Family Travel

So, on to Las Vegas – again a bit of a shocker after the quiet back roads and parks of lovely Utah! This is our 4th visit to Vegas but the first for 8 years and the first time we’ve been with the girls so it was pretty exciting to be there with them. Las Vegas is hurting a lot from the US economic slowdown - bad news for the town, but great news for us! We stayed at the Stratosphere – about halfway down the Strip, in the newer tower, in August high season for $60 a night! We also got Tower passes to the Observation decks and half price show tickets thrown in too.

Anyone who says Las Vegas isn’t child-friendly hasn’t been there with kids. The first evening we headed uptown to the Fremont Street Experience, which is the rebrand of the original Vegas downtown area. This part of town started to slide downhill as the newer flashier hotels down the Strip took over, and has now come full circle as a place to visit. The whole of Fremont St is now pedestrianised and covered, and every hour a music and light show is screened on the underside of the roof! Very cool. Sadie said ‘I wish my bedroom was like this…’ The lights in the downtown hotels are the most concentrated, the drinks and food are cheaper and – allegedly- the slot returns are better too, all good reasons to spend an evening up there!

Fremont Street:

The days quickly developed a typical LV pattern – sleeping in and going out for brunch, back to the hotel for a swim and siesta and then heading out around 5pm for an early tea and exploring. Temperature wise, Las Vegas is hot, hot, hot in summer – we had 107+ degrees (over 40 celcius) every day we were there. Nights were a little bit cooler (80’s), but bizarrely we ended up taking fleeces out with us, as it proved impossible to dress appropriately for both night-time outdoor sightseeing, and indoor air conditioned eating! Vegas is famous for it’s all-you-can-eat buffets, they’re not as cheap as they used to be, but still great value, and brilliant for the girls as they were able to eat an unlimited amount of pasta (plain with cheese), this week’s favourite veggie and lots of sticky puddings and ice-cream!

On our second night in town we went downstairs in the Stratosphere to see the ‘American Superstars’ show – a bunch of tribute artists – the girls thought Elvis was amazing and also loved Michael Jackson and the dancers. After the show the stars hung out to have their pictures taken.

Elvis leaves the building:

Next day we used our free passes to zoom up the 350m Stratosphere Tower to look out over the ever-changing building site of Las Vegas. It’s amazing how many hotels have been leveled and new ones built since our last visit 8 years ago. It’s up there that you realise what a night-time spectacle it is, and the Strip has some big gaps in it at the moment. Construction continues apace though despite the 6 continuous months of lower-than-average visitor/revenue figures, so no doubt there’ll still be cheap rooms for a few years to come. We had a coffee at the highest Starbucks (what else?) in the world and then headed out to the Strip at dusk, and the age old free pirate ship show at Treasure Island – still very good, but the girls now seem to have lost their clothes in previous conflicts! Predictably our girls stood amazed as the life sized galleons took each other on with pyrotechnics attached.

Before the battle:

A lot of the casino hotels on the Strip are themed in some way - the Luxor is a big black pyramid with a statue of the Sphinx sat in front of it; New York, New York has managed to fit most of the Big Apple landmarks into a few square meters:

The Venetian has canals and stone bridges (and inside a fake ‘sky’ ceiling and piazza with air conditioned ‘al fresco’ dining!):

We stood in front of the half sized Eiffel Tower at Paris Hotel – Fin said ‘That’s in France!’:

The famous Bellagio has a very smart but fairly unremarkable frontage for a Vegas hotel, but it has a beautiful addition every evening – the fountains on the lake set to music which play every 15-30 mins. Also free - you just wander past and stop and look:

Of course behind all these amazing facades it’s all slots and tables, along a rabbit warren of corridors, designed to keep you in the casino as long as possible. The girls were a little peeved that they couldn’t play as they are pretty good at Poker after Lawrence’s babysitting entertainment and proficient at Blackjack and Patience after endless games on the road, but were still quite amazed at the endless games going on.

On our last night in town we took them to see Lance Burton, a magician/illusionist at the Monte Carlo. He came highly recommended as a good show to take children too (which always makes us highly sceptical) but it was very good. The tricks are amazing, he has a great banter with lots of little asides for the adults that pass over the children’s heads, lots of set changes, lots of costumes – he didn’t just stand there doing trick after trick. So we had a great last night, we didn’t gamble at all, we just ‘used’ Vegas for it’s cheap beds and eats and it’s free shows and had a fab time.

See ya

All love CRFS xxxx

What to do with 3 whole weeks in the USA? Yep, that’s it, all we’ve got left here after ‘poaching’ time to spend in other less accessible areas. We decided though that 3 weeks just in Los Angeles would probably send us around the bend so thought we’d head out across country to see some of what America does best – the National Parks. Yosemite National Park up near San Francisco was a top contender, until the recent wildfires, which have left it shrouded in a smoky haze for the summer; Chris and I have both seen it look so much better and didn’t want a disappointing return visit. This turned into a bit of a theme when looking at the map – we spent 3 months in the USA last time around, plus a southwest-side trip when I was expecting FIn and have great memories of it. Another consideration is the summer crowds, August is full on holiday season here but some of the lesser known parks are much quieter and just as pretty.

Arriving into LA we must admit to being shocked and stunned. Although the flight arrived at 12.30pm I had pretty much written off the rest of the day for getting through immigration and getting the luggage etc. Well can you believe it – the plane was on the gate at 12.20pm, we had all our luggage and were at the rental car desk by 1pm! Immigration was so well organised and they were segregating families to go through in another line – much faster. So we did spend the night in LA but only as I had pre-booked a hotel!

Next morning we were all a bit pale and couldn’t really work out why we weren’t hungry at 9am until we realised: 6am Cook Islands time! So jet lag be damned we decided we would just get on with it and knock over the big drive while we weren’t sure where or when we were = 8 hours in the car to Flagstaff, Arizona. We meandered along the old Route 66 (which is now a lot of the I-40) driving through some dusty little places. Flagstaff itself an attractive little town – we made a spare day to explore its low rise timber buildings and breathe in the clean pine air.

Road to everywhere else, Flagstaff:

From there the next day it was time to go see the Grand Canyon, still looking as stunning as ever. The girls have seen so many big mountains recently they were quite surprised to see a Big Ditch for a change! We saw it from a few angles, and walked down a little way into it, but the weather was against us – should you really be standing on the rim of a canyon (the highest place around) in an electrical storm? Made for impressive viewing though!

The stormy Big Ditch:

After a night-stop at the Cameron Trading Post in Navajo Nation Reservation we took off along Route 160 to Monument Valley. We haven’t been here before and now we know why – it’s a chuffing long way from anywhere! But oh wow – its incredible scenery. Just think of every Spaghetti Western you’ve ever seen, Butch and Sundance, Thelma and Louise. We spent ages just sitting and looking at it:

Monument Valley:

Monument Valley straddles the Arizona-Utah state border, and so we continued north into one of America’s most conservative states (we later saw a fridge magnet that said ‘Drink, party and be merry, because tomorrow you may be in Utah’) on towards a place called Blanding via a place called Mexican Hat. Why is it called Mexican Hat? I wonder if you can guess…

As mentioned above it is high season here, and although this doesn’t seem to mean a huge hike in prices, it does mean that motels are really busy – and as we planned this trip over a long black in the Muri Beach internet café 3 days before we arrived, we've found that pickings are slim in the busy spots. Which is how we ended up in Blanding for the night. The Rough Guide says ‘the eating in Blanding is indeed bland eating’ and they weren’t kidding – we now know there seems to be a policy in southern Utah towns of quietly encouraging you to move on!

From Blanding we went east to Lake Powell which until the 1960’s looked a bit like a mini Grand Canyon with the mighty Colorado River blasting a trail through the bottom, and incredible rock buttes and mesas towering over the river. The Glen Canyon Dam was finished in 1963 effectively drowning Glen Canyon and all its natural beauty. The hydro electric turbines of the dam provide power for Arizona and California and at the top end of the lake the water is diverted off to irrigate the inhabited deserts, but environmentalists are united in their wish to see Glen Canyon drained and the dam destroyed, in favour of the Hoover Dam further downstream. In 1980 David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth, who had previously endorsed and argued for the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam before a Congressional Committee, described his previous support as ‘the greatest sin I have ever committed’. However, as Lake Powell is Utah’s #1 tourist attraction, and second only to the Grand Canyon in the southwest in the terms of summer visitors (4 million a year) is looks likely to stay. We drove to Hall’s Crossing where we put the car on a tiny ferry across to Bullfrog and then found a swimming area on the other side to spend the afternoon. It’s still a lovely spot.

Lake Powell: Hall’s Crossing – Bullfrog Ferry:

Having squelched in the lake silt and had a lazy time we grabbed a very late lunch and were all set to drive the Bullfrog – Escalante Burr Trail Road. Except that we couldn’t as the recent thunderstorms had washed out the creek bed section of the road. Hmmm. So we had to take the long way round which added about a 150 miles! The Rough Guide is equally complementary about the town of Escalante – ‘a screamingly dull place to spend the night’ but as we are also screamingly dull of an evening we found it very peaceful and great for star watching from the long wooden veranda on the front of the Circle D motel. So peaceful. The owners of the Circle D also had a great recommendation for breakfast with friendly hummingbirds flitting about.

Hummingbirds for breakfast:

A few miles down the road from Escalante is Bryce Canyon National Park and it’s ‘a doozie’ to quote a local saying. As you all so enjoyed last month’s geology lesson I shall press on with the topic for August: ‘Hoodoo formation - freeze-thaw action on upthrust sedimentary rocks’. Bryce Canyon is a perfect example of this erosion technique. The rocks that were uplifted have been stretched and fractured due to the mammoth stress forces involved (they also sit on various fault lines, causing further joints and fractures). Into these crevasses the tiny annual rainfall of 18 inches trickles where it goes through around 200 freeze-thaw cycles per year. This basically means that for most of the year night-time temperatures are sub-zero, while day-time highs are warm enough to melt the ice that forms. As water expands as it freezes the repeated stress placed on the rock causes it to crack and shatter at the weak points. As this happens the acidic rainwater itself slowly dissolves the softer parts of the rock, leaving smooth edges and washing off the debris. The result is absolutely stunning formations, made even more beautiful due to the vibrant colours of the original rocks.

Inspiration Point, Bryce Canyon National Park:

We took a walk down into the canyon to see the Hoodoos up close:

So from Bryce we headed south towards the Utah-Arizona border, passing through Zion National Park on the way. Less ‘unique’ than Bryce but just as stunning, Zion is just a ‘regular’ canyon, formed by the Virgin River cutting down through the rock resulting in a height difference of over 1000m of sheer vertical rock faces towering over you from the valley floor.

The Virgin River quietly potters through Zion Canyon:

Although it looks quiet and unassuming that little river can turn into a raging torrent after the summer thunderstorms dump on the canyon rims, flash flooding is common, and the topography of the valley floor is constantly changing. We took a walk along the riverside and found one of these cute but viscious critters (they bite as people insist on feeding them)

See ya

All love CRFS xxxx

No. of weeks in the region: 14

No. of countries visited: 3

No. of kilometers driven: 13,200

No. of friends/family visited: 34 (‘Hi’ and many thanks to you all in Perth, Canberra, Gold Coast, Auckland, Rotorua, Hastings, Upper Hutt, Wellington and Nelson!)

No. of different beds/campsites/driveways slept in: 39

No. of international rugby matches watched: 4

No. of scuba dives: 9

No. of kangaroos hit: 0

No. of doctor’s visits: 3

No. of hot springs sat in: 4

No. of helicopter flights: 1

No. of nights in the BWT: 27

No. of kg’s winter gear shipped home from NZ: 15

No. of times we missed the ‘chicken-and-rice lady’ on the corner: surprisingly often!

Wow – could it be more different to Asia? Home from home in many ways, but I guess we had adjusted to Asia more than we thought as still lots of things that caught us on the hop, mostly to do with food, transport and costs! We found winter a wonderful time to visit Australia and New Zealand, being able to turn up and find a room each night affording us true versatility, and we were able to see a lot of more remote places due to having our own wheels.

Feels very weird that the next stop is the last one, but we are planning to make the most of it!

See ya

All love CRFS xxxx

OK, we’re expecting zero sympathy here, but it is actually 4 months since we spent a week in the same place, so we were all looking forward to doing a whole lot of nothing in Rarotonga. Typically, having managed to avoid high season everywhere for the last 10 months we managed to turn up on the eve of the Constitution Day celebrations so there was little room at the inn. Luckily Vara’s on Muri Beach had a space and more out of luck than judgement it turned out to be one of the best stays of the trip. Vara’s Beach House is a backpackers but across the road up on the hillside they also manage a few private homes for groups and families. They are a bit tired and dated but we don’t mind the football stickers on the light switches and the glow-stars on the ceiling in the kids bedroom, plus the opportunity for some self catering was appealing to everyone as we look forward to 3 diet busting weeks in the USA! So we ended up sharing with a few geckos in a great 2 bed apartment, almost as big as our flat in Thailand, with amazing views of Muri Lagoon and the little islets.

View from our hillside balcony:

Having unpacked, we managed to get to the beach where the children were overjoyed to be reunited with their sun-suits after a 2 month absence! We didn’t just lie by the beach the whole time - we also had a little pool up on the hillside!! Up there we met Lisa and Miles and their 2 little children who left home (Brighton, UK) last September and have wandered through India, SE Asia, Australia, NZ and Tahiti to get here, and have about 4 weeks home through the US and Canada, arriving at the end of August! Oh did I forget to mention they are home for a day and then go to a big family wedding – HOW WEIRD IS THAT!! As you can imagine we don’t meet that many people we have so much in common with, so we swapped family RTW highs and lows as well as email addresses so we can help each other through the re-entry process. Their children are quite a bit smaller than ours – fair play to them doing the trip with nappies and buggies to think about too.

One day the weather was overcast and showery so that seemed the perfect time to catch the ‘round-the-island’ bus to Avarua, the main town and capital of the Cook Islands. There are only about 13,000 people on ALL the Cook Islands (although independently governed, Cook Islanders have NZ passports and the currency is the NZ$) which is probably why the main town is so little! You could get what you need but not a lot more – which I suppose would be the best way for us all to live – and it does have a funky feel to it with a bit of café culture and arty shops.

Having got a week’s supplies from the supermarket we didn’t really need to venture back in to Avarua as Muri beach is probably the next biggest place on the island, by which I mean a handful of resorts, a dive shop, a couple of tiny ‘juice, milk and bread’ shops we could walk to from the flat, and a sparkly new internet café at end of our road so we were pretty much sorted! We did head back into town on Saturday – market day – which was very cool with live music, little stalls selling all kinds of food, other stalls selling all kinds of tat (girls happy) and by complete chance, as I had hurt my back carrying heavy shopping up the hill, the NZ Chiropractic Association were ‘on tour’ giving a free clinic! So I got an adjustment (sorry Julian, but it was really sore) which seemed to do the trick, but it was the 3rd day since it happened so maybe it was just getting better by itself!

Avarua Maket Day:

So that was pretty much it – Chris did a little diving, I finished my book, nobody drove anywhere which was bliss and we didn't go out for dinner once, much to the girls delight.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…
Muri Lagoon Sunset:

See ya

All love CRFS xxxx

Early on in the trip, when we were looking at where we might spend the 6 weeks we had pencilled in for New Zealand we hadn’t really intended to go to the South Island at all, figuring it was quite a lot of miles to see the sights down south. It took Chris and I a month to get around it last time and we thought this time we’d stick to the North Island and take it slower. Then a couple of things happened en route – we met Steve and Claire from Nelson who invited us to stay, and then in the height of the sweltering Thai summer Fin asked me what a glacier was. So it turned out we had to show her really the world’s most child-friendly example.

New Zealand is just about the only place in the world where you can see a glacier without having to climb a mountain first. The Fox and Franz Josef (and the Tasman) Glaciers all come down to within 200m of sea level, meaning you can pretty much drive up to them. They are also visually stunning and if you open a textbook and look up glacier the picture looks like one of those.

Glaciers are formed high up in the mountains where the summer melt is unable to remove all of the winter snow. A surplus of snow accumulates each year, and it is this snow which feeds the glaciers. On the slopes (neves) above the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers approximately 45m of snow will fall in a winter season, mostly due to the weather patterns that force moist air from the sea up to over 3000m in virtually no time at all.

The snow is transformed into ice and flows slowly down the mountain into the warmer temperatures of lower altitudes where it melts away. Like the hour hand of a clock, the movement of the ice down the mountain is too slow to be seen. But it can move between several centimetres a day to several metres a day in fast flowing, steep glacier trunks. Debris falling from the mountainside is carried on and within the glacier (lateral moraine) and further debris is collected at the glacier base (terminal moraine) the moving ice. The debris forms an abrasive layer which gradually wears and gouges the bedrock into smooth, glaciated forms.

Glaciers behave as huge but very sensitive climate indicators. While the glacier ice continually flows downwards, the position of the glacier front in the valley changes with the altering climate. In cooler, snowy climates the glacier front advances down the valley and when the climate is warm and dry the glacier front retreats. Currently the New Zealand glaciers are all advancing, and here there is a time lapse of approximately 5 years between amount of snow falling on the neve and the advance/retreat status of the glacier at the valley floor.

So with all this in mind we headed to the pretty little town on Franz Josef to check them out. The afternoon we arrived couldn’t have been worse for mountain viewing, as the cloud base was around 700m, but we could still walk up (through the rain; ‘How is the ice still there if it’s raining?’ asked Fin) to see the terminal (end) of the Franz Josef, showing that 10-15m of vertical ice and dirt is still impressive whatever the weather.

The seemingly source less Franz Josef Glacier:

Next morning the sun was shining and just look what was at the end of Main Street!

Hmmmmmm how best to explore the glaciers? The girls are too small for the glacier hikes, and we don’t have time to drive all the way around the other side of mighty Mt Cook to get a proper look at it, so we decided to take them up in a helicopter to see the mountains and the glaciers from the air. Chris and I did this before and remember it as one of the highlights of our trip to the South Island. It’s one of those things (like swimming with whale sharks, tiger spotting in India) that you can only see in that one place in the world and you just have to be there at the right time - if the weather was awful, we couldn’t have gone. So at 9.30am we were in our seats, sick bags at the ready (50% of the Edmeads party never having been in a chopper before) and the whirly bird lifted off nose heavy into the sky. Needless to say our fears were unfounded and little rev-heads that they are the girls loved every minute! The view was incredible as we flew up the Fox Glacier and over to have a good look at Mt Cook – 3700m and the highest point in the southern hemisphere – and Mt Tasman – marginally shorter.

Mt Cook (right, streaming cloud) and Mt Tasman (far left) from the helicopter:

Then the pilot flew us over to the Fox Glacier neve for a snow landing – not as easy as it sounds after about a metre of new snow had fallen thanks to the awful weather the day before! The helicopter was bogged to the belly and we all had to shuffle head down through deep snow to get away from the rotor blades:

We leapt about, threw a few snowballs, shouted ‘We’re standing on the top of a glacier’ (but no-one could hear us!), and stared at the awesome Mt Tasman towering over us and the blue ice in the folds and crevasses around us:

After that we hopped back in the chopper and flew over to the Franz Josef to follow it from its birth on the neve as it squeezes, tumbles, scrapes and twists its way down the valley to the bottom, just amazing – the pilot told us these crevasses are up to 150m deep!

We arrived back 40 minutes later feeling like we spent the whole day up there, and it wasn’t even 11am! What should we do in the afternoon? Well we walked out to the terminal of the Fox Glacier – again about an hour’s walk, but a lot better in the sunshine!

Fox Glacier:

Fox’s Glacial Blue Ice:

The ice cave that collapsed with a big "kerrrr-booom" as we were leaving:

So Fin was probably left wishing she hadn’t asked. After enduring the various lectures on earthquakes and volcanoes on the North Island, the poor kid now has glacier formation, structure and terminology to add to the list. They have now both reached the stage where they just turn to each other with a kind of ‘she’s gone all geological on us again’ look on their faces! Having said that she was heard happily regurgitating the info on the phone: ‘Did you know, Grandma, that a glacier forms a U-shaped valley but a river forms a V-shaped valley?’! All is not lost!

Franz Josef will also stick in our memory as the first doctor’s visit of the trip. Poor little Sadie had some infected eczema requiring antibiotics – of all the places we might have needed medical help during this year, I hadn’t thought this would be one of them! The (English) staff at the tiny Franz Josef Health Centre were great and we managed quite by chance to turn up on the one day of the week when the doctor was in too! The disgusting magic medicine did its stuff and Sadie was feeling much more comfortable by our last day so we walked around the corner to the Hukawai Centre where they have an ice-climbing wall that the girls wanted to try out. Turned out they much preferred the soft boots and killer crampons to ski boots and were up the 12m wall of ice like the proverbial rat up the drainpipe, but the most fun was apparently the abseiling down! Murray (their instructor) was really cool giving out the high fives and Chris stayed in the freezer to take the pictures while I went upstairs to watch them through the giant windows.

Mini mountaineer:

See ya

All love CRFS xxxx