July 15th Started the day with breakfast together with 100 other tourists in the ‘charming’ breakfast room with annoying elevator muzac playing to get us out of there in a hurry. Amazing that even though the food looked nice it didn’t taste that way. The morning was spent with cooling off in the hotel pool, which was quite nice, and planning the afternoon canyon visit, only disturbed by an endless herd of small airplanes and helicopters on their way from Tusayan airport to the canyon polluting not only the air but also making a hell of a lot of noise. We [View Full Entry]

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July 14th Break-up day as we today would continue to Grand Canyon. Business as usual as Tine and Paul went down for breakfast while the children slept late, can't really blame them - not very exciting. Got packed and ready and soon we were heading southwest towards the Four Corners, Navajo National Park to make a fool of ourselves by putting one foot in Utah, another in Arizona, one hand in Colorado and the other one in New Mexico. Totally ridiculous taking into consideration that all of this belonged to the Indians a long time ago and is now a reservation [View Full Entry]

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MOAB - ARCHES NATIONAL PARK July 10th We headed down road 12, which wasn’t exactly in the national park but we still had the beautiful red rock formations. We passed by Tropic (population 460!) not a very big place and further out into the wilderness. Everything is very remote and we didn’t see many other cars, it does make you (read Tine) a bit apprehensive because she worries about what to do if something happened to the car, as we did not have any cell phone connection here. On our way we passed by a large amount of other national parks [View Full Entry]

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July 7th Off to Bryce canyon. The trip started out with desert but after a while the landscape changed and we found ourselves driving through canyons and Very nice views and a relief after the desert. We did at some time have a funny experience - suddenly in the middle of nowhere there were hundreds of windmills on a hilltop, quite impressive. We could began to see the red rocks that we have seen on pictures of Bryce Canyon. Luckily the trip was not as long as we anticipated always nice when it’s that way round. We got an ok room [View Full Entry]

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July 6th On our way towards sin city. We knew it was a long drive and the only reason for stopping in Vegas was a break and maybe a bit of curiosity. We saw a lot of desert and a lot of Joshua Trees - a sort of over grown Yucca. About 80 miles before Las Vegas we had t stop for gas and other things that could not be waited upon. But it was a chock to leave the car. It was like walking into a wall of heat and having somebody put a blowdryer into your mouth on 'HOT'. [View Full Entry]

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July 3rd continued Started our trip towards Yosemite. It turned out to be a drive in very hot and what we first thought was very barren country. But even though it looked barren when looking closer it was fields that had been harvested already. And as Tine read in the travel guide, The San Joaquin valley is one of most productive agricultural areas in the world. They grow not only wheat and corn but all kinds of fruits such as Plums, Peaches, Nectarines, Watermelons etc. and of course raisins as Fresno is the raisin city of the world. This is of [View Full Entry]

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July 1st continued Left San Francisco - I hope it won't be another 39 years before I'm back! Found the freeway pretty easily and drove about 1 1/2 hours where we stopped in Gilroy the City of Garlic for some groceries among other things. We had decided to take the 101 some of the way because we would have too long a drive otherwise. Went towards the coast so we ended up around Monterey Bay and from there on we had a beautiful ride along the Pacific on Highway 1. It was a long ride because of 'The long and winding [View Full Entry]

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25.6.09 Left home at 5.15 and had a fairly unadventurous trip to Heathrow where we had to wait for 3 hours for our connecting flight. 11 hours later we we're at SFO and luckily they let us through both immigration and customs. Took a cab to The Hotel Nikko where Tine immediately crashed due to the fact that she had a very sore throat and wasn't feeling to well. The other 3 went to the swimming pool. When they came back Freja went to bed too, and after a small walk outside and a coffee and a hot chocolate Paul and [View Full Entry]

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07.12.07 Woke up to another sunny day and got ready for the final stage on the North Island to the bottom part with the capital city Wellington as the main attraction. Tine had planned a short detour to Bunnythorpe just outside Palmerston North to visit the local primary school, the reason for this was that the principal of Bunnythorpe school, Mr Doug Drysdale, had been visiting her school in August ’06 as part of an exchange programme with her principal - you could wonder who got the better end of that deal. Unfortunately, Doug wouldn’t be able to be there himself [View Full Entry]

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29.11.07 Drove on towards Taupo and besides seeing a lot of dead Possums on the road it was a quiet drive. Stopped at the Huka Falls, very impressive and the water was crystal clear. A bit further up are the Aratiatia Rapids, they supply the whole region with energy and every two hours the operators open the floodgates to let the tourists see the water flow freely. Together with the power stations that exploit the surrounding geothermal area these two power sources provide 5 % of the total energy demand of New Zealand. Just before we drove into Taupo we stopped [View Full Entry]

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