezing but we were both exhilarated by the experience of seeing such an amazing place. I was particularly happy because we also saw some deer with huge antlers on the side of the road, and a coyote ran across our path on the way back to the car.

Driving back was fine (Andrew discovered that the car is limited to 113mph) and as we pulled into the strip we decided our last meal (at about 10pm) should be something thoroughly terrible, so we went to the Cheesecake Factory at Caesar's Place. Some deep fried mozzarella, orange chicken and key lime pie cheesecake later and we were full to bursting, it was getting late and our last night in Vegas was coming to an end. We hadn't actually done any real gambling so we each took $1 and had about 15 minutes of fun on two of the old fashioned one-armed-bandit 1c machines. I won $1.83 and cashed in. Andrew lost his dollar. Tired but happy we drove back to the Monte Carlo to crash before another long day tomorrow.