HaveKidsWillTravel

Think Road Runner and Wiley-Coyote, Dr Seuss and John Wayne, and you’ve got a fairly accurate mental picture.

Our route cut North from Vegas, through Zion national park, along the North rim of the Grand Canyon, down to Monument valley and East into the corner country – Mesa Verde, and the Great Sand Dunes.

Zion has to be one of the greatest parks in the states – sandstone cliffs to match the Granite of Yosemite, spectacular otherworldly formations, and narrow canyons carved from a few million years of running water. The big drawcard is the narrows – a hike following the watercourse of the virgin river for about 6 miles up an ever tightening slot canyon – the rushing river, seeping cliffs and hanging gardens making for a surreal contrast to the dusty desert outside the canyon.

Knee deep from the outset, there’s no staying dry, but the cool water was lovely after all the heat. Evie and Angus led the way and we followed the canyon upriver – up to my shoulders in places. After a lunchtime picnic, we turned back, and Digby – who had been happily sitting up on my shoulders on the way there – fell sound asleep, making the deep crossings bit more of a challenge on the return.

We hadn’t thought to book our campsite for the night, so by the time we got back in the late afternoon, things were booked solid – so we headed out of the park, stopping to explore and walk barefoot on some of the beautiful sandstone mesas in the cool of twilight on the way.

The North rim of the grand canyon sits on a high plateau, a forested oasis much cooler than the surrounding deserts – and its isolation making it much quieter than the mad crowds of the South rim. Next day, we were lucky enough to get a last minute spot in the park campground, a short bike ride from the spectacular old 1930s stone lodge, perched right on the edge of the canyon. As we took an evening stroll out along the rim, an orchestra struck up on the terrace at the lodge – America the beautiful indeed. While the cool was a relief after the heat of the desert, we got rain overnight, so thought better of trying to hike down into the canyon the next morning, and headed onwards.

The storms followed us across the desert, making for spectacular skies across the landscape that anywhere else in the world would be a prime drawcard in itself – the vermillion cliffs, the colorado river, the great staircase – and by the time we turned off Monument Valley, we were passing patches of flash flooding and canyons full of churning black water.

We got to Monument Valley late – fearing the dark clouds meant we’d miss sunset, and paid to camp in the most primitive of campgrounds, in the most incredible of locations – sitting up on a ridge above the famous mittens, two mirror-image buttes of red Navajo sandstone. The storm rolled in, the wind picked up, and we put up the tent down off the ridge to escape its full force. There were just a couple of RVs in the campground (that we suddenly deeply missed), and a couple of folks who had given up on the idea of spending the night in their tent and retreated to their cars for the night. Fiona cooked out in the sandstorm and finished just as the rain and lightning arrived, for us to huddle together for a gritty meal in our little tent as the storm raged outside. Things quietened down overnight, and we woke for a spectacular sunrise over the mittens.

Mesa Verde is home to the largest and best preserved native american cliff-dwellings in North America – homes to the ancestral Pueblo indians who lived in the area 700 years ago. Elaborate villages built into the underhanging sandstone cliffs, some of the structures look like they could have been lived in just yesterday. After taking in the museum, we split up to make the most of the day, with Angus and Evie and I going to see the Balcony House – a bit of an adventurous tour involving narrow crawls and 30foot high ladders to get in and out – while Fiona and Digby saw the Spruce tree terrace. Evie wrote a story of living as a little girl, growing corn and living in the cliff houses. Angus wrote and drew in his dragon diary about marauding cliff-dwelling dragons.

A long drive across Colorado, and we made it to the Great Sand Dunes – an incredible 700foot high mound of dunes piled at the edge of a desert plain against a corner of the Rocky Mountains. The storms seemed to have followed us there, and in the evening climbing across the dunes, the strong winds nearly covered our footsteps as we made them. Next morning we ventured out again – for some running up, running down and log-rolling races – until the sand got so hot you couldn’t stand it without shoes.

Just a week in the desert – and I think we’ve all got dust, sand, mud and sunlight in places it’ll never get out of.

Well, yes and no.

It is an extraordinary spectacle, the vast hotels and casinos making for one of the more peculiar wonders of the world. And there’s plenty to do – even the free entertainment kept us busy – the huge swimming pools of our hotel, wandering the strip at night to see the blazing neon of the strip, the ersatz sightseeing of Paris, New York, Egypt, the Belagio fountains, even an erupting volcano!

But of course that isn’t all there is to Vegas. Wandering through the crowds along the strip, Evie spotted showgirls posing for photos – “Mummy, Princesses!” – “aaah, well, actually”, but it was too late, and she had dashed over for a photo of her own, smiling with the girls – “Don’t forget, sir, tips are appreciated.”

Of course, Digby was captivated as we attempted to explain the difference between Disney princesses and Vegas showgirls. And proceeded to test this valuable new piece of knowledge every chance he had – sitting up on my shoulders as we pushed through the crowds all the way down the strip, pointing at every bare midriff he spotted on the billboards or in the crowd and hollering – “LOOK, DAD, SHOWGIRLS!!”

Happy 4th Birthday, Digby.

The oldest continually produced line of vehicle – and one of the biggest ever in production – the Suburban has been an American automotive icon since 1935 – driven by soccer moms, the Police, Fire Chiefs, and the Secret Service – even the President gets driven around in a black Suburban. Think of the biggest SUV you’ve seen on the road outside the USA, then add an extra row of seats, and you’ve got a fairly accurate picture. Over its production life, Chevy has attempted to export it to dozens of countries – but none of whom have known exactly what to do with such a ludicrously huge, gas-guzzling behemoth when it gets there – and so it has remained a uniquely American phenomenon.

See, the downside with renting our Winnebago was that sooner or later, we were going to have to bring it back, and after 3 months and over 10,000 miles travelling up the West coast to Alaska and back again, the time had come. Still, we had a long way to travel to get the rest of the way across the country, and checking out the price of air-fares, and figuring that cars are cheap, guessed that buying a vehicle might be the best way of getting us all there. After a bit of homework, it seemed that San Diego seemed to be a pretty good place to buy a used car, and after looking at the amount of stuff we had accumulated over the past 3 months, figured that we were going to need something substantial to haul it all in – hence the suburban.

Not knowing much about anything, I’d done a bit of googling, and really just started at the bottom of the market and spent four days steadily working my way upmarket to find the cheapest thing likely to get us across the country. Now good cars are pretty much the same, but cheap cars can be wrong in many different ways, and so I found myself white knuckled and dripping with fear in cars with binary accelerators (either off or ON!), spewing plumes of white exhaust smoke (‘aah, that’s just condensation, man’) and Frankensteins (‘um, I didn’t think these were ever made with a 6 cylinder?’ – ‘No, this is a special!‘).

So after a process of eliminating everything lifted, lowered, repainted with a spray-can or with inexplicable blood-stains in the trunk, I settled for the neatest, straightest looking instance of the genre I could find for a couple of grand. A ’98 5.7litre small block v8 with a few obvious aesthetic defects (the paintwork has a bit of Californian sunburn), but it starts, stops and turns corners, the tyres look ok, the a/c works, it has no rust, makes no odd clunking noises or weird smells and doesn’t leak any vital fluids, so to my limited mechanical mind, seems as good a bet as anything else I’ve seen.

So we loaded it up with 3 kids, 4 bikes, strapped on all our possessions, and – feeling just a little like Tom Joad – hit the highway, out into the desert, and onto the remnants of the mother road. Chicago, here we come!