Vegas, Route 66 and a certain Canyon...

Road Trip: Day Three. Miles travelled: 985

Today started on a pair of rocking chairs on our hotel balcony eating Bran Flakes with ever-so-slightly off milk! I'm aware that I'm slightly staving off a cold. My throat feels a little hot and tickly. We're not acknowledging it...

We were in the car just after seven, and, within a few minutes had driven to a place in Death Valley called Zabriskie Point. The temperature was already 90 degrees, but it felt refreshing compared to the furnace of yesterday night! Zabriskie Point is where you get to see what Death Valley is all about. A little winding footpath takes you up a small hill to a vantage point with 360 degree views of rocks which have been shaped into mounds, ripples and ridges of magnificent colour over millions of years. It's a staggering sight. Imagine being one centimetre tall and looking out across the different tubs of ice cream in a proper Italian Gelateria. It's like that, except the rocks aren't in tubs. They merely flow in and out of each other. All the flavours are there: chocolate, coffee, vanilla, pistachio, lemon sorbet, even a small scoop of raspberry ripple. The earth is genuinely that many colours - deep umbers, yellows, browns, russets. And the domes and folds stretch as far as the eye can see. All against a deep blue sky. Not a tree, bush or tuft of careworn grass can be seen. It's truly staggering. The most inhospitable yet beautiful place I've ever visited.

I forgot to mention yesterday that the dreadful garage we visited in Beattie (pronounced Batey, by the way) was called Eddie Land. The enormous sign which told us this fact was accompanied by a circular, somewhat creepy, faded photograph of an eight-year old boy. It was the sort of thing you sometimes find on gravestones. My assumption is that Eddie off of Eddie Land was a child who'd died. All very strange. And all rather American.

Speaking of which, on the outskirts of Death Valley, we passed through a town called Pahrump. Imagine living in a town named after the noise a trombone makes?! I can't tell you much about Pahrump, but I can tell you that it sprawls over a large area, that it has a strip mall and an enormous fireworks warehouse and that cannabis is legal there. I know this because a huge billboard informed me of this fact! The same billboard suggested that cannabis should be kept out of the reach of children! The Americans in these parts seem to put anything on a billboard: "Thank you for your service, Deputy Becht." "Who cares? I care! Internationally recognised psychiatrist Ron Zedek." "Webuyuglyhouses.com." Endlessly fascinating reading...

You can see Las Vegas across the desert from at least twenty miles away. Its tall buildings loom on the horizon in the form of misty, light grey shapes. It's all rather beautiful.

As you get closer, however, the true horror of the city begins. First you see the billboards advertising Britney, Cher, Rod Stewart, Calvin Harris... Then you start to see the hotels. The first looks like a Disney Castle. The next is a giant pyramid and then there's a mini Chrysler Building, a fake Eiffel Tower and so it goes on. Each, of course, has a casino attached. The pièce de résistance, which told me that this was a city I was destined to loathe, was a giant, gold-plated Trump Tower. Literally. No. Words.

You witness everything, like an unfolding horror scene, from the freeway. A rather silly woman whom we bumped into at the Ghost Town yesterday told us the place to visit was Fremont Street, which actually bills itself as the "Fremont Street Experience." In my view this tells you about all you need to know. It strikes me that everything in Vegas needs to be billed as an experience before anyone will deign to enjoy it!

The first two shops we saw there aptly demonstrated the inherent contradiction of the American Dream. First up was a restaurant called Heart Attack Grill. ("Over
350lb eats free!") Next up was the Oxygen Bar, where, one assumes, stupid healthy people go to suck in air for extortionate prices. Actually, I'd rather like to give it a whirl. Anything for a quick high!

Fremont Street is covered in a huge, domed roof which doubles as "the world's largest Instagram screen." Thrill seekers can ride a zip wire along a cable which runs the length of the street. It is, in a word, hideous. We popped into a casino to use a loo. A battered-faced woman, holding a fag, bumped into me before blustering away. All of the slot machines have ashtrays. A man walked past wearing Elvis-style sunglasses with a pair of side burns attached to arms. He genuinely seemed to be wearing them with no sense of irony, or shame. At the back of the casino, next to the discount clothing racks, there's an area where old and broken slot machines have been rounded up and left to die.

Perhaps it picks up at night, when all the lights start flashing and all the hen parties start screaming, but, as far as we were concerned, Fremont Street was a bum steer!

We drove to the famous Strip, which I think is actually called Las Vegas Boulevard, and parked up. It's like Disney Land. Fake. Fake. Fake. Shopping centres with roofs which have projected clouds floating about on them. A reproduction St Mark's Square in Venice where the gondolas are powered by propellers. Everything is plainly terribly expensive whilst managing to look really cheap. Casinos blast lovely smells and cool air into the street to entice people in. Tatty, vapid showgirls with soggy arses stand on street corners, their sole purpose, apparently, to be objectified by men on stag dos. "Ooh, you're in there" shouted one particularly gross man as he photographed his mate. A bloke came up to us in the street; "you guys wanna party with sluts?" "No!" I said, horrified!

There are escalators taking people up and over bridges because the obese Americans can't be bothered to climb up stairs. A fat slob of a ten-year old girl gurned at me. She was wearing a T-shirt which said "I want it all." No love. You ATE it all.

Las Vegas, to me, can be entirely summed up by the only purchases we made whilst there. Two brownies. Nathan's was all frosting and no substance. Mine looked nice but was entirely burned!

We ran for the hills. Las Vegas "done" in two hours flat. I doubt I shall ever return.



Sam and Matt ate snickerdoodles, which is a sort of cinnamon biscuit and another example of Americans infantilising the sweet things they eat. "Cookies," "twinkies," "candies."




There was a gun store with an indoor range on the outskirts of the city. I'm sure there were hundreds. But I noticed this one. It made me feel almost as nauseated as the billboards celebrating Jesus.




Next up was, predictably, the Hoover Dam. It's very much on the tourist trail from Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon, and, well, why not? It's a spectacular example of 1930s engineering and architecture. It gleams in the bright sunlight - it was 101 degrees for the record - in absolute Art Deco splendour. High above the valley, a road and foot bridge oversees everything, but we didn't have the time to go up there today, having wasted an hour in the hell zone of Fremont Street.




We decided instead to walk across the dam and peer gingery over the edge to the jade-coloured river snaking along the valley 1000 feet below. Clinging to the side of the cliffs on either side are all manner of pylons, metal objects, curious cables and wires, which are plainly there to harness the hydro-electricity generated by the dam. I can't tell you a great deal more about it, having not had the time to trawl around the visitors centre. It was built in 1931, and dedicated to James Herbert Hoover and not, as I'd thought, J Edgar Hoover. I'm not altogether sure I know who either of these Hoovers are. We had a very interesting and highly ill-informed discussion about this very subject. It's fascinating the conversations you suddenly start having when you no longer have the ability to immediately google answers to the questions for which you don't have answers!




We left the dam via Route 93, and instantly crossed over from Nevada into Arizona, which becomes our third state on this road trip.




Along the 93, we encountered our first little truck stops and souvenir stores. Very much the sorts of things you might expect to find on Historic Route 66. The most tragic was almost certainly "This is it! Santa's Land!" Which had closed down and was now turning to dust in the Arizona desert. Theme park it was not. I assume it was a little road side store which sold Christmas decorations. Seeing anything boarded over like that is heartbreaking. It implies a dream which turned sour...




We turned onto Interstate 40 at Kingman and, for some time, found ourselves driving along the Historic Route 66 - or at least one of the roads which replaced that great American icon. The road is big news for tourism in these parts and many of the inns and roadside attractions bear the road's logo on their advertising hoardings.




We randomly came off the 40 at a place called Seligman which refers to itself as the birthplace of Route 66. A preserved section of the "Mother Road" exists in the town, lined by ancient general stores, a cafe called "Road Kill" and a 19th Century Jail house. This is exactly the sort of place I was hoping to find. The little general store was obviously a bit of a Mecca for travellers in the 60s. It had some totem poles, a few dusty wigwams which children would have probably played in, and a long-gone, yet still signposted pets' corner. There was everything inside from paints and hardware, through to trinkets, souvenirs and weird food stuff. We were able to buy glass bottles of Fanta in strawberry and pineapple flavour!




We chased the sunlight on our way to the Grand Canyon. There was a terrible panic that we wouldn't make it there before the sun set, which would have been catastrophic. To add insult to injury, the cars on the single carriageway road leading up to the national park seemed to be taking their own sweet time. I kept wanting to shout "haven't you got a date with a sunset?" We were plainly all heading to the same place!




It took about ten minutes to get through the barriers into the actual park, and we could feel the sun setting as we parked the car. The four of us literally jumped out of the car and sprinted across the car park and through a series of tree-lined walkways following signs for the "rim trail." It genuinely felt like an episode of Treasure Hunt.




The joy about the Grand Canyon is that you don't see it coming from a mile off. You pass through a line of trees and then suddenly, there it is. And it's bigger, wider, deeper, more colourful, more astounding, than you could possibly ever imagine. It literally takes your breath away. Nathan and I both swore as we saw it for the first time. Sam gasped. As the sun set, the colours of the canyon got more and more intense. Oranges. Reds. Mauves. Yellows. Deeper and deeper. Fading to purple as the light finally went.




For the next hour we took photos, found better spots to observe different views, dared ourselves to peer down into the abyss and gave ourselves the collywobbles. I played it safe. I hate heights. Nathan was the bravest of us all and took himself out onto a tiny little outcrop of rock where he sat with his legs dangling over the edge. The closer he got to the edge, the further I took myself away from the rim of the canyon. By the end I was standing in the trees about twenty metres away! It was truly terrifying and utterly toe-curling. Nathan reappeared with a flushed face, shaking with adrenaline and excitement. His joy was absolutely worth my pain!




My last view of the Grand Canyon was a dark purple silhouette against a thin strip of the brightest orange sunset.






I am astounded by the quality of days we're having, and the amazing things we're managing to pack in. San Francisco seems like a dream. London seems like a lifetime ago!