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Published: April 15th 2011
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Hyundai Rolls Canardly
Our little tin shack - such a pretty shade of blue. The Grand Circle Day One
Ursula and I had arranged to meet at Las Vegas airport for the start of long awaited and planned trip round the ‘Grand Circle’ National Parks. We had flown to Las Vegas from different locations, Ursula from Heathrow via Los Angeles and I from Sacramento. On the day we were to meet, it occurred to both of us that our arrangement had existed of ‘see you in Las Vegas’. Other than that we had little idea of exactly where we would see each other. This lack of planning would be a theme of our trip, for our many meetings to ‘plan the trip’ somehow fell far short of any concrete decisions once the first bottle of red wine was out of the way.
On arriving in Las Vegas, another thought occurred to me, I had no idea which flight Ursula would be on. We had discussed what we were taking in our luggage, we had discussed what kind of hire car we should get, we had actually looked at maps and worked out the total distance for the trip was 1400 miles. We hadn’t shared any details about our means of arrival. In fact I only
Typical planning session
The wine always captures our attention before we get far with the planning. knew Ursula’s stop-over was Los Angeles because she had the foresight to send me a text telling me her connecting flight would be ‘on time’. I looked at the arrivals board – there were six flights due in from Los Angeles. Six! How do you choose? One was coming in about an hour after mine, so I sent a text back on my trusty new American mobile phone, hoped it work and hung around the carousel for that flight like a hopeful middle-aged divorcee in a pick-up joint.
Amazingly, we did meet up. Ursula’s luggage was half the size of mine, as I had suspected. We went off to get our hire car. We had an interminable wait whilst the hire car company worked out how to process our pre-paid voucher. They asked us if it included Satnav, stupidly I said ‘no’, because they knew it was all paid for. They blamed the airline for the problems with processing ‘this happened to me yesterday’. No suggestion that the common denominator being the clerk may be the problem. Obviously there was a suggestion from me, but I only made it to Ursula. Having only just been reunited with my driving licence I wasn’t going to further jeopardise my chances of driving.
Eventually we were set to go. The clerk gave us a “free upgrade” to a compact car because they had made us wait. Every time I have hired a car in the US, I have had a ‘free upgrade’ for some spurious reason and every time it has meant the same thing – they didn’t actually have any of the smaller cars available anyway. When we got to the garage where the cars were, another hire car employee waved in the direction of Alamo’s compact cars (not an economy level car in sight) and told us there were six to choose from, he then left us to it. We looked at the six cars on offer. We made our decision carefully based on our in-depth knowledge of cars suited to touring – “let’s have the blue one, it’s a nice blue isn’t it?”; “yes, and we will easily be able to find it in a car park”. It would be Moab, many days later, before we saw more than half a dozen cars in a car park.
It was a blue Hyundai something. We were soon to find out that maybe we could have been a bit more selective, it had no central locking (I thought all cars now have central locking), the windows wound down manually and after a few days we decided it was a Hyundai Rolls Canardly, it that it rolls down hills and can hardly get up the other side.
I was the first designated driver, Ursula having just been through a 10-hour flight from the UK. Ursula has experienced my driving before, for those of you who pity the huge shock that was about to befall her. I have also experienced her driving too, so we both knew what we were in for. As this was her first time in Vegas and we weren’t stopping overnight I gave her a tour of the delights of Las Vegas – a drive along Las Vegas Boulevard. Naturally we went the wrong way down it at first, and after a while we agreed there was a strong smell of burning rubber in our little hire car. Then I realized the hand-brake was still on. How we laughed. We wondered if it might have damaged the brakes or the tyres, but then decided it was getting late and we had a long way to go, and after all we were only going to one of the most mountainous regions in the US, when were we ever going to really need a handbrake?
Our first stop was 130 miles along Interstate 15, in complete darkness. The scenery could have been spectacular, we were not to find out. We got to St George, we saw our hotel as we drove past it on the Interstate. We were not to see it again for about 20 minutes whilst we drove round and round trying to get to the hotel. We had already discussed how rarely you find roundabouts in the US, and that they call them ‘circles’. St George has several circles amazingly, the signage showing you your exit is quite strange, and La Quinta seem to have made a corporate decision not to provide detailed signs to their hotels until you reach their carpark, so we got used to circles.
Eventually dear reader we made it through the perilous circles to our hotel. They had a huge jar of red candy at the desk, for small children. My grubby little hand was straight into the jar for a red liquorice twist. It was vile, I had to hold it discreetly until I found a bin. There is a lesson there. We had a lovely room, and a very welcome glass of the wine Ursula had the foresight to bring with her. Our trip had begun.
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