C: We arrived into Zion in the evening and the road in is probably the most awesome road we've ever driven down. Huge mountains towering over us with massive drop offs into canyons to the side. The road continues right down to the base of the canyon and then into the small town of Springdale where we were staying. The sun had gone down by the time we arrived and there was a different kind of crazy scenery - pretty much every building covered in Christmas lights, even the street lights had been lit up to look like candy canes! The town was completely dedicated to tourism, loads of hotels, motels and places to eat. We found a little Thai restaurant and had some excellent Thai curries. The next day and we were ready to explore ... read more

R: sounds a bit like a children's book... We moved on from Arches to Capitol reef, a smaller national park in between there and Bryce Canyon. Cate wasn't feeling too well so spent much of the drive with her eyes shut - so I am writing this bit as the only witness to the day's activities! It's about 3 hours drive between the two along Highway 12 - an official "all american road" apparently. I never really worked out what this actually means, but it is possibly one of the most scenic drives of my life (up there with the Transfagarasan road in Romania). Capitol Reef had some good vistas and lots of interesting rock formations made of numerous exposed layers. There were some Native American petroglyphs (rock carvings) to be found, and I did a ... read more

C: So after another extremely early start (I am not good at getting up at 4.15am!) we caught our next flight to Salt Lake City for the start of our Utah national parks adventure. We'd been told that there wasn't a lot to see in SLC so we'd only booked one night's accommodation and so just had the afternoon to look round. First though we had to pick up our hire car for the next ten days. Now due to the USA being the home of the big car we had done what we always do and booked an economy car knowing, from previous experience, that we would be upgraded. Wrong. Roger was not a happy bunny when we strode up to a Chrevolet Spark that would be our mode of transport for our road trip ... read more

R: It's really Cate's turn to write the blog, but she really didn't like Juneau, and to be honest, I havent got much great to say either. Its small, it is state capital, and has lots of administrative buildings along with a large cruise ship port and everything around there is closed as it is out of season. We arrived at 5am and had to wait to get into town as nothing was running and there were no cabs. We got directed to a coffee chain which seems to be local to Juneau, it's interesting to see here are none of the big chains here except Subway. We looked at the sights by about an hour in freezing rain then ended up taking shelter in a museum run by a bored old lady who had been ... read more

C: We woke up on Sunday morning to about half a foot of snow! Roger spent quite a while digging the car out before we could leave the B and B. Our train was at 12.30 so I decided to go to a really pretty church we had seen the day before, it had beautiful icicles hanging off the sloping roof. It was Anglican so the service was quite familiar. The priest was from Essex though and had a very odd accent, Canadian with Essex boy twang! What struck me was how doughty the congregation was. As is increasingly the case at churches everywhere, the congregation was mostly fairly elderly but there was no way the snow was going to put them off. Two of the men who must have been at least 70 were outside ... read more