Our final day in the states. This was where we said our sad farewells to Sunita who was going to stay behind in Santa Barbara as her flight out of LA was not for a few more days. Shannon, Amanda and I kick it down the coast towards LA until we get to Hollywood. I really had no idea what to expect of Hollywood, but is basically just a strip of road with some weird buildings like the Chinese Theatre with hand and foot prints of celebrities on the side of the road. Apart from that, there isn't too much, apart [View Full Entry]

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Well I have been so busy after getting back from the states, I haven't even had the chance to complete my last two blog posts, HOW SLACK IS THAT! I have decided it's better to have something than nothing at all, even though I might be a bit rusty on the details now. Once we got to Santa Barbara, we moved straight in with Sunita's friends Tony and Dana - a lovely young married couple living in the "family" units some UCSB living quarters. UCSB stands for University of California, Santa Barbara - which is a pretty famous uni mainly known [View Full Entry]

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The next day was time for some California Adventure Park. The girls were a little afraid to tackle the big roller coaster straight away so we warmed up with the kiddies roller coaster which Shannon thought was the most scary of them all. It tends to head in a straight line until it is overhanging the world below and then abruptly turns without leaning into the corner. There was also one part where I was sure if I didn’t duck I would have been about a head height shorter. So then we did the California Screamer which is far better than [View Full Entry]

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We decided to skip Big Sur since winding down the coast was going to take a long time, and we wanted to save more days for Santa Barbara. Rugged coast line we have plenty of in New Zealand anyway (that’s what we tell ourselves). We are now on the home stretch of our journey, But at the same time still have lots to look forward to. After arriving in Anaheim at around 10pm at night, we had no accommodation pre-booked so drived around a few places until we found one that we liked. Due to being feeling hungus, most of us [View Full Entry]

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In San Francisco we stayed with Sunita's friend Meghan in a small town about 45 minutes out of the main city called Pleasonton. It is quite a rich area, apparently the houses are normally a million plus. Meghan had another friend over (Kendra) who was a pure bred Pleasonton and we hit a local bar which had a live band and a whole lot of merry oldies dancing. For those who usually read my oddities site, it looked as though a lot of them got their moves from the video "How to dance like a white boy". The next day we [View Full Entry]

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When we started winding into the Yosemite hills on the 10th, we were greeted with a deer standing just to the side of the road - stunned and looking at us. It took a while before he bolted back off into the forest - how cool. Once we got to our accommodation just as we got out of the car, two raccoons came running out from behind us and across the path in front of us. It was the first time that I have ever seen a racoon and they seemed tame and a little cheeky. They raced up onto the [View Full Entry]

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Today we headed into Death Valley from Beatty. Death Valley is a long expanse of scorched earth, big rock formations, sand dunes, and salt planes all surrounded by a long strip of mountain ranges on each side. It is one of the hottest places on earth and has the second hottest recorded temperature in the world: 57 degrees C in July 1913. In July the average high temperate is 46 degrees Celsius and in January is 18 degrees C. The reason why the valley gets so hot is to do with the geography. For a start it is extremely dry, as [View Full Entry]

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This morning we left the Grand Canyon on route to Death Valley back via Hoover Dam and Las Vegas. It was so cold in the morning that when we got into the car the water in Shannon’s pump bottle had frozen solid. The internet told us that the overnight low would have been somewhere between -13 degrees C and -7 degrees C. We had originally planned to stay inside Death Valley itself at a place called Stovepipe Wells, but we had been told by my cousin/aunty/uncle that went through a few months prior that the place was in the middle of [View Full Entry]

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This morning we woke up to a free all you can eat breakfast and booked ourselves onto a helicopter ride over the canyon ($185US worth). By this stage we still had not seen the canyon at all. After a brief safety video and a weigh in we were boarding a small helicopter. I ended up facing backwards and we put our headphones on. I think there was a trainee girl pilot flying but I had faith. I tried to forget the fact that a helicopter has nothing to glide on if the engine stops, and falling into the canyon probably wouldn’t [View Full Entry]

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The weather in Vegas was much warmer than I was expecting, it was cool but not bitterly cold. In fact it was quite nice it being a bit cooler so walking the distances between the hotels was a bit easier. Today we left Vegas on a 5 hour drive towards the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. The route automatically goes through Hoover Dam - Hoover Dam is a big dam. I was surprised at the lack of barriers (being America!), it would have been fairly easy to hop over and slide right to the bottom. We were thinking that even [View Full Entry]

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