It has been quite an easy going day. From Phoenix this morning, the coach took us through the beautiful red rock mountains to an old Indian settlement known as Montezuma's Castle. Just outside Camp Verde, this place just has to be seen to be believed. It's one of those attractions which people tell you about and you're not quite sure whether they're making it up or not. Originally built by the Sinagua Indians during the fifteenth century and declared as a nationa...

Over the last two days I've headed south from Las Vegas into Arizona and will be doing a whistle-stop tour of the state, taking in a few of the more well known national parks and tourist spots before my schedule pushes me on into Utah where I have a hotel booked in a few days up in a place called Kanab. To be honest, Arizona hadn't been one of the places I had planned on visiting while in the US - so my knowledge of the state was limited and I was very much going...

Coming out of the hotel (more properly, casino resort) this morning, a guy walked past with a slogan on his T-Shirt which I thought nicely summed up many people's experience of Las Vegas: "One Casino, Two Casinos, Three Casinos, Poor" Actually, though, Vegas it quite an easy place to visit on a budget. The casinos seem to make something of an assumption that anyone coming here is going to be spending tons of cash and therefore should be enticed into doing so wit...

The Mirage Casino, I have discovered, is obviously called that because it never seems to get any closer however far along the strip you walk towards it - I felt like it took forever to get there, even though at any point it seemed to be just another block away. At one point in the not too distant past, the Mirage was one of the most spectacular Casinos here, the towering waterfalls out front drawing crowds in their thousands to gasp, point and wonder out loud how...

The following blog entries from Las Vegas were originally written in February 1999. I made arrangements with the hotel yesterday to be driven to Las Vegas by a friend of the Concierge, a guy called Carlos who acts as a tour guide and travel agent to groups or single travellers. I don't have the budget at this stage to be booking planes for these short journeys, and I figured that finding a ride through the hotel was probably the best way to ensure that I didn't ...