Salt Lake City - Day 20

One of my regular readers complained this morning that I hadn't been keeping up with the required frequency of blog postings to his liking. Please accept my apologies.

The big news is that we have decided to cut our trip short, and make it back to London in time for both kids to start school in the fall. Our plans to have Tom take his first semester of High School through the Internet were falling apart. The school is in the process of “re-evaluating” their program for full time students, and did not have a date when this process would be completed. So we have shortened our plans to arrive back on Sept 4th, in time for school on the 8th. The kids are overjoyed. We are all a little road weary now. We have seen so much, it is hard to get excited about seeing new things. Chris and I will have to go back and visit Provence, Greece, Italy and Spain by ourselves someday soon.

Back to the trip! On Monday, we left Phoenix and headed north to Sedona. Sedona has majestic buttes of red and gold coloured rock. The kids and I took a Red Rock Jeep Tour up into a couple of the buttes. The guide was very informative, and talked nonstop. One of his best stories was about a tree. The red in the soil comes from high iron content. Arizona gets a lot of lightning strikes, but rarely does it ever have a forest fire as a result of lightening. This is because there is a tree that acts as nature’s lightening rod. Whenever it rains, the tree sucks up a lot of water and with the water, iron. The high iron content conducts electricity, and when lightning strikes, it almost always strikes this tree. The tree’s high water content prevents it from catching on fire. You could see lots of examples of where these trees have scorched tops where they had been hit.

We spent the night in Flagstaff, and then drove up to the Grand Canyon. I have always wanted to see the Grand Canyon, and now I have. It is truly awe inspiring what a river can do to the landscape in a few hundred million years. We spent a couple of hours looking at the Canyon from a couple of different viewpoints, then we got back in the car. Our next stop was the Hoover Dam. Again that is something that everyone should see. We have heard a lot about the pending water shortage in the South West US, and again we saw dramatic evidence of it. Lake Mead, which feeds the dam, has been dropping steadily for about two decades. It is now dropping about 10 feet per year. Have a look at the pictures, the white line is the old water mark. The Hoover Dam has also been affected by the Zebra Mussel, as it is breeding like there is no tomorrow and causing lots of problems on the water intakes and pipes. We left Hoover Dam and drove the final few miles into Las Vegas.

I think the kids where more impressed with the fountains at Bellagio than the Grand Canyon. They are fantastic. We spend two nights and one day in Las Vegas. We wandered the strip, I lost the $20 per day gambling that I allotted myself, spend some time near the pool, and did a bit of shopping. The kids and Chris did a gondola ride at the Venetian. It was just the right amount of time to spend in Las Vegas in my mind. We spent the next day driving up to Salt Lake City.

I have a buddy who lives in Salt Lake City. Byron and I went to high school together and also lived together for a couple of years in University. We had dinner on Wednesday night with Byron, his wife Tammy and their daughter Jenna. On Thursday, we drove out to see the Kennecott Copper Mine. It is one of the largest copper mine in the world and had been in production since 1903. Supposedly, it and the Great Wall of China are the only two man-made objects you can see from the space shuttle. We also had a tour of Temple Square, and heard the pin that was dropped at the front of the Tabernacle. The Tabernacle was constructed in 1846, yet has unbelievable acoustics. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir now just practises there.

We went to dinner at a great Mexican Restuarant called Red Iguanna, and then went out to Byron and Tammy's home and were treated to her famous Deep Fried Ice Cream. It lived up to its billing, but I didn't need the calories. It was really good to catch up with our friends again.

Today we start our three day drive to Indian Head.

Cheers Ian

Sedona, Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam and Las Vegas