One of the highlights of Arizona are the scenic drives and the most recommended one in the Phoenix area is the Apache Trail. It should have been a simple task of heading east out of Phoenix from Apache Junction ... but it seemed to take us nearly two hours to navigate Scottsdale/Phoenix and get to the start of the trail ... and it was supposed to take that long to take the trail in one direction from Apache Junction to its finish at Roosevelt Dam. It was getting ...

Heading from Oceanside to Scottsdale, Arizona will be the longest single journey of the trip and one that took us from the coast, over the mountain range and into the desert. We hadn't been driving long when the temperature started to soar, rising from a humid 75 degrees in Oceanside to a steady 100 degrees of dry heat as we climbed the mountain roads. By the time we arrived in Scottsdale at 4:30 in the afternoon the car was noting a sweltering 104 degrees Farenh...

Wednesday was an intentional lazy day: our last full day in California before I started dictating when alarms would be set for the road trip section of the holiday! A lazy morning meant the perfect time to do a little laundry before being on the move. However, we discovered that things don't dry on the Californian coast. You can leave things hanging on the balcony in 75 degree heat and when you get home it's still damp due to the humidity in the air! For our day...

We took full advantage of our beachfront apartment on Tuesday morning: All the locals were already off being busy with their day jobs as we awoke nice and early (we still haven't fully adjusted to the -8 hour time difference and tend to wake naturally at 6:30). On the full stretch of beach between Oceanside pier and harbour there were one or two families, a couple of lone book readers and a gaggle of early bird surfers about fifty meters out. We set up camp watch...

Did you know that for every foot of giraffe, it's tongue is that long in inches? Yes, we went to San Diego Zoo. The place is absolutely enormous! Spread across multiple levels and an absurd amount of hectares, it took constant reference to the zoo map to find our way from tiger to panda to koala and back to refreshments. In all, it was a bit of a rush around and three days would probably be required to do the centre justice. There was lots of information about ea...