21th day: Universal Studios LA

We spent almost the whole day at Universal Studios.

The Universal Studios opened its doors to public somewhere in the middle of the  60's. Since that it became a successful theme park operating in several cities of the world. For the attractions, we made a ride on, see the pics in the Picasa album.

In the afternoon we drove to Beverly Hills and tried to approach the famous sign, but apparently in order to avoid vandalism it s been closed for public.  We still had some fun driving along the residencies of some famous stars.

 To stay with the stars, we also visited the famous Sunset Boulevard, also known as the walk of fame, where you can look the hand prints of stars and red stars dedicated to them. There 2500 stars along the street, 24xx of them already occupied.....

After the exhausting day, we needed an other 4 hours to drive back to Las Vegas.

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20th day: Driving to Los Angeles

This morning we went to see the famous Zoo of San Diego and the park around. After leaving the city we drove north on the coastal highway and dropped by several beaches, looked at the surfing scene of California.

In the early afternoon we arrived in the bay of LA, where the old Queen Mary is moored.

It sailed primarily in the North Atlantic Ocean from 1936 to 1967 for the Cunard Line (known as Cunard-White Star when the vessel entered service). After several years of decreased profits for Cunard Line, Queen Mary was officially retired from service in 1967. She left Southampton and sailed to the port of Long Beach, California. The ship now serves as a tourist attraction featuring restaurants, a museum, and hotel.

After that we went out on Venice beach, the most funny and livelly  beaches of LA. It is featured in several movies, well known about its exhibitionist crowd, the outdoor gym and basketball court. As we ve been there, it was a lot going on as well.

In the evening we went to visit the Kodak theater, where the Oscar prize is given every year for the bests of Holywood. Since its opening on November 9, 2001, the theater has hosted the Academy Awards, accomodating 3600 people for the big event.

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19th day: Driving to California

We left early morning for our next loop. This time to stay in style we rented a Mustang cabriolet and left direction south, to California. It was a long drive through the desert. The idea was to use the advantages of the Mustang and speed through the empty roads, but unluckily there was a police car in front of us for almost 100miles.

We turned to east at the village cold Mexicali and drove all the way along the Mexican border to San Diego. The birthplace of California, San Diego is known for its mild year-round climate, natural deep-water harbor, extensive beaches, long association with the U.S. Navy, and recent emergence as a healthcare and biotechnology development center. The population was 1,322,553 based on latest population estimates.

We spent the day visiting the Cabrillo NM on a peninsula, just south of San Diego and later on we went to Coronado beach and its famous hotel, which you can recall from several movies. The most famous one is maybe the "Some like it hot" from 1959 with Tony Curtis and Marylin Monroe.  When it opened in 1888, it was the largest resort hotel in the world.

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18th day: Preparing for the next loop

We spent an other day LV relaxing in the pool of the condo our friend is living and visiting some property projects around the city. At that time  nobody did expected, that just after a year the market will collapse.

We made also our plans for our next loop, which is going to bring us to San Diego and Los Angeles California.

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17th day: Relaxing in Las Vegas

After returning from our 2000km loop in the wild west, we took a day of and were just hanging around on the Strip, visiting some more Casinos. It was quite hot outside, tehrefore I needed continous refreshment.

The casino "Treasure Island" has a really nice show twice a day with real amazons and pirates fighting for a ship and the gold.

My sister was quite lucky and met Pavarotti in the Venetian. Since that the master passed away....

In the afternoon we went out to the "old town", where you can find the small casinos of good old times. You can recognise some, when looking at the one of my favourite movies, The Casino with Sharon Stone, Robert d Nero and Joe Pesci.
 

In order to protect the "old town" with its famous neon light Marlboro man, the whole street is covered and has projection on the ceiling every evening.

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16th day: Route 66 to Las Vegas

After leaving the Grand Canyon, we spent the night in Flagstaff, some 80 miles south from the Canyon. We started the day driving out into the desert and looking at the simply cold Meteor Crater, which is surprisingly a meteor crater.

The crater was created about 50,000 years ago. At the time, the area was an open grassland dotted with woodlands inhabited by woolly mammoths and giant ground sloths. The object that excavated the crater was a nickel–iron meteorite about 50 meters (54 yards) across, which struck the plain at a speed of several kilometers per second. Impact energy has been estimated at about 10 megatons.
Meteor Crater lies at an elevation of about 1,740 m (5,709 ft) above sea level. It is about 1,200 m (4,000 ft) in diameter, some 170 m deep (570 ft), and is surrounded by a rim that rises 45 m (150 ft) above the surrounding plains.

From here, we took again a short-cut via the desert, which was quite exciting, because we almost run out of fuel. At the end we survived and found a petrol station in the middle of the wood in a village of having 50 habitants.

From here we drove all the way on the Route 66 back to Las Vegas. There are a lot of relics to seefrom old times, when the route was main connection between the north -east (Chicago)  and the South -west (LA).

Route 66 was established on November 11, 1926—with road signs erected the following year, covering a total of 2,448 miles (3,940 km). It was recognized in popular culture by both a hit song and the Route 66 television show in the 1960s. It s end started in the beginning of the 60's, when a much better quality interstate highway system was built instead.

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15th day: Hopping over to the Grand Canyon

After an other night in an other road motel, we drove around in the Monument Valley protected national reserve. The ground actually still belongs to the Navajo indians and they collect money for entering the area. Indians living here are not like you would imagine looking at the movies or documentaries. They don t have their pride anymore, they don t have anything to do around here, so they just hanging around and most of them are alcholic.

From here is only a few hours drive to arrive at the eastern regions of the Grand Canyon, which we reached in the afternoon. On the way there we made a short turnout to the Glenn Canyon dam and its famous bridge. You can recall this bridge from several movies, like the Twins with Arnold Schwarzenegger or The natural born killers.

The Grand Canyon  is a steep-sided canyon carved by the Colorado River. President Theodore Roosevelt was a major proponent of preservation of the Grand Canyon area, and visited it on numerous occasions to hunt and enjoy the scenery. It is considered one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World. The Grand Canyon is 277 miles (446 km) long, up to 18 miles (29 km) wide and attains a depth of over a mile (6,000 feet or 1,800 metres). Nearly two billion years of the Earth's geological history has been exposed as the Colorado River and its tributaries cut their channels through layer after layer of rock while the Colorado Plateau was uplifted.

 

 There are several activities organised around the canyon, but due lack of time we just drove around along the rim and enjoyed the scenery. I like to note that I didn t enjoyed it that much as the Bryce canyon a day before. You just loose the overview, because of its size. Probably it is more fun if you go down to the bottom of the canyon and spend a night there in a tent and come out via the river on a raft bought. Unfortunately we didn have the time for that.

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14th day:Dirt road to the Monument valley

After spending a night in a road motel, which you can know from all horror movies, we had a great american breakfast with pancakes to have energy for the hike going down into the Bryce Canyon.

There are several trails going around the canyon, wherein the shortest is like a comfortable walk and the longest could take a full day. We took one, which was like 4 hours, going down from the northern rim. We enjoyed it prety much, since early in the morning there were no tourist yet and temperatures were modest as well.

Actually I liked the place that much, that I even returned there last year in the winter. You can read about it here:
http://szaip.blogspot.nl/2012/01/4th-5th-day.html

Leaving the Bryce canyon we took a shortcut on a dirt road direction monument valley i.e. the Marlboro country. Driving that road was not easy, but we had a lot of fun with the Cherokee and saved 500km s by not driving around the whole Colorado river down to the next bridge.

Instead we took a ferry over Lake Mead and enjoyed looking at the wildlife around the lake.

Shortly after the ferry crossing we arrived in the Monument Valley, which is a region of the Colorado Plateau characterized by a cluster of vast sandstone buttes, the largest reaching 1,000 ft (300 m) above the valley floor. The area is part of the Colorado Plateau.

The elevation of the valley floor ranges from 5,000 to 6,000 feet above sea level.We just arrived before sunset and enjoyed the view of the valley after a flash rain in the middle of the desert.

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13th day: Zion and Bryce canyon

That was the first day of bigger loop we made around Las Vegas at that time. We hired an SUV for it as we had it in mind to go off road as well, where it is going to be possible. We got a V8 Grand Cherokee and left LV early in the morning, with the destination Zion NP.

Zion National Park is located in the Southwestern United States, near Springdale, Utah. A prominent feature of the 229-square-mile (590 km2) park is Zion Canyon, which is 15 miles long and up to half a mile (800 m) deep, cut through the reddish and tan-colored Navajo Sandstone by the North Fork of the Virgin River. The lowest elevation is 3,666 ft at Coalpits Wash and the highest elevation is 8,726 ft at Horse Ranch Mountain.

The Historic period begins in the late 18th century with the exploration of southern Utah by Padres Silvestre Vélez de Escalante and Francisco Atanasio Domínguez. The padres passed near what is now the Kolob Canyons Visitor Center on October 13, 1776, becoming the first people of European descent known to visit the area. In 1825, trapper and trader Jedediah Smith explored some of the downstream areas while under contract with the American Fur Company.

Today thousands of tourists visit the park every day. You can not enter anymore by car, there are busses driving around in the park. We ve been there just after some heavy rain and had to walk therefore in water, which was not easy, because of the rocks on the bottom. It hapened in the past several times that tourists were cut away the exits because of sudden rains.

We continued thereafter direction Bryce Canyon, which we reached just before sunset. It was a really nice drive just escaping several rainstorms.

We spent the night at Ruby s Inn a family run hotel/motel gift store complex at the entrance of the Bryce Canyon. The family moved here in the 1920s, when there was nothing yet only some farmers spread around. They ve got the land almost free and lived for some years as simple dairy farmers. One their neighbors Bryce brought into their attention that there is a useless but quite nice hole on their land. Indeed it was nice and the family liked it so much that they started to invite friends and relative to visit it. The next year they made a camp with 2 tents along the rim. That I show it is started. Today it is one of the most famous and visited NP s of the US with millions of visitors 3 Best Western Hotels several motels and gift stores on the still family run property.


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12th day: Trip to the Hoover dam

On that day we made a rather short trip around Vegas and vistied a State park closeby. It was really hot outside, but we still had fun outside looking at the bizarre rock formations in red rock.

Later on in the afternoon we visited the Hoover dam, an amazing construction, specially at the time it was built.
It was constructed between 1931 and 1936 during the Great Depression and was dedicated on September 30, 1935, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Its construction was the result of a massive effort involving thousands of workers, and cost over one hundred lives.

The curving arch of the dam transmits the water's force into the abutments, in this case the rock walls of the canyon. The wedge-shaped dam is 660 ft (200 m) thick at the bottom, narrowing to 45 ft (14 m) at the top, leaving room for a highway connecting Nevada and Arizona.

Some interesting data (wiki):

Dam and spillways
Type of dam	Concrete gravity-arch
Height	726.4 ft (221.4 m)
Length	1,244 ft (379 m)
Crest width	45 ft (14 m)
Base width	660 ft (200 m)
Volume	3,250,000 cu yd (2,480,000 m3)
Crest elevation	1,232 ft (376 m)
Impounds	Colorado River
Type of spillway	2 x controlled drum-gate
Spillway capacity	400,000 cu ft/s (11,000 m3/s)
Reservoir
Creates	Lake Mead
Capacity	28,537,000 acre·ft (35.200 km3)
Active capacity	15,853,000 acre·ft (19.554 km3)
Inactive capacity	10,024,000 acre·ft (12.364 km3)
Catchment area	167,800 sq mi (435,000 km2)
Surface area	247 sq mi (640 km2)[1]
Normal elevation	1,219 ft (372 m)
Max. water depth	590 ft (180 m)
Reservoir length	112 mi (180 km)

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11th day: Welcome to Las vegas

Las Vegas metropolitan area has 2 million habitants and was established in 1905. It has one of the highest suicide rates but not because of the residents. It is the visitors... Why? Because Las Vegas is the second gambling capitol of the world, just after Macau.

The first Casino opened here in 1931 and offered 63 rooms. The era of the megaresorts, which is the trend still today started with the opening of The Mirage 1989. With its 3000 rooms it was the biggest hotel of the world at its opening. Today there are around 20 hotels along the strip, each having 3-6000 rooms. The biggest one at the moment is the MGM Grand with almost 7000 rooms. We visited quite some of the big resorts.

The casinos have very nice bars, restaurants and different types of entertainment. The density of Michelin star quality restaurants is the highest on the world. Cirque de Soleil is running 5 different shows at the same time and the city is home to numerous sport events and huge conventions. The hotel occupancy rate is the highest nationwide and was well over 90% in 2005. Even during the crisis in 2008 was not lower than 80%, although gaming revenues fall back by 50 percent and still not recovered by far.

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9-10th day: Leaving the East-coast

We spent our last days on the East coast around Rocky Hill and just relaxed as preparing for the transfer to Las Vegas. We visited some brand new neighbourhoods with their tiny houses. Nobody did know at that time, that in less than 2 years the bubble will burst dropping the value of these properties by 50%.

I would be really curious to see those streets these days. Probably most of the properties are bank owned and selling really cheap.

On the other day we said Good Bye to uncle Steve and the family and left from Boston with the JetBlue Airlines to Las Vegas to continue our trip on the South-west.

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