Yes, that is a pine marten licking peanut butter off our cottage window

One of the benefits of staying in a remote Scottish valley accessible only by driving over a mountain. (Pine martens go nuts for peanut butter.)

Road Trip Retrospective

10 unexpected yet totally memorable experiences
1. The view of Monument Valley from Muley Point
2. Seeing a white alligator in Hogle Zoo (Salt Lake City)
3. Eating chili polenta at the Red Rock Brewing Co (Salt Lake City)
4. Driving off-road through the Valley of the Gods
5. Watching wild humming birds in close up
6. Traveling along Route 66
7. Standing under Double Arch and looking up, and up.
8. Losing count of how many buffalo were in the herd we saw on Antelope Island
9. Driving over the Hoover Dam
10. Getting excited when a genuine Wild West style tumbleweed ‘tumbled’ across the road right in front of our car.


10 experiences I’d rather forget
1. Drinking prickly pear flavoured iced tea
2. Buying an out-of-date bottle of Diet Dr Pepper from a dodgy vending machine
3. Turning too soon when we were looking for Cracker Barrel and having to drive back down the freeway we’d just driven up
4. Some scary moments adjusting to driving in America
5. Making a fool of myself at an old-time petrol station in Williams, Arizona (“You, lift the handle up, Pardner!”)
6. Most of Las Vegas, especially…
7. The nicotine-heavy smoky smell of the distinctly unglamorous casinos
8. The unhelpful attitude of the Avis sales clerk at SLC airport
9. Having to unpack/repack overweight cases in SLC airport before we came home
10. Waiting for my cases to appear on the conveyor at Heathrow (they were the last ones of our group by a long way and I’ve got prior history of lost luggage!)

Best restaurant of the trip: Red Rock Brewing Co, Salt Lake City. So good, we broke our ‘no going back’ rule and ate there twice. In fact I'd fly back to SLC today just to eat dinner at the brewpub.

Worst restaurant of the trip: The other guys would no doubt say Taco Bell, but I thought the food at The Canyon Star restaurant attached to the Grand Hotel in Tusayan was mediocre, and the waiting staff were distinctly off. But at least we avoided the guy with the banjo! Cracker Barrel needs to get a decent vegetarian option onto its menu as well.

Best hotel of the trip: Metropolitan Inn, Salt Lake City. Right in the city centre, with a decent sized car park, a nice room, a pool, and free internet access in the lobby. Plus breakfast!

Worst hotel of the trip: Hmm, tough one. It’s probably gonna have to be The Stratosphere in Las Vegas. Our room looked out on a concrete wall, and was pretty small by American hotel room standards. The Strat would also have been better if there was some way of avoiding walking through the giant slot machine alley which was the casino.

Best driving experience of the trip: Rallying around mesas in the Valley of the Gods, listening to the gravel pinging off the car’s under-tray.

Worst driving experience: Escaping from the airport, and adjusting to life on the right hand side of the road. Sitting in traffic on the Las Vegas Strip was frustrating.

Biggest serendipity: Humming birds hovering outside the window as I ate a delicious egg salad sandwich at the Thunderbird Lodge. They were drinking sugar water from plastic feeders, and we could walk up to within inches of them, after we'd eaten. After the over-crowded and slightly artificial atmosphere at the Grand Canyon, and the bad-taste gaudiness and sleaze of Las Vegas, it was an unanticipated soul-refreshing moment.

Biggest disappointment: Las Vegas.

Lessons learned: Next time I wouldn’t bother leaving Utah. The Grand Canyon was less impressive than I thought it would be, and Vegas just felt sad.

Buffalo Point

Last day in Utah and we went out to Antelope Island nature reserve in the Great Salt Lake. At Buffalo Point we saw a buffalo. Here's me pointing at him.



Later we saw quite a few more, and closer up too. In fact, we had to wait while they crossed the road. I counted about 300 or so in the herd we saw, but there may well have been more (600 live on the island).

Bison Crossing



Buffalo Herd

Back to Salt Lake via Bryce Canyon

After a long road trip yesterday to Escalante where we drove through Zion National Park, we had another mammoth trip today returning to Salt Lake City, but first we saw the sights of Bryce Canyon. And what sights they were.

Bryce is full of 'hoodoos', naturally carved red sandstone pillars and fins, in such a quantity, they become eye-boggling. We didn't have time to hike down among them, which must be amazing, so we travelled the rim trail, stopping every so often to look down on a new vista of knobbly rocks.

A Native American legend related to Bryce Canyon has it that the spirit god Coyote turned the inhabitants to stone on account of their wickedness. The white discoverer, Bryce, a Mormon pioneer farmer described it as "a hell of a place to lose a cow". I'm happy to believe both of those stories, having seen the place.

We didn't see any coyotes, but we were chuffed to see a Utah Prairie Dog on the rim trail. He stopped and posed for photos for us, which was cool, as apparently they're quite rare. However the privileged feelings didn't last long. An hour or so later, we were eating our dinner in a tourist trap restaurant and there was one running around inside the restaurant eating fallen bits of food. There's nothing like finding out endangered animals are considered rodent pests to take the shine off seeing them in the wild.

"Ah, 'tis Grand, to be sure"

2 highlights from our trip to Grand Canyon...

1) Seeing wild Californian Condors riding the thermals - from above. They're the largest birds in America with a wingspan of 9 and a half feet. From the ground they look like hang-gliders!

2) Walking behind a family of tourists from the Emerald Isle talking in a broad Irish brogue. I wanted to go up to them and get them on tape saying the canyon was "Grand" but I thought better of it.

Petroglyphs on Potash Road

This morning we left Moab and travelled down the Potash Road to look at the seven hundred year old rock art carved into the dark coating on the cliffs. Of course, several modern day artists have carved stuff next to it too. But the original figures are still compelling and curious. One set, carved like a set of people cut out from paper made me smile.

On the way back to our car we saw a family of skunks crossing the road - a mum and three babies. We followed her at a distance and watched her safely esconce her family in the a tiny cave behind a tree.

From Moab we headed out to Natural Bridges National Park, before taking an off-road trip to Muley Point where we could look out over Monument Valley - the real wild west of mesas and scrub. After traversing a switchback road down a cliff we took another off-road diversion - this time a 20 mile trip through the Valley of the Gods.

When we arrived in our destination for the night, Bluff, there were very few places open. We ended up in a barbecue steakhouse and I sacrificed my vegetarian ethics so I could actually eat something - authentic deep south barbecue chicken. It was delicious.

Urban Fox

Driving back into Cardiff today, we spotted this little fellow on the roundabout at the end of Newport Road. He was watching the cars chunter by slowly in the Christmas sales traffic. As we were stuck in the traffic we had the time to take his picture.

A depressing tally

Driving back last night from Shrewsbury I hit a badger. It seemed to leap out from the hedge into my front wheel with a resounding bang and a thud. I thought it was a dog or a sheep or something because all I saw was a flash of white before it disappeared below the bonnet of my car with a thump.

Even though I'm an animal lover it adds to quite a depressing tally of wildlife roadkill. Once when I was driving home from Weston two baby foxes were on the carriageway. They seemed to want to play with the headlights of the car and wherever I moved on the road they moved too, until I slammed on my brakes, but it was too late to avoid hitting at least one of them. Then up in Scotland once, a squirrel dashed out and ended up under my wheel with a sickening crunch.

And now I've got a badger on my conscience too.