The desert-ed Arizona

We  left off with us riding into the heat of the Arizona desert. I have to say my expectations were proven as wrong as they could be. I imagined a boring rock desert and a seemingly endless drive in the middle of nowhere but in reality, the 7-8 hours drive was barely enough to get my jaw back from the floor. First, the change from the green vegetation to the desert is very sharp, if someone falls asleep in the car for five minutes, he/she can wake up in a completely different scenery. 

To summarize it, It’s just beautiful beyond reason. It’s the classical western scene, which prompted us to play Morricone songs. More precisely only one, the „Man with the harmonica” from the movie „Once upon a time in the west” but as it  fades into itself perfectly, we didn’t realize for long time that the iphone was on repeat mode and we had been listening to a three minute song for a half an hour. 

Anyway, trying to describe the scenery in words wouldn’t do much justice to it, so I’ll just leave it to the pictures to speak for themselves (I’ll try to make them available asap, but given that we have around 3-4000 of them it’s not going to be a 10 minute job). I almost gave my life to make the sunset pictures as I just jumped out of the car and sprinted up to the top of a hill which turned out to be a pretty bad idea given the extremely hot air and the ammount of dust in the air. As a result me and oxygene grew kind of distant from each other, but at least I can say I have the photographer’s spirit.

Beyond the natural beauty, it’s also a pretty cool place, rowdy bars and diners  are lined up in tiny towns around the road, one „world famous” burger/steak/random food place after another. Things got even better when we took the historic Route 66 from Kingman. The diners turn into museums or classic chainsaw massacre stlye gas stations, ghost towns and theme diners, it’s just plain awesome. We even found a diner that claimed itself to be the official Bedrock, and for five bucks, we could have walked into Fred Flinstones living room. Well, we did not, but instead we got the world’s cheapest coffee for five cents (!) and some random but delicious burgers. 

The short story of Route 66 is that during the late 19th/early 20th century gold rush, it was the standard paved road to get to California from Chicago giving birth to an army of entertainment and service ventures along the way. Of course, the establishment of the modern highway system made it obsolete and now it’s just of historical and touristic value.

We arrived at our Grand Canyon lodging long after sunset but we couldn’t wait to check it out, so even before occupying our room, we drove to the so called mother’s point and took some night pictures. The moonlight was perfect and thus long exposure time yielded excellent graphics. Of course, we had to check out the ledge, and take pictures there, what we didn’t see though was the incredible depth under us, a sight for which we had to wait till the morning.

The lodging receptionist was probably the model for Walt Disney’s Goofy, I swear he even did the doi, doi sometimes. It turned out that in the US, when you book a room for five people, it might very well happen that there’s only four bedspace coming with it (maybe the price is for the oxygene consumption of the fifth person) and we had to pay an extra $10 for a fifth bed.  Swallowed this, we swallowed our usual whiskeybottle-content and called it a night.

The next day we saw the canyon in the daylight. To put it into 16th century English court manners, it’s just F-U-C-K-I-N-G mindblowing....period. Again, you guys have to wait for the pics but I can honestly say that it’s one of the most amazing sights I’ve ever seen in my entire life.

We took a hike down a trail that would have eventually (in a day) lead to the Colorado river at the bottom of the valley. As we were on a tight schedule we only took a three hours hike down to a lookout point that gave us yet another view I can’t describe as I’ve already run out of the proper adjectives. 

Upon finishing and taking one of our most popular blazer check-in photos, we hopped back into our second home and hit the road towards Sin City  Las Vegas, but that’s a completely different story...

USA Roadtrip: The city of angels

Hello again,

The sun disappeared on the horizon a half an hour ago and there is not much to see in the Dark in the otherwise gorgeous Arizona desert so I decided to write to you again! The previous episode ended with the cliffhanger that we left DC for the sunny Los Angeles with a stopover in Cleveland, OH.

The flight was actually great, after the endless corn and wheat fields of the midwest, the breathtaking bird’s eye view of the grand canyon and the surrounding rock desert is always a pretty sight and we also got offered some audiovisual entertainment, „The vow”. Trying not to spoil anything, Rachel McAdams falls back in love with Chaning Tatum (Ooops...). 

At LAX I noticed that the foil I wrapped around my bag was gone which means that the Toilet Safety Administration (South Park reference) was really interested in my shower gel. Thank god, there wasn’t anything missing, so we immediately took the shuttle to the car rental pickup lot to get our bottoms into our new Dodge Grand Caravan minivan. Surprisingly, it looks almost identical to our earlier Crysler Grand Voyager, maybe there is a minivan standard in the US.

Our first destination was an arbitrary place to eat which turned out to be an Indian express grill. Unfortunately, it was rather a Mexican place disguising as an Indian one and the food was absolutely terrible to the extent that Peter experienced the first throw-up of the trip and not in the good way. I think we’re done with Indian food for the rest of the trip.

The accommodation this time was the Banana Bungalow on Hollywood Boulevard, which was the best accommodation so far, we even got a kitchen and a fridge. Of course, we arrived too late to join the clubbing night organized by the hostel so we chatted a little with some Scottish girls and a guy from New Jersey who turned out to be a writer. He told us that if we ever need inspiration for anything, Hawaii is the place to go to and even told us the way to make an easy living there: work on an organic farm. Well, I’ll keep this in mind just in case. 

We started the next day with a long walk on the Hollywood walk of fame taking pictures with our favorite stars. It’s hard to describe, but It’s a pretty lively place, I really liked the vibe there, felt like a big party. Actors are on the street dressed as Batman, Spiderman, the mad hatter from Alice in Wonderland, storm, troopers, etc.

After walking the street both ways, we hopped into the car and drove all the way to see the misery and poverty of Beverly Hills. First, we looked up the location of the Playboy mansion but unfortunately we could only see the gate and an arriving prospective playmate. She looked really good at math. Since we didn’t wanna spend money on a „Starmap” (i.e. a map that marks the location of celebrities’ houses) we made up fake stories about which mansion belongs to whom.

Rodeo drive was the next stop, but we didn’t even get out of the car there as we were so horrified by the poor people all around, it’s so sad, that some people have to live like this, life is so unfairJ. Instead, we headed straight to Venice beach to meditate a little on how great it would be to work in the office on a rainy weekday.

On the way there and back, the main reason why I wouldn’t live in LA became apparent. The traffic situation is just abysmally horrendous, even four lane highways are stuck hard all the time. The public transportation situation is even worse, there are a few metro lines but they don’t really connect interesting places and the buses get stuck in the same traffic jams as the cars.

In the evening, we watched the sunset from the Griffith observatory which provides a marvelous view of LA and the Hollywood sign, can’t say I was disappointed. The observatory itself used to be an actual one even though it’s impossible to see anything useful now due to the smog and therefore the telescopes are just part of an exhibition now.

We arrived back to the hostel just in time for a free pizza party, where I could utilize my free food skill I polished to perfection over the past two years in the department. It was after this when I met the first arrogant and annoying Australian of my life. He was a rodeo rider with a completely incomprehensible accent and the worst sense of humor I ever seen. Since he refused to tell us his name, we (more precisely Daniel) named him the Australopithecus to reflect his appearance and manners at the same time. 

I also made friends with the Russian receptionist girl whose accent I guessed correctly at the first attempt which I’m very proud of. Working with a Russian advisor and hearing a lot of the other Russian professor’s accents trained me very well apparently!

For the last day in LA, we departed for the first time during the trip. Ákos and Dan took the car to Pasadena to check out Caltech and then suffer a little on the sun of Malibu beach. Peti, Csaba and me hit   Universal Studios instead. For anyone who considers it, it’s absolutely worth the $80 entrance fee. The studio tour at all the shooting sites including the standard NY set, the wild west, the original Bates motel, the plane crash site of the war of the worlds and so many more iconical places that enthralls the living dump out of a movie geek like me. The tour was guided by Jennifer Love Hewitt’s alleged boyfriend. As I don’t really follow celebrity news, I have no clue if he actually was the real deal.

The rest of the studio is like a Disneyland but a lot cooler, the Transformers 4D attraction was the most beautiful IMAX 3D based rollercoaster I’ve ever ridden and the other attractions were just as awesome except maybe the Shrek 4D which was a little boring. By the afternoon, the lines got a lot longer as more and more people showed up (this Monday happened to be the memorial weekend Monday, so even the locals had the chance to storm the park). Fortunately, standing in line wasn’t just a boring waste of time as every attraction had a background story introduced during the wait.

Not all of the thrills were rollercoasters, there were some shows too, e.g. a special effects presentation which was really cool up until the point when they brought in a Jar-Jar Binks style character named Jerry who tried to be funny by falling over, forgetting himself in the set, etc. From me that’s a giant facepalm, apparently, the rest of the audience were actually entertained… I’m not a namist, but from now I’ll consider Jerrys a bad omen.

At the Terminator 2 show (which is the oldest attraction in the park and it's indeed really cool), a similarly annoying character tested our nerves. This time she was the spokesman of Cyberdyne presenting the background story on a very high pitched voice including thousands of

-Oooookkaaay-dooookkkaayyyy? Suuuuuuupppppeeeeer!

Since Ákos and Daniel were still in Malibu, we took the metro back to our hostel. To my greatest surprise, we were never asked for tickets (we bought them from the machine), maybe that’s also a reason why this state is constantly bankrupt. 

After having another evening session with our BFF Jim (Beam), we called an early night and hit the road early morning to the Grand Canyon. But that’s another story for next time.