Photos of Summer Vacation 2008
Here are my photos from a really great trip in the Western United States.
The focus of the trip was to join our friends Denise and Richard from Seattle at Grand Canyon and hike to the bottom and back. We've been talking about an adventure like this for years - and now the time has finally come to undertake the trip. Thanks go to Denise for fixing 2 night's accommodation at Phantom Ranch at the bottom of the Canyon.
And I'd also like to thank Kate and Barkley for their company on this adventure. Kate and Denise roomed together in San Diego about 30 years ago and have remained friends ever since. Kate and Barkley live in Flagstaff, AZ - so they're locals. Thanks guys for your company.
We bought a new camera for the trip. A Canon S5 IS - just great. And it can take multiple shots and make them into panormas - even 360 wrap-arounds. Here are our panoramas. You'll need QuickTime (free download from Apple). These are about 7mb each:
However the Grand Canyon Adventure was sandwiched with a couple of great slices of California we've always wanted to visit. Before arriving at Grand Canyon, we visited Lake Tahoe, Mono Lake, Lone Pine, Death Valley, Las Vegas and Hoover Dam.
On the return, we visited Flagstaff, Montezuma's Castle and Phoenix, Arizona before returning via San Diego and Los Angeles and driving the route 101 home to San Jose. We visited the Presidential Libraries of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
It was a really great trip. 2574 miles. Quite a trek. It's hard to pick off the highlight of the trip because every day was interesting and enjoyable in its own way. So we'll award the gold star to Grand Canyon and Phantom Ranch, however Mono Lake, Lone Pine, Death Valley, Taliesin West and President Reagan's Library were also unforgettable.
We've lived in this wonderful country for 8 years now, and visited 46 states. This is the first time we've revisited anywhere out of California. Revisiting Grand Canyon, Flagstaff and Phoenix were all fine. And the trip down memory lane in San Diego was interesting. I hadn't been there for 25 years and it's clearly prospered and grown considerably since the early 1980s.
Vegas was as seedy as I suspected. We didn't bother to leave the car when we drove down the strip. As I get older, I get even less interested in cities and mass entertainment. Ali and I are much happier to go hill walking than visiting a place like Vegas. It was astonishing to see how much construction is going on in Phoenix and Vegas. Building sprawling cities in the desert doesn't make sense to me. With climate change approaching and higher energy costs, it's hard to see how living in those places can be sustained into the future. And there's the matter of water supply. Lake Mead is 100 feet below its normal level. The folks in Vegas could empty it in the next few years. I'll watch with nervous interest and concern.
