Breakfast bars and fruit again for breakfast and we hit the road. First stop - Salt Creek, and our first "off road" trip - all 400m of it! A short board-walk around a rather smelly little creek in the middle of - nothing really. Plenty of little fish and the odd bird made it a little desert oasis. Next stop - Scotty's Castle. In the heat we walked - slowly - up to Scotty's Grave on the hill overlooking his castle. We take a few pictures and head inside for lunch. Next stop - Uberhebe Crater. Wow! Much more impressive than [View Full Entry]

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Shopping day today! After another forgettable Holiday Inn Express breakfast we packed our bags and headed out to the Las Vegas outlet store. I've _never_ seen a bigger shopping centre in all my life! I literally couldn't walk the length of it! Seriously! Karina was in heaven and bagged a few bargains - so she tells me - including some stuff from Tommy Hilfeggar? I found a cool music shop that sold all sorts of music, video & TV stuff, and spent about 1/2 hour looking through it while Karina was clothes shopping. I _almost_ bought a Donkey Kong Jenga game [View Full Entry]

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To the supermarket for breakfast bars and orange juice for breakfast. A couple of shirts and then we filled up the jeep before heading back to Vegas. This time we decided to skirt Zion and pass through Cedar City. We were told it was very scenic which was just as unexpected as the trip up. We started to climb a bit and eventually we started to see snow on the side of the road. After a while we came to Navajo Lake and a lookout over the partially frozen water - beautiful! On the short trek from the side of the [View Full Entry]

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Up at 8am on the dot and showered ready - hopefully - for our ride. Karina rang the office at 8:45 to book the 1/2 day morning ride. They were only running afternoon rides and told us just to turn up at 12:30pm for the 1pm ride. After a couple of breakfast bars and an orange juice for breakfast the first order of business was seeing about getting the slow leak in the tyre fixed. We suspected it had been flat since we hired it, as the handbrake warning light had always been on - until the tyre was flat enough [View Full Entry]

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Another horrible Holiday Inn Express breakfast and then we checked out to head to Bryce Canyon. I didn't know much about the trip - not having done it before - and had a feeling it would be rather a boring 4 1/2 hours. And an hour out of Vegas it looked like I was right. We stopped at St George, just off the I-15 for some gas and a quick lunch - Subway again! We were taking I-15 north-east from Nevada, across the corner of Arizona into Utah. The first few hours were long, straight and relatively flat. However we found [View Full Entry]

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Getting up at 5am after going to bed at 1am was never going to be easy. Missing breakfast - as horrible as it was - just made things that little bit worse. We were picked up at 6am and shuttled to the underground carpark of the Planet Hollywood casino complex, where we were offered a complementary "breakfast" consisting of a museli bar and a bottle of water. We finally left around 7:45am. First stop was Hoover Dam. Unfortunately we weren't allowed to stop on the "impressive" side, we only got glimpses of it on the way through. Security was tight - [View Full Entry]

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A subway for breakfast and an early start. Normally the subways were good, but the breakfast choice - some rather cuious ham that looked more like donor kebeb beef with (presumably powdered) egg and cheese - was rather bad. We scoffed it down in the car and headed for Vegas! It was a 4 1/2 hour trip today. More very long, very straight highways. The closer we got to Vegas, the wider the freeway and the heavier the traffic. The GPS died (no power) en-route, which put us in a bit of a panic. Turned out to be the cigarette lighter [View Full Entry]

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Normally I look forward to the free "all you can eat" breakfast in hotels, but there was absolutely nothing to look forward to for our 5th breakfast at The Holiday Inn Express. The only remotely healthy choice was Raisen Bran (already with sugar) and scrambled powdered egg on toast. Even the orange "juice" was cordial. Uggh! Not that there was much else to choose from - the fried bacon and iced pastries particular standouts - so it was the _same_ breakfast every day. Well, almost, I did have a cold boiled egg once or twice. Leaving LA was a bit of [View Full Entry]

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Up in time for breakfast and onto the metro for 1 station to the Universal Studios shuttle stop. We're at the gates about 10 mins before the opening with a few hundred other people, waiting for the "Action" call before entering the park proper. 10am and we make a bee-line for the studio tour, with most people following suit. We're on the 1st tour of the day, and it turns out the 1st tour with high-def video (woopee). As expected it take a tour of the back lots, past sound stages and production facilities, with the occasional pre-staged special effect and [View Full Entry]

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Up for an early breakfast and then downstairs right on time to meet the shuttle at 9:15 to take us to the airport to pick up our car. 9:35 and it still hadn't arrived, so we rang. "3 miles away" I as told. 9:45 and it still hadn't arrived. Talking to the girl at reception - she mentioned that they'd already been! At 9:15. We weren't there, so they left! No waiting. No calling the room. Just left. And we were there at 9:14 by our watch. Not impressed to say the least, we were advised that we could catch the [View Full Entry]

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