R: Next morning we headed on to Santa Monica, the first of the Los Angeles beaches we came to. Santa Monica is a victim of urban sprawl, and while not unpleasant, its fairly urban with a so so beach, and a pier with rides on it which I vaguely remember from last time I was here. Our primary objective here was to visit the two British shops in the continued search for Christmas puddings. success! "Ye Olde Kings Head" had stacks of them, along with crackers, mince pies, brandy butter, not to mention Cadbury products, Tesco cook in sauces, pies, pasties and prawn cocktail crisps. We asked what the guy was going to do with all the left overs after Christmas and he was pretty sure they would find a good home! We had a bit ... read more

C: It was a relatively short drive down to SF from Bodega Bay and our first stop was the pretty town of Sausilito, just north of the bay on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge. From here you can see straight across the bay to the city and after a little meander along the waterside we found lunch with a view, sitting outside in the sunshine eating pizza with SF and the Golden Gate in the background. Particularly nice in December! There was also a guy on the beach doing amazing balancing art with different sized stones and pieces of wood. We then got to drive across the GG bridge and visited the park on the other side. It's a huge park, similar to Central Park in size and shape but the main thing ... read more

R: Our next plan was to head to Yosemite national park - but it wasn't to be, the national weather service reported a winter storm coming in with several feet of snow forecast overnight the night we were planning to stay, so we decided to make a tactical detour and stay near the coast. From Fresno we headed to Napa - we were going to come here anyway, but decided to extend our stay. Napa is wine country, so we headed for the wine welcome centre to discover more. From there you can buy a pass which you can use for a tasting in 12 winery shops in downtown Napa, which ranged from a single taster, up to 6 different pours - and the size of these depended on the generosity of the bar tender. So ... read more

BB: Gordon's alive!!!! R: No, I can't do a whole post like that. We headed on to Las Vegas via the Hoover Dam, in total about 2 hours in the car from our last stop. We spent a bit of time going between the Nevada and Arizona time zones for our own amusement then headed on to Las Vegas. We were a bit early so I took Cate on a drive into the dodgy northern area of "The Strip". After check in at the Hard Rock Hotel, we headed out for some exploring. Well, actually, while I was returning the rental car, Cate had been down and played video poker and won $4... Hopefully the start of things to come. Our next few attempts at winning it big proved fruitless, so we got on with other ... read more

R: Another one in short succession. Today we went to the most amazing place. I'm going to let the pictures do the talking (scroll right to the bottom for more!). We stayed overnight in Page, which is an extremely dull new town that was built for the construction of the dam. It did have a great street that had all the towns churches in one handy cluster (10+), but that was about as exciting as it got. In the morning we took a pickup truck out to Upper Antelope canyon which is a slot canyon, meaning it's no more than a metre wide in places, and the sandstone gets carved by successive flood waters leaving amazing whirlpool marks, debris and etchings in the Najavo sandstone. The floodwaters enter every summer, some being higher than others, and ... read more