Author: Jon

Quad Biking in the Valley of Fire

Another first for both of us today as neither of us had ridden a quad bike and we didn’t really know what to expect. We’d booked a trip to go quad biking along the edge of Valley of Fire State Park and we couldn’t have asked for a better backdrop to our first ride.

I had my suspicions that it was going to be a bit like the horseback trail ride we did in Yellowstone Park, a fairly sedate drive through some amazing scenery. I quickly realised when I signed the “we’re not responsible for your death” waiver form and saw the guide’s “The fun things are all dangerous” T-shirt that this wasn’t going to be a sedate drive!

We were given a very brief introduction (here’s the accelerator/brake, don’t touch anything else) and after our first mile or so we were asked if we wanted to go faster or slower. Those of us that said faster were moved into the first group which went ahead and the slower ones went behind so they could go at their own pace. This is where it got really fun. We drove about 14 miles across sand, rock and dust trails, jumping over bumps and hitting top speeds of around 30mph, which feels very fast on a quad bike. After eating lunch (kind of, it was nearly sunset) in the middle of the desert it was time to head back to the start.

Unfortunately, a few minutes later I turned a bend and got the shock of my life as I saw through the dust what looked like  a quad bike upside down, with Jen underneath it.

I don’t mean to make this sound more dramatic than it was but even more worryingly Jen was shouting for somebody to lift it off of her and there was petrol leaking onto her from the fuel tank, which didn’t look good. Anyway, I lifted it off and she was on her feet within a few minutes. She was worried about the very hot exhaust pipe leaning on her leg but she hadn’t broken anything and apart from a few bruises (see photo) and a battered ego she was fine.

By the time all this was over the light was pretty much faded and one of the guides took us back via a safer but longer route, which meant we got to drive through the desert at night by the light of the dune buggy’s lights, which was an experience in itself.

Jen’s little blip didn’t seem to put her off and we both agreed this was easily the most exciting thing we’ve done since we got here and the scenery would have been worth a visit even without the quad biking. We can’t wait to do it again.

Just in case anyone worries, Jen is absolutely fine. It looked bad but she drove then walked back and she says she can’t feel anything except a few grazes.

 

Pinball Hall of Fame

Just a quick post today because we’re still having fun and recharging the batteries in Vegas .

We spent a couple of hours today at the Pinball Hall of Fame , a not-for-profit museum (well, warehouse)  containing a huge collection of both pinball machines and (more interestingly for me) original arcade games dating back to the 70’s.

If you’re not interested in old video games then it probably looks as dull as hell, but for me it bought back some great memories, with fully playable versions of Paperboy, Pac-man, Asteroids, Donkey Kong, Tetris and Space Invaders.

Having spent many a day as a 10 year old begging my parents for 50p’s to play the Teenage Mutant Ninja Tutrles game, it was odd watching 4 grown adults playing the game again while their 10 year old looking on in bemusement. Nothing makes you feel old like realising that your favourite toys were made 30 years ago.

Anyway, the museum is a labour of love and all profits and donations go to the Salvation Army so if you can tear yourself away from everything else Vegas has to offer I can thoroughly recommend it.

 

Vegas, baby!

So, we survived the casino crawl in Vegas (see previous post) and managed to place 14 bets on 14 different roulette tables with friends back home picking our bets. Good friends they are too as they helped us to finish the day $200 better off than we started it, which was nice.

After a day off to recover we managed to do a proper tour of the strip tonight and have some fairly nice photos to show for it.

We’re staying in the Luxor hotel , which is the big pyramid with the Sphinx in front of it and I hadn’t realised that the pyramid is actually hollow with all of the rooms on the sides. There are a couple of photos below taken from the balcony outside our room looking down into the middle of the pyramid which is quite a sight.

I played the honeymoon card again when I booked it so we have a corner room overlooking the strip on the 26th floor! This also means we have to take the special lifts which go to the top and have to travel at 45 degrees up the side of the pyramid. It’s slightly disconcerting being inside a lift which is going sideways as well as upwards but you get used to it.

Vegas is pretty much everything it’s been described as. It’s completely over the top and we both love it. Luckily, we’ve still got a few more days here.

 

 

Calico Ghost Town

We left LA today and travelled to Vegas via Calico Ghost Town .

Calico is a former silver mining town, long desserted like many small mining towns in the desert here. THis one has been turned into a tourist attraction with a few of the original buildings still there. We found the original bits quite interesting as they told the story of the town and the people who lived there. The newer additions seemed quite pointless though and were mainly gift shops.

Still, an interesting stop, slightly overshadowed by the excitement of the fact that we’re now in Vegas.

You might not hear from us for a couple of days because tomorrow we’ll be joining in on our annual pub crawl. Although the pub crawl is taking place in Buckinghamshire as always, we’ll be doing our best to match our friends in the casinos from over here, which means I’m due a drink at about 3am.

What do you reckon, red or black?

 

Los Angeles Day 2

My day 2 in LA was really my first day in LA as I was in bed ill yesterday.

Luckily, Dennis had been on the city tour yesterday and kindly agreed to drive me around a few of the sights again today so I could see them, so apologies for the duplicate photos of the Hollywood Sign, Chinese Theatre and Walk of Fame below.

We also had time to check out the John Paul Getty Museum and the Griffiths Observatory .

The John Paul Getty Museum is home to several art collections including painting, photography, furniture and sculpture, housed in some impressive buildings. Given that it started as his personal art collection it’s impressive, but to be honest unless your a fine art expert or particularly interested in pre-19th century furniture there’s little by anyone you’ll recognise (apart from one van Gogh apparently) and the art collections themselves didn’t seem all that impressive, even the photography exhibit which I thought I would really enjoy. Having said that, the architecture of the museum itself and it’s grounds are stunning. It’s built on hills overlooking LA and the gardens and the view you get from them is worth taking the trek up there alone.

This evening we visited the Griffiths Observatory, which was far more up my street. The Griffiths Observatory is also on top of the hills overlooking LA, so as well as being treated to some incredible night time views of the city we got to see a great planetarium show about the history of astronomy. It’s a great story and the narrator could give Brian Cox a run for his money. There were some really great exhibits, including a ‘Foucault pendulum’ , designed to demonstrate the rotation of the earth (please don’t ask me to explain), the phases of the moon, eclipses, etc. My only regret was not getting to look through their refracting telescope. As far as I know it’s one of the only places in the world where you can get to look at the night sky through a full size observatory telescope, but it was too cloudy and we were too late anyway. Oh well, still a great day.

 

Muir Woods and Sonoma Wine Tour

We had another jam packed day today. The alarm went off at 6:30am so that we could get into San Francisco for our tour of Muir Woods and the Sonoma Valley wineries .

The tour started with the drive to Muir Woods, a protected area of woodland (technically a national monument, not a national park) containing lots of Coastal Giant Redwood trees . We spent about an hour exploring the woods, which are small but interesting and well presented. The giant redwoods grow to up to 250 ft despite having roots only 6-10 feet down, they grow in ‘family circles’ and link roots to hold each other up. They only grow near the coast because they need the mist to take on water at that height as trees can’t take water from the ground to that height).

We then drove out of the bay area to the Sonoma Valley, Napa Valley’s less well known but equally beautiful and less congested neighbour. We got to visit two wineries, one of them owned by the Jacuzzi family (the same ones whose ancestors invented the hot tub!) and got to enjoy two tasting sessions.

Unfortunately, Jen is still on antibiotics so couldn’t actually drink the wine but she still managed to taste a couple of them and there was more than just wine on the menu. The Jacuzzi Winery also had an olive press and we were able to taste lots of different flavoured olive oils (I’ve now fallen in love with hazelnut oil and ‘blood orange’ olive oil on bread). We then had lunch in Sonoma’s very Mediterranean looking square at the Sonoma Cheese Factory. We got to taste lots of cheeses and had a nice lunch, after which I managed to get another glass of wine in next door before continuing to our second winery and more wine tasting.

As you can see from the photos, Sonoma is absolutely beautiful and completely different from San Francisco considering it’s less than an hour away. They say it get’s a degree warmer for every 3 miles you drive north out of San Francisco, you can be wearing jackets and gloves at one end and shorts and T-shorts at the other.

We’re going to get an early night tonight and leave early tomorrow morning for L.A.

 

Musee Mecanique

Yesterday was kind of a rest day for us in San Francisco, but we did manage to get down to Fisherman’s Wharf again in the evening and came across the ‘Musée Mécanique’ at Pier 45.

It describes itself as “One of the world’s largest privately owned collection of coin-operated mechanical musical instruments and antique arcade machines in their original working condition.”

All of the machines are playable from the antique exhibits (some of which are over 100 years old) through the the most recent machines from the 80’s, some of which I remember playing as a kid such as ‘Pole Position’ and ‘Super Sprint’ and really enjoyed playing again. We also go to play on an original ‘Pong’ machine with paddles which was one of the first proper video games in 1972.

After grabbing some food in San Francisco’s famous Boudin Bakery and learning about how their founders travelled from France to set up a bakery during the gold rush and how the bakery survived the 1906 earthquake in their own mini museum, we took a cable car (tram) back to our hotel.

The cable cars are one of San Francisco’s biggest tourist attractions and they still run the original cars, some of which are over 100 years old, up and down the hills of San Francisco. They are so called because the streets under the tracks actually have a cable running right the way underneath them which is constantly moving at 9mph. The cable car controller starts and stops the tram by causing it to grip onto the underground cable when he wants the car to move and letting go when he needs the car to stop.

The best thing though is that passengers are encouraged to hang onto the outside of the car and lean out as it zips up and down the hills. this is especially fun at night when the cable car controllers are having a bit of fun with the tourists and decide to see how fast they can go round some of the corners. The photo at the bottom is a blurry one of me hanging out of the cable car as we flew down a hill.

 

Alcatraz Tour and Cruise

This post follows on from the previous one about our San Francisco tour here - https://www.jonandjendoamerica.com/index.php/2011/08/06/san-francisco-tour/

After our Urban Safari we were given our tickets for the Alcatraz cruise which were hard to come by as they sell out weeks in advance. It takes about 15 minutes on the ferry and they give you a quick introduction (and a movie) before letting you explore the island. The island has lots of buildings including workers living quarters, a lighthouse, power plant, warehouses etc. but the main attraction is the cellhouse where the prisoners were kept.

Rather than just let you walk around the empty cells, recreational area, dining hall and other areas unaided (which would have been great), you’re each given a set of headphones and a control unit you can pause, play, rewind etc. as you walk around. The audio commentary turned the tour from an interesting one into an absolutely fascinating one, because it was narrated by ex prisoners and ex guards.

Walking around the cells and hallways while listening to the sounds and voices of previous occupants was a little spooky but it really bought the experience to life  and we both came away thinking it was one of the best things we’ve done since we came here. Having been in Chicago a few weeks ago seeing the places with Al Capone used to live the high life, it was really interesting to see the 9’x5′ cell where he ended up and Jen had a go at being shut in a pitch black solitary confinement cell for a couple of minutes (I’m a bit too claustrophobic for that one).

Anyway, when we got back we were straight onto the last leg of our tour, a sunset catamaran sailing tour of San Francisco Bay. We got to sail round Alcatraz again and over to Sausalito , before sailing underneath the Golden Gate Bridge as the sun set. A perfect way to finish an amazing day.

 

 

 

San Francisco Tour

We’ve been so busy today that I think I’m going to have to split the day over 2 blog posts.

We started at 8am with a 4 hour “urban safari” of San Francisco (a bus tour), followed by an afternoon trip to Alcatraz and a sunset cruise round the bay to finish the day. I’ve got so many pics that I’m going to save the Alcatraz and sunset post for tomorrow.

Despite being the most southerly place we’ve been, San Francisco is very cold and shrouded in fog at this time of year, so we donned our jumpers and jackets and joined out “Urban Safari” this morning for a trip round San Francisco. Basically, the tour is conducted on a zebra patterned safari bus (see photos) and everybody is provided with a safari hat which we were supposed to wear for the tour.

Suffice it to say that nobody wore the hat, the bus was totally impractical and when the tour guide tried to get us all to sing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” I nearly jumped in front of a passing tram.

However, no amount of tour naffness could detract from what a great city San Francisco is and they did take us to all the major landmarks, including some great spots to view the Golden Gate Bridge.

San Francisco really doesn’t look like any city we’ve been to so far, partly because it’s so earthquake prone nearly all of it’s buildings are 2-3 story town houses, many of them in a distinctive coloured art deco style, partly because it’s amazing hills and trams and partly due to it’s hippy background and it’s laid-back alternative attitude.

It’s a very unique, old fashioned and ‘pretty’ city (for want of a better word) and we’re really looking forward to exploring it some more. I might have to buy some gloves though.

(Oh, and the thing in Jen’s hand in one of the photos is a piece of the Golden Gate Bridge).

 

 

Jelly Belly Factory

On our way to San Francisco today we stopped at the Jelly Belly factory in Fairfield where they do free tours and tastings and even give you a free bag of Jelly Belly’s.

The good news was that it’s a proper factory tour where you get to see everything, in person and on video as you tour the factory, from the flavour development to the creation of the jelly bean centres to the covering, polishing and packaging. The bad news was that no photography was allowed in the factory, only in the foyer and the gift shop, so not many photos below.

It was actually a really good tour and the factory (unlike the Ben and Jerry’s factory) is huge and produces all the beans they sell around the world. This means you get to see millions of jelly beans being produced in giant “cement mixers”, left to dry in a huge room (I counted a couple of hundred stacks of trays, each apparently holding 10,000 beans) and then being packed by those massive robots you usually see in car plants.

If you think I sound a bit too excited about seeing a sweet factory, you should have seen Jen in the gift shop.

My favourite product was the “BeanBoozled” Russian roulette boxes we bought, which have lot of lovely jelly beans mixed in with some really nasty ones. Will you pick the toasted marshmallow bean or the canned dog food bean? I think some of them may be making their way back to TVI.

Oh, and yes that is a portrait of William and Kate made out of Jelly Bellys. Best not to ask…