The Four Corners monument sits on the geographic point at which four states - Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah - meet. To be honest, given the American love of straight lines, I regard it as something of a miracle that this sort of thing doesn't happen all over the country - take a quick look at a map, and it quickly becomes clear that the United States must be one of the few places on Earth that hasn't spent its entire history squabbling about boundary lin...

Lake Powell is big. I mean, incredibly big. Bigger, even, than the biggest thing you can imagine. It's rather large, is what I'm trying to say. To give you a rough idea of the scale of Lake Powell, I'd like to point you at the Western shoreline of the contiguous United States - you know, that wiggly bit of coast that stretches all the way from Tijuana on the Mexican border to Canada 1293 miles further North. In fact, let's throw in the entire coastline of Hawaii ...

The United States has a peculiar habit of constantly taking you by surprise - just when you think you've seen everything it has to offer, there's something new and exciting around the next corner. People who respond to any mention of the US by immediately thinking of fast food, overweight people and loud obnoxious tourists are just showing their ignorance and generalising in a really quite ludicrous way about a country which probably has more to offer in terms of...

Rather than heading north towards Salt Lake City immediately, I thought I'd spend a few days seeing some of the National Parks Utah has to offer, so I was looking forward to getting out into the middle of nowhere and finding out what everybody was talking about when they banged on about the Midwestern states being full of stunning scenery. Bryce Canyon is certainly distinctive and can always be recognised in photographs by it's hoodoos - curious rock formations ...

NOTE: Names and locations of certain events in this entry have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals, although everything happened in Utah back in the 90s... I would just like to start by saying that Utah might possibly be one of the most ridiculously religious places I've ever been in my life. Now don't get me wrong here - I have absolutely nothing against the religious community, and I cannot deny that it obviously has a very profound effect on pe...