"My, you are a long way from home aren't you!" The lady at the till remarks, eyeing up my driving licence, I.D. for the purchase of several bottles of lager on my credit card, at the General store Oskar and I have stopped off at. We've just been and had our supper at one of the two diners in this small town somewhere off Route 66...proper America. Big, huge trucks. Big, huge men, with big huge ZZ Top beards. Bears. Grrrr...There's a stuffed mountain lion on a plinth and the head of a once beautiful Elk is hung on a wall. As we walked to here, we passed up another eating experience at the Roadkill Diner, again, huge macho men, bent over pool tables, with their massive cues silhouetted at the windows; "hey boy, you faggot?"
We're on the way to the Grand Canyon. We left Las Vegas around lunchtime after three nights spent at Circus,Circus, twenty seven floors up in a big room overlooking the Strip. Famed for having featured in '71 Bond movie, "Diamonds are Forever," it really couldn't have been better, despite many awful reviews to the contrary. We kept the curtains open the whole time we were there, the views becoming ever so pretty as all the lights came on of a night.
Yep, it was every bit as crazy and surreal as we'd imagined and then some. Insane roller coasters. One, at the top of a tower calling itself Stratosphere, gives you, the paying, a ride over the very edge, stopping to pull you back before it repeats and sends you once again down the short track to dangle you just short of your own glamorous suicide. It made my testicles disappear back into my body just watching it from all that way below. Liz and I went on a bloody huge one while someone looked after the kids. This one climbed up to the height of a tower next to it and then dropped and had us screaming like girls for the duration as it went through god knows how many three-sixty loops.
The Sirens of Treasure Island, now they were a highlight on the first night, dancing as they sung their poisonous songs, luring us to watch them on their tall ship. Miles of Casino, no clocks and no Exit signs...huge, white stretch limo's, there's even a replica Eiffel Tower, and where else would you pass a couple of Vegas era Elvis clones nipping out for a fag on the street.
We became tv critics for an hour, when invited to view the pilot of a new series yet to air, each of us with consoles, moving the dial more to the right if what we saw made us moist, to the left if bored. Actually, it was pretty good, though I noticed Oskar had turned his to zero when some snogging came on screen, during which he just sat with his arms folded, looking on in disgust.
So anyway, we left Vegas without gambling a single dime and headed for Hoover Dam, some forty minutes up the freeway.
Hoover Dam was built in the early thirties, employing thousands of people during the great depression, using some 2,480,000 cubic metres of concrete. If you or any of your friends or family would like to know more, you can look it up. But it is fucking impressive. We were taken down inside the dam itself and where we stood, you could feel the place vibrating from the sheer force of the water being redirected along huge pipes, fifty feet in diameter.
Today, our slumber was broken by Liz, who wanted us up and out for a trip to The Grand Canyon, pronto.
It's almost pointless trying to sum up this place in words...and none of our photos live up to it. It's a mile deep and god knows how many miles across.
Oskar and Stash enjoyed very much, eating the snow that decorated the trail we started to walk down for a bit. It was beautiful sunshine with snow on the ground.
But as I say, we only walked part of the trail as it was very icy and we none of us wanted to slip and fall that mile to our deaths.
The kids were sworn in by a Ranger, to promise to take care of the park and eat lots of broccoli, sprouts and other good stuff.
Elizabetty then insisted we take the car up to one of the other points to witness the sun setting on this great hole.
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