Monument Valley and other places

Bear with me, I am trying to upload photos. The service here is not very fast - but then, we are out in the desert. Try one of the old upload strings to get to Picasa and with luck the latest photos will be there. Arrgh, my upload allowance is full, and I needed to buy more space, now the photos will be on Picasa but some new upgrade now prevents me from pasting the upload strings here. If you care to go back to an older posting and copy the string you will be able to view all the latest photos.

Back peddling furiously here, Howard has rapped me over the knuckles for not keeping up with events so I have to type very quickly and without checking.

We arrived in Monument Valley early this afternoon Sunday 13th June - they don’t have daylight saving here in Utah so we lost an hour of precious time before we started. The hotel here is bliss. It was a place I was looking forward to because of the locality and is no disappointment. I will recommend it to everyone. Not as posh as any Sheraton, beautiful and understated. Enough of that, the scenery is stunning as expected. We checked in early, had lunch on the balcony and then set off on a 3.2 mile trail walk in the desert around one of the “mittens”. It took a while to catch on but some of these things, buttes, are called mittens because that is just what they look like, mittens (as in thumb gloves). We must have brought some rain from the Grand Canyon because we got sprinkled on and then back at the hotel while having dinner on the balcony which, by the way included cake and ice creams - special dispensation from Howard - he had a Dove, they're like our Magnums and I had Hagen Daas both wrapped and then packaged in individual cardboard boxes - that's so wasteful to us - going on with the story, the rain got a bit heavier, which changed the scenery, and then at sunset we had a rainbow and the long shadows WOW. Check out the photos now.



Joshua Tree - Thursday morning 10 June

We left the Jolly Roger Hotel in Washington Boulevard, Santa Monica before 8.00am and joined the continual traffic jam. It was hell on the freeways - but by now we aren’t overly intimidated by it all - just enough to be mostly scared. It was Howard’s turn to drive and he was doing well keeping up with the speed. Hollywood sped by in the morning mist, we were glad we weren’t on the other side of those five lanes as the cars were non-stop all the way out to the desert near Palm Springs. Did you know Palm Springs had nearly 100 golf courses apart from the casinos?

Also, there are vast wind farms out that way, thousands of them. There is enough wind out there to turn the windmills over double. And mist, it extends inland for quite a while. Anyway, on we went and the scenery got better (for us), we were in the desert now. Once again we were able to check in to our Joshua Tree hotel early and because of our late night last night, had a little lie down. We went out to Joshua Tree National Park and took in the beauty and harsh nature of it driving around for miles and walking as much as we could. At one lookout, Keyes View, there is a view over the San Andeas Fault, but also over the smog pall which mixes with the mist, fuelled mostly by vehicle exhaust fumes, industrial waste and fire smoke. That was where we saw the snake, we are keeping a good lookout while out on walks and will do our best to avoid any.

Friday 11th we headed out towards the Grand Canyon and that will be the next entry. Now it’s time for shut eye, we have another early morning walk planned and I’d better be alert for it.

Cheers all