The Jag-war is now officially an ‘Ag-war, the J having either detached itself from the boot-lid somewhere in the desert Southwest, or having been detached by someone else suffering from the aforementioned. ‘Opefully ‘Ertz understand.

I got up early and joined the crowd watching sunrise at Mather Point. The light was intermittent due to the heavy but broken cloud cover, but when it broke through we got nice splashes of colour on the rocks. It was bloody cold – even with my heaviest available hat and coat I was suffering a bit by the time the sun was fully up.

After breakfast we set off back down the East Entrance Road to the Desert View area. This time the light was good and I managed to get up the Watchtower, a great brick folly on the wall of the Canyon with wonderful views outside and great recreations of native art inside.

At the next stop back towards the Lodge we were treated to a wonderful display, a rainbow forming underneath us, inside the Canyon.

In the afternoon I took a sightseeing flight over the Canyon. We were a bit dubious of the safety record of the helicopter operator, so I opted for a fixed-wing flight. As a way of getting a fresh perspective it was fine, but as a photographic platform it was pretty useless, and I was battling a combination of odd angles and a dirty and scratched window. Next time I will be brave and stick to the helicopter.

After frankly disgusting food at Grand Canyon’s other outlets we had great hopes for our dinner booking at El Tovar, but we were sadly to be disappointed. Things didn’t start well – we arrived a few minutes early to be told our table was not yet ready, fair enough, and to come back nearer the exact time. We sat down about 5m from the person managing admissions. The next thing we knew I received a text, at international rates, saying the table was ready, only to be told again at the desk that it wasn’t.

We were eventually admitted, and shown to a cramped corner table with a view of the car park and a strong cold draught. The latter was so bad we eventually had to move ourselves. Our server turned up and was very helpful, but was unable to offer any alternative to sprouts as the vegetable accompaniment to roast duck! We tried to get on the Wi-Fi, but failed and the water boy appeared to take some delight in confirming that access was only available to residents, not restaurant customers.

The food was mixed: the soup, Elk Bolognese and the duck itself were good. The sprouts were like bullets and the rice pilaf was dry and inedible. Overall it was nowhere near the standard which should have been delivered for the very high prices being charged.

Back at the lodge we attempted to plan better catering for the next day, but literally every catering outlet in Grand Canyon Village and the gateway town of Tusayan gets, at best, very mixed reviews and many are downright appalling. The statistical distribution of TripAdvisor reviews is a whole topic for another blog, but we essentially gave up and decided to stick to sandwiches until we’re back in Utah.

Disappointed.

We got on the road early to drive down to the Grand Canyon. The first segment went very well, with a quick drive to Jacob’s Lake, a pleasant coffee and cookie stop, and some wonderful scenery in great broken light as we followed the 89A underneath the Vermilion Cliffs.

That route ended at the Navajo Bridges. While these are still majestic with great views from the old bridge into the Colorado, they’ve changed the layout of the parking and viewing areas somewhat since our last visit in 2007 and I found it impossible to recreate my favourite shot with both bridges in the frame.

Once over the bridge you are in the Navajo Nation, and there’s essentially nowhere for a stop until you reach Cameron, an hour down the road and only a mile before the turn off into the park. We were sufficiently desperate that we went into the Cameron "Trading Post" and opted for the "fine dining" option although we only really wanted a sandwich. Let’s put it this way: Michel Roux has nothing to worry about. Put another way, Frances described her toasted cheese sandwich as possibly the worst meal in recent record. My "chicken club" (burger) was marginally better, but came swamped by about 2000 calories of disgusting carbs. The main course was followed by a latte so strong Frances claimed she could taste it in her ears!

Lunch "dealt with" we drove into the park via the Eastern entrance which both saves about 100 miles driving and provides direct access to a number of viewpoints. At this point we encountered a new challenge – the temperature was dropping like a stone, and our "hot desert" outfits were woefully inadequate. I don’t think you can get pneumonia via the knees, but it’s just as well. That said the scenery was absolutely stunning, as ever, but between the temperature and tricky cloudy light we worked quickly and moved on promptly from each viewpoint.

Once we’d booked into the Yavapai Lodge and settled into our room we went in search of sustenance. The Yavapai Tavern is a bit basic and produced a remarkably rubbery Elk burger, although for a change Frances’ chilli was OK. They do have one of the best beer menus I have seen in a long time, but that doesn’t fully compensate for an inedible meal.

Things can only get better. Tomorrow we’re on sarnies for breakfast and lunch, but we have dinner booked at the El Tovar restaurant. Fingers crossed!

Kanab is probably the best base for a day trip to the Grand Canyon’s North Rim. We’ve had some aspiration to do such a trip since our first visit to the region in 1994, but each time it’s been prevented by the early closure of the North Rim after the first snowfall. Fortunately there was no such issue this time, and today we set off for our visit.

From Kanab it’s a very easy drive, albeit about 90 miles. The first section through Fredonia is a bit boring, but you have to watch the speed limits and Frances was battling with an odd road surface which while smooth had a pattern of shiny stripes reflecting the early morning sun. Fortunately the straight stretch quickly gives way to the climb onto the Kaibab Plateau, and the "almost mandatory" coffee and cookie stop at Jacob’s Lake provided for a quick recovery.

From there it’s a very pretty drive down to the North Rim, especially with the gathering Autumn colours, although you have to keep your eyes peeled. At one point we had to jam on the brakes to avoid a group of deer crossing the road, and the possibility of a bison or cattle encounter was signposted.

At the Rim our interaction with the Ranger at the visitor centre focused on the pending US government shutdown and the potential impact on the rest of our trip. However we decided not to worry about that, and had a nice walk around Bright Angel Point, followed by a picnic lunch.

In the afternoon we drove the scenic drive down to Point Royal and back. This provides easy access to a range of the North Rim’s best viewpoints. It’s a very different experience to the south, where you’re looking across to the higher North Rim. Instead the Marble Plateau, itself at over 7000ft, stretches out below you. What is similar is that when you are on the road you can be 50m from the Grand Canyon, and be completely unaware it’s there.

We got back to Kanab a few minutes late for our dinner reservation, but needn’t have worried as unusually Adria’s was almost empty. However the food, beer and service were excellent and we’ve been promised live music for tomorrow, so we’ll pay them a repeat visit.

Minor Tribulations

We spent the morning on laundry and admin. The first source of minor panic was the near miss on the US Government shutdown. This might have significantly impacted our trip, although it appears that the governors of the states with multiple National Parks have got tired of the federal government screwing up a primary income stream at random intervals and now have appropriate Plans B in place. In the end the shutdown was narrowly averted, but one continues to be bemused by a system of government in which the three main legislative branches are frequently working to not only different but actively opposed agendas.

With CNN on in the background I was also trying to make sense of the position on our credit cards. In the old days every transaction generated either a paper or email receipt, but it’s suddenly a lot more complicated. Hotels and tour companies take part payment at booking and part later, but you don’t necessarily get details of the second charge. A lot of minor transactions don’t generate a receipt at all. To further complicate matters Kanab appears to be a wierd twilight zone where they don’t get chip & PIN and resort to swiping, signing and multiple random variants thereof.

Admin completed we visited the movie set museum, and set about trying to find a light lunch. Although it was still about a month from the end of the season, and all the hotels were full, almost all the coffee bars and cafes were shut. We settled for soup and a cheese sandwich at an odd vegetarian cafe, but something less dairy focused would have been better for my digestion.

In the afternoon we did the drive to the Rimrock Hoodoos, also known as the Toadstools. These are set in a small plateau within a mile of the highway. Unfortunately it had clouded over and I was battling the light, but hopefully I have some workable shots. While she was waiting Frances was watching the activity of an enormous tarantula scuttling over the rocks, but sadly just as I got back to her some other tourists spooked it and it went to ground.

We took dinner at Adria’s, accompanied by live music. The band insisted on starting by each playing their own solo compositions, and initially we thought we might be making an early exit, but eventually they all got on stage together and did a set of energetic crowd pleasers covering The Animals, Creedence Clearwater Revival and similar and a good time was had by all.

Cracking!

Everyone knows The Wave, that curling saddle of twisted colourful layers of rock, and everyone wants to get to The Wave, but access is strictly controlled via a tight lottery, and only a few pull it off. However the Coyote Buttes area contains several similar formations, for most of which access is still straightforward, and the best known is White Pocket.

It’s another destination for which you need an appropriate vehicle and guide, and I had again signed up with Dreamland Safaris. When I arrived at their office I was somewhat surprised to find about 10 other punters all going to White Pocket in three separate jeeps, but it is their most popular tour. However this does suggest that some form of access limitation may be on the way.

The drive in takes about 2.5 hours, with paved road giving way to good unpaved road, giving way to rough unpaved road and finally thick, deep sand. Fortunately our guide Maddi made it look easy, but I suspect it really isn’t.

White Pocket is a big area, bigger than The Wave, covering about 7 square miles and a typical route taking in the well-known and most dramatic formations is a 2-3 mile hike/scramble of 3-4 hours, if you’ve got and are used to photographers, which fortunately Maddi was.

There’s no single signature formation like The Wave itself, although The Wormhole comes close, but instead you have a procession of impossible looking rock loops and swirls, and waves, linked by white "brain rock" which is very easy to walk on.

My advice is simple: if you can do this, do it before it also becomes inaccessible to all but a lucky daily few.

On Wednesday morning I had another planned trip, to Peekaboo Slot Canyon near Kanab. This has many similar features to Antelope Canyon, except that if you time it right it’s completely empty, and a photographer can be left entirely to their own devices to play with equipment, settings and compositions as they wish.

The big challenge is that the drive (or hike) in is over a mile of deep, soft sand, not to be attempted in a normal road car regardless of pedigree, so most people use the services of a specialist tour company, and I was no exception, going with Dreamland Safaris, a local company in Kanab. Our guide, Orion, was both an excellent driver and a highly entertaining guide, although I don’t think any of the guests managed to get a word in edgeways.

The canyon lived up to its reputation, with great reflected light through the early morning, and I came away very happy with the results.

Over lunch Frances and I realised that while Kanab and environs might fill four days, we didn’t want to return after Bryce Canyon, and felt a replan coming on, to make a different use of our last couple of days. Replan aside we had a quiet afternoon, fitting in a drive to the somewhat disappointing Johnson Canyon and some shopping before an early dinner.

Dinner itself was hilarious, including educating the waiter how to make an Irish coffee, and threatening him and the bartender with broken legs if they attempted to repeat the excess of their compatriot at Glacier National Park and add a nice bit of Crème de Menthe for a splash of Kelly Green.

Tomorrow I would be back to Dreamland Safaris and my trip to White Pocket!

After breakfast we set off for the drive back to Kanab. We shared the first two stages, over the mountain to Boulder and then down the SR12 to Cannonville. These were uneventful, except to note that the aspen trees which were green four days earlier were now almost all yellow, and a few were on the way to orange. It’s amazing how a few cold nights can bring on such a sudden and coordinated change.

At Cannonville we left the main road and set off down Cottonwood Canyon Road – a well maintained but unsurfaced road which cuts straight through the Paria Plateau to emerge halfway between Page and Kanab. Completing this road had been on my to-do list since originally planning the 2007 trip. It’s a dramatic road of constantly changing scenery and geology. However the highlight for me was definitely Grosvenor Arch, a dramatic bluff of yellow stone in the middle of nowhere, topped by an amazing arch structure. The Jag-war, with its Range Rover underpinnings, managed the drive without fault, but I certainly wouldn’t attempt it in something with two wheel drive.

The last few miles of the road are a bit boring and feel somewhat interminable, but we eventually emerged onto highway 89 and turned right for Kanab. The town is very spread out, with a road pattern which while it does follow the American grid system, seems to have somewhat arcane numbering, and as a result we couldn’t find our hotel. At one point we pulled in in front of the local school, and I attempted to work out what we should be doing. Unfortunately the downloaded maps on Gaia GPS, while they appear to map almost every rock in Utah, don’t have Kanab street names so that wasn’t much help.

Meanwhile Frances was sitting pointing at the big screen on the car’s dashboard, struggling for the right words. "That.. The magic machine… For Finding Places… Would that work?". After much hilarity we put the address into the Jag’s GPS and it took us directly to the hotel. Magic.

Dinner was somewhat delayed for various reasons. We were running late and most restaurants in Kanab had a queue. We got near to the front at one before realising that the primary ingredients in all their dishes were garlic and chilli. We were finally sat down with drinks and food ordered at the Iron Horse, and all the lights went out! The staff appeared completely unphased and just circulated with warm words until things went back on about 15 mins later. We were eventually fed and watered, but somewhat later than planned.

For the next stage of our trip we had to move on from Escalante to Torrey, at the gateway to Capitol Reef National Park. First leg of the journey was along the dramatic stretch of Scenic Route 12 to Boulder, a road we have driven several times but never gets old. We stopped at the top of the Hog’s Back, the narrow ridge where the land falls several thousand feet both sides of the road, and I had yet another go at capturing it photographically.

In Boulder we found a great coffee shop apparently run by a retired member of the Village People – great coffee and croissants – then set off down the Burr Trail. This small but paved road eventually winds down to the bottom of Capitol Reef, but much of the photographic interest is in the first 25 miles. It starts with mounds of cross-bedded cream limestone, but then the road descends into the aptly-named Long Canyon. This runs for about 10 miles with the road winding along the bottom alongside the riverbed, red and grey canyon walls towering above.

At one point there’s a short but dramatic slot canyon. It’s not Antelope Canyon, but it is pretty, a few feet from the road, and about a million less people.

Back in Boulder we revisited the coffee shop, then hit SR12 for the final run to Torrey. This section is different again, a pretty winding Alpine route with cattle grazing and aspens replacing the cottonwood trees – the pass summit is at 9600 feet.

We finally reached the end of the 12 at its junction with the 24 a few miles outside Capitol Reef. We took dinner at the local Mexican restaurant, which was absolutely buzzing. Frances took great delight in inspecting the comings and goings at the liquor store next door. Torrey is in a different county to Escalante and they obviously have a more relaxed attitude to booze. There’s even a distillery over the road!

Desert and Oasis

The Red Sands Hotel in Torrey shows the downside of too much checking on TripAdvisor. The rooms are large and clean, but they are overpriced and poorly equipped and the hotel has no soul or view. Several impracticalities will get added to my list… A mile down the road we found my first choice: stunning views, cheaper and a very nice restaurant over the road – I might have compromised on the age of the bedding.

After a gentle start we set off to explore the park. Everywhere you turn there’s a new, dramatic vista with yet more forms and colours in the rocks. However it’s interesting just how much varies with the quality of the light, and the direction of travel. In 2007 we drove route 24 from East to West, in dull conditions, and didn’t get any of the majesty which hits you like a slap heading into the park from the West in good light.

In amongst the towering rocks and stretches of desert brush you have the Fruita Oasis, a small valley fed by the Fremont river which even at the end of a heatwave summer is pleasant and green. The original Mormon settlers moved on with the creation of the National Park, but the rich orchards still generate vast quantities of fruit available to visitors on a "U pick" basis.

In the afternoon we did the aptly named Scenic Drive including the short unpaved section into Capitol Gorge. The scenery was consistently stunning, but towards the end clouds were gathering and the dull light killed effective photography.

We therefore headed for an early dinner at the Rim Rock Restaurant. I ordered a coke to start, and a very small glass turned up. It took one sip to establish this was not just a coke, but had a substantial shot of rum in it. I know some of the Americans struggle a bit with my accent, but that’s a new one. Planned drink restored we had an excellent meal, albeit slightly interrupted when the last rays of the setting sun broke through the cloud lighting up the view with a stunning orange glow which sent everyone running for their cameras.

Here’s hoping for better light tomorrow.

Red Canyon

After a good stay at the Thunderbird Lodge we hit the road towards Escalante. The morning’s highlight was Red Canyon, a relatively small area with similar geology to Bryce, but many of the rocks are a bright reddish shade. Many of the best views are from the road or a short trail around the visitor centre. We’ve driven past previously without time to stop and explore, so we took our time today.

Scenic Route 12 is over 120 miles from its start near Red Canyon to its end at Capitol Reef, and a large number of those miles are packed with dramatic scenery. In addition the road has had a lot of work since our last visit and is now open, a comfortable width and beautifully surfaced. The drive to Escalante was a very pleasant one.

The Canyon Country Lodge is a nice new hotel and we had a pleasant few hours in the sun. Dinner, however, was complicated by Utah’s licensing laws. We’d already fallen foul of the rule that you can’t order a drink until you’re sitting down with meal ordered, so you go thirsty if there’s a wait for a table. Tonight we had a new version: we sat down promptly, placed our food and drink order, and then they couldn’t find any staff over 21 to open the bottles and carry the drinks to our table, so the drinks only turned up with the last course, carried to the table by a suitably qualified (old) member of staff who looked suspiciously like the gardener. You also can’t finish drinks off outside the restaurant area, so the concept of a relaxing drink in the lounge doesn’t exist. Annoying.

Hell’s Backbone

After a disturbed night’s sleep (what idiot leaves the alarm set for midnight on a hotel room clock?) I did a solo dawn shoot at the Devil’s Garden. This was straightforward apart from the Jag-war’s satnav dumping me in the middle of nowhere 4 miles from target at which point I had to revert to manual navigation and dead reckoning. When I arrived the car park was occupied by several trucks with photographers milling around, but they promptly got into their trucks and drove off, not hanging around for the wonderful golden hour light. Odd.

Back at the hotel we discovered that there is nowhere to get a decent breakfast in Escalante. Every shop, regardless of the nature of their merchandise, will sell you a coffee, but none of the cafes and restaurants do breakfast service. The fare on offer at our hotel was inedible, and the very nice diner attached to the motel where we stayed in 2007 seems to have disappeared.

Mid-morning we set off on the aptly named Hell’s Backbone, a 38 mile high-country unpaved road between Escalante and Boulder, which was the only way to get between them until the challenging engineering of the new, lower road in the 1940s. Most of the drive is in forest, moderately demanding and not very interesting, until you reach Hell’s Backbone Bridge, a short and narrow link (109 ft long and 14 ft wide) between two outcrops. This apparently took about a day off the old horse trail, but it also has the most dramatic views down into the valleys on both sides of a narrow ridge, and for probably a good 40 miles in both directions.

After a relaxing few hours at the end of the day we took dinner at the pizzeria. New variant on the Utah licensing laws: I had to go to the counter to order Frances’ second glass of wine, but I am not allowed to carry it to the table on my own so the proprietor had to accompany me with one glass of wine, apologising as we went. Daft.

You Can’t Win Them All

We had another poor night’s sleep courtesy of a big unexplained thump around midnight and a recurring noise sounding like someone pulling a water tank around the car park. However we then slept a bit longer in the morning which may have helped reset our internal clocks a bit.

I took a walk round the Petrified Forest, which was a pleasant ramble but had only a couple of really dramatic pieces of fossilised wood, so I’m not sure "Forest" is fully justified.

We took lunch at the deli, where delivery of our coffees was somewhat delayed by a rather public employee relations dispute. Not for nothing is the Chinese symbol for war two women under one roof. I suspect there may be a staffing change coming on, but it’s also possible they have been carrying on like that for years…

After a lazy afternoon in the sun we went back to The Devil’s Garden to photograph the rocks at sunset. Four miles from the site a large number of cars were parked up in the middle of nowhere roughly where the Jag-war’s satnav dumped me the other morning. We carried on to the actual location and had that wonderful place to ourselves. Are we growing a race who really cannot cope if the computer is wrong?

Back in town we took dinner at a different restaurant attached to another new motel. The food was delicious, service was prompt and they presented no complications due to Utah licensing laws. On the other hand it had absolutely zero ambience and the music was awful – weird covers of 60s hits. You can’t win them all.

Not only a good night’s sleep but also an excellent breakfast turned out to be included in the $130 per night for the hotel in La Verkin, not quite sure how they pull that off. It does make a difference having a good start to the day.

We’ve visited Zion Canyon three times over 30 years, but previously always come away feeling underwhelmed. We therefore set off into the park with moderate expectations, but a bit more time to spend than under the original plan. First contact reinforced our concerns, as traffic was slow, parking difficult and purchasing our parks pass effectively impossible due to IT issues. We filled our water bottles and headed to the mandatory shuttle bus.

The drive up the valley teased with great views and I worked my techniques for photographing from inside a moving vehicle, however when we got to the end the river walk from the Temple of Sinawava was crowded and uninspiring. Fortunately things got better at the next stop, with a well-lit soaring vista to admire.

Once again Martres’ instructions paid dividends. He has assigned the name "Photo Point" to "40 feet below the unnamed car park between stops 8 and 7" and with good reason as you can get great compositions including both The Organ and The Great White Throne. I was battling flare due to the Sun’s position, but hopefully I have some rewarding shots.

The Zion Lodge has a beer garden, in which you can buy a beer without falling foul of the complexity of Utah licensing laws, of which more later, so that’s icing on the scenery’s cake.

We drove out through the East Entrance. On previous visits we’ve never really been happy with the lighting on that scenery, but today even though the sun was still fairly high in a clear blue sky everything had a warm glow and we stopped for shots at each turnout.

We came away feeling that we’d finally done Zion justice. Maybe it just helps doing it as an early stop not one of the last on the traditional Grand Circle tour. You can’t escape the fact that it’s overcrowded, but get away from the fixed routes and it is a gem.

A Plan Comes Together

For our Autumn 2023 trip we decided to return to Red Rock country, and do a variant on the Great Circle tour around canyon country in Arizona and Utah. We weren’t short of ideas: the map of southern Utah is an almost continuous patchwork of National and State Parks, some of which we’d just skirted on our previous trip 16 years ago. Also that time we’d missed out Grand Canyon and Bryce Canyon, and wanted to see them again having only dim memories from our 1994 trip. Our initial idea was a sort of Grand Circle in reverse (going clockwise rather that the traditional anti clockwise), but as Field Marshal Moltke famously pointed out, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy!

Our planning started in earnest about 6 months ahead, and it became rapidly apparent that we should ideally have booked some of the key hotels even earlier. We were also wary having ended up in a couple of alleged hotels in Hawaii which were only one step up from doss houses, so a lot of reference to TripAdvisor was required. However after a bit of juggling we had our hotels for Grand Canyon and Bryce, and could start fitting the rest together.

Once again our primary reference was Photographing the Southwest, by Laurent Martres. Fortunately both the Arizona and Utah volumes were comprehensively revised in 2017, and are now helpfully available in Kindle format. What became rapidly apparent was that while the rocks might still be much the same, a lot else has changed. In particular it’s now very difficult to get access to a lot of sites in the Navajo region, whereas others such as Antelope Canyon are completely overrun. Either way access for meaningful photography becomes almost impossible.

What emerged was a plan to really explore southern Utah, spending a few days each based in Kanab, Escalante and Torrey and taking in more unusual locations such as the North Rim of the Grand Canyon as well as the South. The plan also included several guided tours of more difficult locations, such as the northern part of Capitol Reef, so we would not be entirely dependent on my limited off-roading skills in an unknown rental!

Contact with the Enemy

As part of our preparation for any trip, we try and watch some educational videos to tune into the destination. Our choices might bemuse some people – for Hawaii it included Snakes on a Plane. For this trip we found a couple documenting norms of behaviour in Las Vegas, and another couple featuring the dramatic geography of the area around Page and Kanab:

• Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous
• The Hangover
• Evolution
• Broken Arrow

The resilience to unexpected events portrayed by all the central characters in Broken Arrow is particularly salutary.

Packing and preparation complete, we set off for the airport. Contrary to expectations we whisked through check-in and security, although not without the observation that we seem to have to do more and more for ourselves which used to be someone else’s job. This was to become a recurring observation.

Arriving at the gate a short while before boarding it was somewhat disconcerting to see no evidence of any British Airways staff, and this became more concerning as the scheduled departure time came and went without any such appearance. It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that they were trying to avoid contact with customers, especially as no meaningful explanation was forthcoming once boarding did start.

The flight was very smooth, but we arrived very late. On previous trips we flew out of Heathrow at about 11am arriving mid-afternoon with still a reasonable chance of picking up a hire car and finding our own way to the hotel. With a scheduled 5pm flight (let alone an unexplained 1.5 hour delay) there was no chance, and we’d wisely planned to get a taxi and do the hire car later.

We also whisked through US immigration, in about 5 mins total from joining the queue, but baggage collection was a different matter. First it was supposed to be on carousel 31, then it was on 30, then it was 31 again, then a very confused tannoy announcement advised us to keep an eye on both… Fortunately they were adjacent and our bags turned up fairly promptly, but you can see a pattern emerging.

We rapidly became very grateful for our decision to get a taxi. In preparation for holding a Formula One Grand Prix in the streets, the whole area of Las Vegas a couple of blocks to the east of the strip is just a mess of construction, cones and temporary traffic arrangements. We would never have found our way.

Hotel check-in was another "adventure". I handed over the itinerary from The Flight Centre with my thumb on the reference number. Tap tap tap. "I’m sorry Mr. Johnston, I can’t see that. Could you ring your people who did the booking." I explained that this was now about 5am UK time and that wasn’t going to happen, and suggested the young lady get some more senior help. A rather more substantial, older Hispanic lady came over and there was more, focused, tapping. She tried the highly technical solution of checking under Frances’ name. Bingo. It then proceeded to take about 20 minutes for the young lady to find the bell boy with our luggage, but soon after we were reunited in a spacious room with a large bed. End of chapter.

More Fun and Games

The MGM Signature’s breakfast room gets the problem out of the way in the title being mis-named "Delight". The food was disgusting and we were presented with a bill for $60. The days of Las Vegas offering cheap, good food and lodging so you can spend your money in the shops and casinos are long gone.

We set out into sweltering heat, heading into the high 30s C. Everyone was scuttling between buildings and muttering that at least we’d missed the worst of it – temperatures were 10C higher a few weeks earlier. We decided to use the monorail which runs behind the hotels on the east side of the strip. It’s OK, but by the time you’ve walked all the way through an enormous casino, past that hotel’s pool and car park and repeated the process in reverse you might as well just have walked down the strip.

On a positive note the shops in the Forum at Caesars Palace were up to the usual standard but we failed miserably to get a sandwich for lunch and ended up paying over the odds for a stodgy panini and some very uninspiring wine.

Back to the hotel. Vegas strip done.

After a short nap we cleaned up and put on our best togs, ready for dinner at Lawry’s, a highly recommended restaurant specialising in prime rib. Down to the lobby and out to the valet parking and taxi rank, which was deserted apart from an old boy who explained that because the valet parking is full they have blocked the area off and we needed to walk down to the road to get a cab. This, remember, is the posh extension to the MGM Grand, one of Vegas’ largest hotels. We set off but fortunately managed to flag down an incoming cab dropping someone off, although in the confusion Frances managed to pop a button off her dress.

Lawry’s, for a change, worked perfectly. They were expecting us and without delay showed us into an elegant dining room. Our waiter, Steve, was charming, amusing and knowledgeable. The steak was cut to our instruction at the table, wheeled in in what looked like a miniature Airstream caravan. It was all delicious. Sadly they dropped half a point right at the end because we had to scan a QR code to book our own taxi, but otherwise faultless.

The taxi ride back to the hotel was uneventful but complicated by all the road-works, and then the drop-off area at the hotel was still blocked off. On the positive side I found F’s button. However neither of us now had any confidence in our original plan which involved driving ourselves around Las Vegas on Sunday, using what we had now established was non-existent hotel parking, and we felt a re-plan coming on. Plan B?, C?, whatever involved a new hotel booking on the way to Zion, and getting on the road next morning.

Into The Valley, The Valley of Fire

Repacked next morning into effectively flight mode we got a taxi to the Hertz location at the airport. Although we should be on the Gold Club members list I wanted to check a few things, and we joined the main queue. Just as well. The young lady found our booking, but for some reason it didn’t have the right pick-up time, despite the fact that the paperwork in my hand did. The reserved vehicle wasn’t ready and tapping ensued. "I’m sorry Mr Johnston we don’t have that model, but it looks like we have something the same size called a Jag-war e-Pace, would that do?" Frances was trying to get out a sentence about having a look at a picture but I was already biting the agent’s arm off…

Upstairs to the marshalling area, and the old boy checked my reservation. "We have you down for a Chevvy Suburban, is that right?"

"Noooooooooooo!!!" I explained about the change, which hadn’t propagated upstairs. I though computers were supposed to be faster than two sexagenarians pushing a large luggage trolley, but apparently not. Tapping ensued. "Yes, I can do the Jag-war". Result.

We made one short shopping stop, where the only thing that worked was I got about 5 years supply of underwear at the sale price of about $5 a pair. Frances found a nice piece of knitwear in Guess, but in a new experience for us the saleslady refused to swap the large one with the smaller sized one on the mannequin and lost the sale. We cut our losses and hit the road North.

First target was The Valley of Fire. This is a little known, hidden gem of a State Park less than 50 miles from Las Vegas. It’s a relatively small area filled with colourful strata of ancient sand- and mudstones eroded into fascinating shapes, with the bonus that visitor numbers are small and you can still explore under your own power.

What was interesting was that the park rangers were clearly very worried about the effects of Summer 2023’s excessive heat. They had closed off many of the slightly longer hikes, and even the shorter ones had signs warning of potentially fatal consequences, something we’d never seen before. Fortunately a lot of the best sights can be photographed a few feet from the car parks, so it didn’t affect us.

Back on the road it was a straightforward drive up the freeway to our destination in Utah, a gateway town for Zion Canyon called La Verkin. The $130 a night Best Western succeeded where the Signature at the MGM Grand failed. Dinner was taken at the local steakhouse, where Frances pulled off the impressive trick of establishing within the first 30 seconds of meeting the waitress that they have similar health challenges and needed to share notes on medication. Gobsmacked.