Following our night in Needles, we got up and set off in the morning, back west through the Mojave Desert in California. What should have been a boring drive was one of my favourites of the trip, as we sped along straight roads undulating across the desert plains with good music playing, passing railway tracks with names written in stones on the embankments and surrounded by the ever-present mountains.After a couple of hours of driving we reached the town of Twen...

After our second night in the motel in Hurricane, Utah, we were back on the road.We drove back north to Zion National Park but continued east on Scenic Route 9 past the entrance to the canyon, up a winding road through the sandstone canyons and through a 1.1 mile long tunnel carved out of the hills, with windows cut through the cliff face every so often giving amazing but brief views of the canyons below. Once through the tunnel we found ourselves in the eastern ...

After our last night in Vegas we managed to get up at a decent time of day, still in the morning, and got ourselves checked out of the hostel before sitting down to check out the internet and make some plans.Originally our plan had been to head east to Flagstaff in Arizona before seeing the south rim of the Grand Canyon. However, after chatting to Mike, a guy we met in the hostel who had been good enough to lend me his hair clippers, we changed our plans to head ...

We arrived in Las Vegas on Friday evening after our long drive through the desert from Death Valley.We found our hostel, at the top end of the strip between the big fancy casinos and the old Vegas downtown, a great location. The hostel was in what seemed to be an old motel which had been turned into a hostel and our private room was just like a motel room but with bunk beds instead of the usual monstrous double bed.Tired out after our drive, we napped for a few h...

We left Bakersfield on Thursday morning, heading east on Highway 178, through the flat central valley until we entered the lower Sierra Nevada mountains.The scrubby, rocky folds of land were just as I had pictured them, with the peaks reaching ever higher as we wound our way along a road cut into a canyon through the hills, alongside a churning river. Climbing, we eventually reached Lake Isabella, a few thousand feet up in the mountains, before descending to the ...