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Published: December 12th 2009
Saturday November 21st to Friday December 11th, 2009.
Quite what would possess someone who loathes even the mere thought of sitting behind a steering wheel to drive 1200 miles in three days is anyone’s guess. A quest for adventure ? Most likely, I’m still trying to fathom it out myself to be honest but not wanting to miss the opportunity that the long Thanksgiving weekend had afforded whilst unbelievably turning down offers of not one but two turkey dinners in the process that was exactly what I did, proposed destination the world’s biggest hole in the ground, The Grand Canyon.
With tickets for Tiesto’s LA concert on the Saturday night already purchased I had just three days. The plan, if it could be described as such was to motor out to the Canyon in one long uninterrupted day of travel and then simply take it from there. There was no accommodation booked and no real agenda, just a desire to explore and after almost seven hours slogging through valley’s, ranges and plains spectacular and bland in equal measure I finally arrived in the small town of Williams.
Sitting in the shadows of Bill Williams Mountain 60 miles due
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Lake Havasu at sunset.south of the Grand Canyon Williams is your archetypal American ‘middle of nowhere’ town. Taking it’s name from the intrepid ruddy faced mountain man who pioneered the region during the late nineteenth century it proudly boasts the unique claim to fame of being the last town on the renowned Route 66 to be by-passed by the interstate system.
First settled in 1874 inevitably assuring its entry into America’s National Register of Historic Places it consists of two adjacent one way streets, both part of the original Route 66 lined either side by an inordinate amount of gas stations, numerous dilapidated motor inn’s, a couple of saloon bars as I was later to discover and a selection of tourist targetted stores all competing to offload the same cheap and tacky crap, anything from Route 66 shot glasses to Grand Canyon piggy banks to gullible baseball hatted visitors with money to burn. No wonder the average household income in the town is reckoned to be just thirty five grand per annum, if God had put the canyon fifty miles further north this place would have ceased to exist a hundred years ago. A smattering of single storey timber housing dotted either
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Skaters at Christmas. Union Square, San Francisco. side of the main streets and the boarding point for The Grand Canyon Railway complete the picture and that is just about that.
Just a solitary small sarney throughout the day had ensured I’d developed quite an appetite and so in an attempt to satisfy my cravings I immediately pulled into the town’s one and only recognizable link to twenty first century living, the large and modern Safeway store situated just inside it’s limit’s. Unfortunately for my stomach though, Thanksgiving had seen to it that despite being just after four o’clock the town had already closed for the day. Dusk was fast approaching, the streets appeared deserted and if my objective of seeing the sun set over the canyon was to be achieved I knew I had no option but to push on, tummy rumbling in my wake.
An hour later I found myself handing over my twenty five bucks to the ranger at The South Rim gates and asking for his opinion of the best viewpoint to watch the sunset. As could only be expected considering I was five hundred miles east of home it was bloody freezing so I parked up as instructed by the Yavapai
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The canyon at sunset. observation point, donned the anorak I’d thankfully thrown into the Jeep almost as an afterthought, pulled my socks up to my knees and looking like a schoolboy from sixties Britain strode eagerly to the edge. Wow !.
I’d flown over the canyon at 20,000 feet some twenty years earlier and recalled how it had resembled a huge scar on the earth’s surface but neither that memory nor the photographs or TV shots I’d seen in the meantime could have prepared me for the close up spectacle of one of the world’s seven natural wonders that I was now witnessing. Despite the inevitable scores of people littering and posing for snapshots on the edge, ninety per cent of whom appeared to be either puzzlingly Indian or inevitably Japanese the view was, as expected breathtaking and I spent a chilly hour simply marveling at it’s magnificence before finding, as if in the click of a finger that I was all alone in almost complete pitch darkness.
When I eventually located The Jeep, not an easy task with zero vision when you’ve been wandering aimlessly for an hour or so paying no particular attention to your route it was almost seven
o’clock, frostbite was entering the equation and I still had nowhere to sleep. The Grand Canyon Village, a collection of beds, stores and restaurants located six miles back down Highway 64 is a settlement that exists purely to provide food and shelter for canyon visiting tourists and I quickly realized after five minutes spent looking around that an evening spent in such a place was neither the reason I’d traveled so far nor where I wanted to be. I wanted to experience some real America and so without further ado resigned myself to the sixty mile drive back to Williams.
I had no idea what to expect as I thawed out on my way back to Williams but was simply grateful I’d had the foresight to note down the phone number of one its’ the motels, The Highlander, before I’d left home. En route I called to check for vacancies.
“How would 37 dollars plus tax do you ?” the guy on the other end of the line asked once the formalities were over and done with. ‘37 bucks' I thought 'that’ll do just nicely’.
Considering that he spent his days cooped up in the tiny cluttered
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Big John the biker. Thank God he wasn't a brawler. cubby hole he called his office The Highland proprietor Fred as he introduced himself seemed a jolly soul and feeling a heady mix of relief and elation that my mammoth drive had finally come to an end I was feeling in pretty good spirits myself. The hunger pangs had momentarily all but disappeared and I was ready for a beer, it was 8.30 on a Thursday night after all and as he handed me the keys to my room I asked him the most important question weighing on the front of my mind “Are there any bars in town ?”
“There are two” he replied peering up at me from his chair with an over the top of his glasses look of fatherly concern. ‘The Sultana (neglecting to mention The 'World Famous' part) is three blocks down the street on the right and The Canyon Club five blocks down on the left” adding with barely a pause “but I’d recommend The Canyon Club”. I instantly asked why ?
“Cos there’s probably less chances of a brawl breaking out in The Canyon” he replied, an apologetic smile crossing his face that said facts were facts but that this one
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Tiesto. The reason we were there in SF. was sad but true. I swallowed hard and visions of me being flung headlong wild west style through the saloon doors and out onto the street flashed through my mind as I trudged worriedly to my quarters which, when I opened the door proved itself to be an 8’ x 8’ breezeblock windowless box. I took a shower and prepared myself for the evening ahead feeling, I can only imagine, how a young WW1 soldier in the trenches of Northern France must have felt awaiting his captain’s whistle to go ‘over the top’.
Walking down the main street the silence that was noticeable earlier that afternoon remained. There was a distinct lack of life, both vehicular and human which succeeded in giving me the feeling not only that I was all alone, a stranger in a strange land but also that the townsfolk were all cowering indoors peering from behind their curtains awaiting the pending ambush of the lone cowboy as he walked into the bad guys trap.
As I approached the entrance to The Sultana the doors suddenly flung open and a shaven headed man in his mid twenties staggered out onto the steps, drew hard and
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Don't eat babe for breakfast ! long on a cigarette, exhaled and promptly projected a lump of bile the size of a cricket ball that he’d noisily dragged from the deepest depths of his stomach onto the pavement six feet in front of me. It landed with a resounding crack on the concrete like a jellyfish that had just been hurled from a great height but sensibly I just kept walking, thankfully not having to break stride to avoid the quivering mess before crossing to The Canyon Club.
You couldn’t miss The Canyon Club. The neon signs hanging outside were shining brightly, throwing out a less than convincing welcome but when I got to just a few feet away from the door a scruffily written sign taped to it gave me cause to stop dead in my tracks, swallow hard and murmur three silent Hail Mary’s crossing my chest as I did so. Alongside the ‘No Smoking’ symbol and the flyer for Friday Night Darts Night, no doubt where unsuspecting visitors would be used by locals as moving targets it read simply and politely “No Firearms Allowed In Bar”. It was almost an apologetic request rather than an order, as though the writer expected no
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Coulda found a park bench ! one to take the blindest bit of notice.
Now contrary to popular belief I’m no fool and I immediately realized that in a civilized world the words ‘brawl’ and ‘firearm’ should have no place in the same sentence, even if they were supposedly forbidden. But I’d come so far, was both hungry and thirsty and was not about to let such minor details get in the way. I braced myself, reached for and pressed my thumb down on the brass door latch and then exhaled a huge sigh of relief when the realization dawned that the door appeared to be locked, a peek through the glass confirming that the place was in fact both empty and closed. Phew.
For a brief second I was overcome with the feeling that I’d just had a miraculous escape, one life gone, another eight to go before the realization dawned on me. I was still hungry, still thirsty and still left with another option, albeit one with more likelihood of ending in tears than the one that had just been greeted with a locked door. I about turned and crossed towards the Sultana.
Entering a pub in a strange town can
often prove daunting, especially when you’ve been informed half an hour or so earlier that the chances of violence erupting are as likely as to that of rain from a blackened sky. Again I held my breath as I pulled on the doors which this time swung open. I entered.
Inside the place appeared Tardis like, way bigger than it’s exterior had dictated. Two pool tables took up the majority of the centre stage and a table beyond them was occupied by seven or eight people in varying stages of intoxication. A couple of them were sat with their feet up on the table like a group of dockers enjoying a tea break and I immediately recognized one of them as being the phantom phlegm flinger from ten minutes earlier. Ensuring the avoidance of eye contact I made my way to the bar and realized it was time for another important decision.
The bar was long, about twenty yards in all and was occupied by an assortment of men only of all ages and sizes, not one of whom had even noticed my arrival. There was one vacant stool at the extreme right hand side in front of
the window and two in the centre and not wanting to feel like a wounded wildebeast surrounded by hungry lions I went straight for the centre. Half an hour later despite receiving the disappointing news from the barmaid, who like me was on her first night in the place that food wasn’t on the menu I’d gained enough confidence to further survey my surroundings.
Separated by a vacant stool to my immediate left sat a huge, bald and bearded man with tattooed biceps the girth of my thighs. He resembled as the old adage goes ‘a bulldog chewing a wasp’, wore a cap sleeved T shirt and was a spitting image of one of those stereotypical biker cum hells angel types you see in the movies. God help me or anyone else for that matter if he was a brawler. The rest of the men at the bar were a dishevelled collection of ‘Deliverance’ style banjo strumming mountain types, behind me two females who I later discovered to be mother and daughter played pool at one of the tables and other than the skinhead and his pals the room was further populated by a handful of scruffy Mexican/Indian types.
My first conversation of the evening started when a slight and skinny man in his early fifties entered clutching a huge foil food tray to his side which he slid onto the bar like a pack of cigarettes before ordering a beer and taking a seat between the biker and me. He didn’t look like what you’d imagine a fighter to look like but we all know looks can be deceiving so my guard remained erect. He instantly struck up a conversation with me, became obviously intrigued by my accent and told me he earned his living as a builder but had taken the day off to work as an unpaid volunteer providing Thanksgiving food for the area’s needy and homeless. He didn’t look the sort to do that either but as I say looks can be deceiving. With a population of around 2,000 I questioned how many homeless people there could possibly be in the town but he assured me they, native Indians and all came from miles around.
Before long I found myself stood with a pool cue in my hands as skinny racked and then broke the balls. My first visit to the table resulted
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Baz heads for the pub. in two solid pots and a perfectly executed safety which astonishingly given the number of balls on the table left him snookered. As we passed on my return to my stool he murmured with a sarcastic smile “we don’t play like that around here”.
Whether it was a case of false bravado created by the five beers that were swilling around my empty stomach or simply the fact that any threat now seemed negligible I still have no idea but my competitive side once again rose to the fore and I instantly replied “There’s only one way to play and that’s to win”. Good God, what was I doing ? I could have been unwittingly signing my very own death warrant there and then but thankfully he simply smiled, walked on by and played his shot.
And that it seemed was the defining moment when I became an accepted patron of The World Famous if slightly boisterous Sultana Bar.
Skinny, and I’m ashamed to admit I never did ask his name, upon hearing of my hunger generously insisted I dine on the contents of his silver tray, the still hot remains of the turkey dinner that he’d
spent the day dishing out to the regions vagrants which he was taking home for his supper. It more than filled the hole in my belly although eating it with my fingers like a starving prisoner given a bowl of gruel due to the hostelries lack of utensil’s took a slight shine off it and I also became best friends with big John the biker, the mother and daughter and several other local characters all thankfully without any likely sign of receiving a headbutt, punch to the chops or kick to the stomach in return. I returned to my cell in the early hours not only feeling glad to still be intact but also happy in the fact I’d made some new and valued friends.
The following morning I called home and upon hearing my mother’s voice through the receiver somehow managed to avoid gleefully yelling “I’m alive mother, I’m alive !” at the top of my voice. I went for breakfast in a tiny main street café which as well as serving eggs every which way you pleased also did a nice line in dusty shot glasses and piggy banks before heading out for the sixty mile drive
to witness what I’d seen just a handful of hours earlier.
Sixty miles ! Without so much as a sniff of the cloud of doom that would have been hanging over my head at the prospect of such a trip back in the UK. That’s the equivalent of driving from Ellesmere Port to Birmingham for heaven’s sake but it felt like a nip to the shops, a surefire sign of my decline into Americanization (As is the Z I’ve just put into that word!).
My destination this time wasn’t the Canyon itself but Grand Canyon Airport in the hope of picking up an aerial trip over the void and two hours, one hundred and forty bucks and a five minute safety video later I found myself striding across the tarmac for my very first helicopter flight.
When purchasing the ticket I was asked to stand on a pair of scales and thinking they could have been auditioning me up for some reality weight loss/gain TV show, which by the way are even more ubiquitous over here than they are in the UK, I asked why. I was told it was so the pilot could equally distribute the
weight of his passengers to reduce the chances of a headline making catastrophe which I must say did absolutely nothing for my faith in helicopter flight. I was given a ticket with the number two on and immediately feared the worst to the point of almost cancelling and asking for my money back.
The 'copter I wa stold carried six passengers one of whom was to be sat alongside the pilot leaving the other five to scrap it out to see which unfortunate sucker would be windowless. After five minutes of working out every possible seating permutation I could only see number two being in the middle and if this was the case and I was stuck without barely a view I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. Eventually, before committing I asked and was thankfully assured number two would be sat by a window.
Accompanying me on the cramped twenty five minute flight were an eastern European family from New York. Non English speaking grandma who spent the whole trip frantically scribbling into a notebook what could well have been her last will and testament in an unrecognizable language that resembled some sort of Baltic shorthand and
who to my knowledge didn’t look out of the window once (one of the photos proves otherwise), mother who very graciously sat opposite me displaying no sign of displeasure at spending the entire flight with my knees tucked neatly either side of her ears and three kids, the youngest of whom fell asleep immediately after take off.
I’ve often wondered how a helicopter actually gets airborne. Think about it. Two blades are attached to a glass and metal box containing seven people, they rotate horizontally to the ground in unison with a tiny vertical rotor and somehow succeed in getting the thing off the ground. It defies all the logic Sir Isaac Newton and his Granny Smith bestowed upon us many years ago and the way the thing wobbled upon leaving solid ground made me wonder further. But rise we did before flying for a couple of minutes a hundred yards or so above thick pine forests. Suddenly the pines simply disappeared and the gap between us and terra firma increased by over a mile. Viewing The Grand Canyon from the South Rim is spectacular, viewing it from above is simply unrivalled.
Thrilled I’d done the flight it
was time to hit the road again. My plan was to drive to and spend the night in the resort town of Lake Havasu, roughly half way home and I waved farewell to Williams around four o’clock in good spirits, so good that my foot soon found itself planted firmly to the floor.
Half an hour out of Williams I almost literally flew over the brow of a hill and was horrified to see a cop car, like a Formula 1 car in the pits ready to rejoin the action parked haphazardly but ready for pursuit on the wide central reserve. My heart missed a handful of beats as I scanned the rear view mirror waiting for the flashing blue and red lights to come swirling to life which unbelievably, unlike for poor Thelma & Louise they didn’t. When I eventually arrived home I was informed several times that the whole of the five hundred mile route is littered with hidden speed cameras and I’m awaiting my mail box to start bulging any day now.
Lake Havasu City is a town on the shores of Lake Havasu created specifically for the water sport pleasure seekers who live and
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a pre gig pint with the interns. frequent it. It must be, I can’t think of any other reason why anybody would bother to build a town in such a remote spot. It is also the place which each spring break becomes ‘the’ party town of Western United States having been invaded by thousands of breast bearing college students eager to free themselves of the stresses of a three week semester not to mention home to Arizona’s second biggest tourist attraction, The London Bridge !
At the end of the nineteenth century London Bridge, opened in 1831 was generally accepted to be the cities busiest spot, a fact which no doubt played it’s part in causing it to ‘sink’ at the rate of one inch every eight years. The inevitable decision to replace the structure before it completely disappeared into the abyss was finally made in the nineteen sixties and some bright spark at the council, believe me there is always one, suggested selling it.
Step in American oil millionaire Robert McCullough who spent two and a half million dollars to purchase and a further four and a half to transport the bridge across the Atlantic before putting the ten thousand plus stones, not contrary
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Fred from The Highlander. 'There could be trouble ahead'! to popular belief thinking he’d bought Tower Bridge, back together. It now stands spanning a purposely man made river backed by an equally purposely man made
authentically twee Tudor English village.
With no sign of a City centre I spent the evening in the suburbs and was dining on unlimited fish and chips when news of Tiger Wood’s recent antics flashed onto the screen. I had to smile. Reaction to his indiscretions Stateside has been mixed but reminded me of the furore Mr Beckham caused when he was dismissed against Argentina in the ’98 World Cup, the general consensus of a religiously fanatical country being a typically over the top one that he is a disgrace not only to his country but also to God, to golf and to himself. Shame on him. As I write further evidence of his indescretions appear by the hourand I fear for his safety, at times such as these fanatics really do forget that top sportsmen, however famous are actually human.
I spent the latter part of the evening at an open aired bar/club whose clientele, a mix of all creeds and walks of life emanated way more threat than anyone at
The Sultana Bar had the previous evening where I chatted to a mother and son, she a boat driver, he a boat mechanic out for a night on the town and a young guy called James who introduced himself as we stood side by side at the bar by saying he’d just been released from three years in prison. His crime with the explanation "I just couldn't help it" ? The theft of an Ambulance attending a road traffic accident !
The following morning having stopped to pay my respects to a little bit of English history I headed home and five hours later, having driven through just about every weather front imaginable I arrived back in Long Beach, road trip complete. It’d cost me more in ‘juice’ than it would have to have flown to the moon and back twice over and that is even without the speeding tickets that are probably winging their way to my mail box as I type. That said, it was a wholly worthwhile experience.
The weekend before the Thanksgiving trip Phil and I had flown up to San Francisco, my third visit to this wonderful city to attend a concert on
the Saturday night by DJ Tiesto. On the Saturday morning, determined not to spend all day in bars we set off on foot, firstly to visit the company corporate apartment currently inhabited by two of the companies cheap labour interns and then to explore the area of the city neither of us had been before, all things south of Market Street.
I wanted eventually to get to the Haight Ashbury district, the bohemian area of the city invaded by the flower children of the sixties and by mid afternoon we finally got there but en route across town I discovered three things of which I was previously unaware; San Francisco is an even better City than I initially thought possible, it is ‘home’ to more ‘homeless’ people than I’d ever imagined and it is treated like a mecca by a multitude of talented graffiti artists.
Of course before reaching Haight we also made several necessary watering stops including one at a realistically homely Irish Bar called ‘The Chieftain’ , so welcoming that we found we had to almost drag ourselves from it to continue our journey and one at the ‘Absinthe Brasserie and Bar’ situated at the corner
of Heyes and Gough, a cosy oak decored corner cafe packed with afternoon revellers' where the bartender distilled the small aniseed beverage before our very eyes. Absinthe is the allegedly hallucinogenic drink which gave Van Gogh the inspiration to detach his head from his ear and we returned to the chill afternoon air half an hour after entering with a warm feeling in our guts, a case of the giggles and an even warmer fuzzy feeling in our heads, not least because each drink the size of a Chinese tea cup had cost fifteen dollars !
The concert over later that evening we were searching amongst the crowds for a cab back to the city as were thousands of others when we got chatting to a couple in a similar predicament, Jay a German and his girl Elise. Eventually taking the sensible decision to share a cab we ended up accompanying them to 'Ruby Sky', a tiny open all night city centre nightclub hosting unbeknownst to us the offical Tiesto after party. We were just wondering exactly what we were doing there when DJ T, one of the world's biggest disc spinning superstars strolled up to the booth and
proceeded to play another two hour set. Priceless.
Since my last entry Christmas party season has also arrived, F & E's taking place at a swanky Manhattan Beach wine bar and F & G's at a Sunday morning Champagne Brunch aboard The Queen Mary. It was my first time aboard the old bird and when everyone had departed I remained and spent another hour touring her historic decks.
As I write this it’s Friday evening. I’ve settled in for the night for three reasons, firstly for an economy drive necessitated by the oncoming Christmas holiday season, secondly because Series 3 of ‘Benidorm’ arrived in the mail yesterday courtesy of Big Jerry and there’s nothing like a belly laugh to set you up for the weekend and thirdly because at four pm tommorow I settle into the chair to go under the needle. My second tattoo is about to happen.
PS: The canyon sign warning of imminent danger may seem like stating the bleedi' obvious but is apparently not read by all. On the very same day I was there a colleagues brother in law took a step to far. His funeral was held seven days later !
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WAYMO
non-member comment
Your lucks still holding out I see!