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| Our RV van, home for 5 nights. It was 30 ft (9 metres) long. Notice the flat ground behind the van, and snow on the mountains in the background. |
We flew to Las Vegas, arriving late afternoon, to collect our RV van. We were advised not to travel too far that night, to give ourselves time to adjust to the vehicle and how it worked. A quick trip to Walmart for food supplies and we hit to freeway into Vegas. We stayed at an RV park right on the Vegas strip, thinking we would venture into the city … to feel the atmosphere and and see the lights, not hit the casinos! Unfortunately we forgot to factor in jet lag so by this time, our body clocks were well past 9pm (Vegas is 3 hours behind Montreal), so the children couldn’t manage that. A quick meal at a dodgy food court was about all we got to do.
Thanks to that jet lag however, we were awake at 4am (7am Montreal time). We probably could have hit the strip then! Rather, we made an early departure and headed west towards California. The advantage of the RV was not having to pre-book accommodation. We were completely self-sufficient, including small mini kitchen, shower, electricity, flushing toilet, and fridge/freezer. We had enough food for about 2 days so where we ended up was up to us.
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| Taken from the plane, showing the city of Las Vegas |
The city of Las Vegas is very desert like. It is completely ringed by mountains, formed by rocks, with a relatively small, flat area in the middle forming the city. The airport is extremely central and the sky is very busy with planes - constantly one or two circling, waiting to land and departures every few minutes also. The hills are arid, the colours are desert tones and there are no trees. It is dry and dusty. Vegas has a static population of just under 600 000, who mostly, we imagine, service the tourists who visit the city in their thousands. The plane flight into Vegas had a party-like atmosphere on board, with most people travelling there for a weekend of fun and partying. We were the only people with children, so our experience of Vegas was dramatically different to most tourists!
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| Red Rock Canyon |
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| See the RV in the background? |
We continued on, past the township of Pahrump and towards Death Valley National Park. We left Nevada and moved into California state. Death Valley is the hottest place on earth, with a top temperature of 57 degrees Celsius in 1913. The landscape again was desert, yet it changed every few kilometres. We had towering rock walls; flat plains, limestone hills, tall peaks and shorter hills. There was very little plant life in this area of the world. But for us, one of the best things was the warmth! With that being one of the criteria of the trip, we quickly stripped off into summer clothes.
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| Very windy sitting here ... Soph was holding on tightly. |
We travelled about 90 minutes into the national park, climbing elevation in the first part of the trip, only to quickly drop the further we went into the park. We reached the central area, called Furnace Creek, were we ate lunch at sea level. We walked through a small canyon, called Golden Canyon, but the heat, and strong winds, made it unpleasant to do much more outside. It was even too hot to eat lunch outside - no trees remember, so we ate inside our van.
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| Love this photo informing us we are at sea level, yet we can still see snow on the mountains. |
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Golden Canyon
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The area in which we travelled - you can see Los Angeles on the left,
then north-east to Death Valley, then south-east to Las Vegas.
| A more detailed map. We started at Pahrump and to Shoshone, and through the national park, south of Funeral Mountains Wilderness. Our journey out of Death Valley was the thin gray line, continuing past Badwater Basin and back to Shoshone and Pahrump. |
the National Park, we found ourselves 86 metres below sea level, at a location called Badwater. Aptly named when a surveyor’s horse wouldn’t drink the water, the surveyor made notes referring to the “bad water”, without investigating as to why the horse wouldn’t drink. You can see the grains of salt on the ground and the outlook was white. The white on the path is salt that as been trodden in.
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| The long road ahead .... |
We took a different road back out of the national park, as it was getting late. While we could pull our van up anywhere, I still wanted a little more security of being around others. We decided to aim for Pahrump for our night of accommodation. There are RV parks all over this area of the USA, so finding a park for the night was relatively easy. Pahrump is a satellite town of Vegas and we are astounded that people live there! It is an hour out of Vegas. In 1980 it had a population of 2000; in 2010 it had risen to 36 000! There was no obvious reason for this population explosion: no major developments to bring workers to the town. It is isolated and lacking trees and greenery. It had a huge impressive hospital, so plenty of health workers, but we were amazed why people would live there.
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| Hoover Dam, taken from the bridge |
After a cool night - desert temperatures are high during the day and quite low during the night, we headed off for a big day of driving. We had already discovered that our van was slow, so we really needed to add a couple of hours to our given estimate times. We restocked our food supplies and drove east of Vegas, towards Arizona and the Grand Canyon. We stopped at Hoover Dam, right on the border of Nevada and Arizona, which is an amazing feat of engineering in itself. But to add to that, a new bridge has opened, as part of the freeway, only in 2010, which bypasses the need to drive over the Hoover Dam wall. You can still drive over the Hoover Dam wall, which we did, but it is a tourist attraction now. The rest of the traffic uses the bridge which is extremely high and very impressive. The supports for this six lane bridge go right into rock below. The landscape is high rock walls, with the Colorado River running through them. We walked across the bridge, which gave a great view down to the Hoover Dam. We then drove over the bridge, which is close to scary!
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| The new bridge, taken from Hoover Dam wall |
Once you pass the rock walls of the Colorado River, you are on open plains, most of the way to the Grand Canyon National Park. The freeway was nearly dead straight, through to a city called Kingman. Between Hoover Dam and Kingman, the landscape was desert like: few trees, shrubs only a half metre tall and more cacti. In the distance - about 5 kms away from the road, canyons could be seen. On the other side of these was the Grand Canyon, but not areas accessible to the public. Again there were random settlements dotted along the road: places big enough to feature on our maps and to have names - like Dolan Springs, Chloride and Golden Valley, without trees or much infrastructure. Some of the houses were very run down and not well kept; others looked quite out of place as they were modern and very nice. We constantly wondered about these settlements and what kept them alive. There were several opportunities for us to buy guns, along the way, but we resisted!
After Kingman, most of the drive was a slow climb. The Grand Canyon sits at 7 500 ft (2300 metres) above sea level, which is higher elevation than Mt Kosciusko in Australia. As we climbed, the vegetation changed - the plant life became shrubs; the shrubs became trees and then the amount of greenery increased. Wildlife was Elk, moose and deer, which fascinated the children. The temps dropped gradually too, which wasn’t so great! My impression of the Grand Canyon was that it would all be desert like, but the approach certainly wasn’t. Even within 50 metres of the rim of the canyon, there were trees growing and Elk wandering around. No cacti up this high. This was a big surprise for me, as I was expecting desert like surrounds. We drove for about 8 hours on this day.
We passed through Williams, which is one of the remaining parts of the “mother road” of the USA, Route 66. Lach loves Route 66, mostly thanks to the Disney movie Cars, so he was intrigued. We didn’t stop at this stage, as time was getting away and we really wanted to see the sunset over the Grand Canyon. We entered the canyon from the South Rim, which is the most popular area. The north rim is still closed for the winter, opening at the end of April.
| Started at Vegas, headed through Henderson and Boulder City, then south-east to Kingman, east to Williams and north to The Inner Canyon |
We pulled into our RV park just after 5pm, to prepare for sunset at 6pm. We quickly found our snow coats again and headed towards the rim. That first sight of the canyon is just jaw dropping. It takes your breath away, as you absorb the vastness; the dramatic cliffs; the different colours; the changing rocks; the sharp peaks; the flat plateaus; the sheer, vertical drops. It is truly a natural wonder of the world. We wondered how the native Americans would have reacted upon reaching the canyon, millions of years ago. It must have been a huge shock to see this enormous crack in the earth’s surface. Later, a ranger told us that several of the tribes native to the area actually believe that they came from within the canyon and the water source (the Colorado River) at the bottom.
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| Taken during the day |
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| Sunset on the first night |
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| Sunrise ... it was cold! |
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| We started at the very top of this rock! |
We were keen to do a hike around the canyon and all of us were keen to go down, rather than along the top. There are tracks that go all the way down to the river, at the floor of the canyon, with a couple of camping sites available down in there. We set off hoping to reach the first rest station, which was 2.2km down. The track was dirt, about a metre wide and steep in parts. It twisted constantly as we dropped the 1100 ft (335 metres) down. There were lots of signs giving health advice and warnings about the walk, but we figured we all had a good level of fitness. We were advised that the trip up could take twice as long as the trip down, so we were conscious of making sure the kids had the energy to get up! We walked for about 1 hr 15 and reached the first rest station, but felt it was a very easy pace. We stopped lots of times, taking many photos along the way. There was considerable human traffic along the way, especially in the first 20 minutes, but it dropped off as you went further down. Everyone was very friendly and people took photos for each other along the way. We chatted with others, many of whom were setting off to camp overnight at the bottom or were returning back up, after being out for 1-2 nights. Many interesting stories as to why they wanted to do this!
The hike down showed significant changes in the rock structures. At one stage, the dirt on the track changed from a yellow tone to a distinct red dirt. The first part of the track was against a backdrop of a vertically flat wall of stone. It was amazing to see how high it looked from the top, then to find that we were below it on our path. We expected the temperatures to rise as we went lower into the canyon, so we were all prepared with layers on. As we were walking in shade quite a lot, we were cool for most of the journey and only really took jumpers off at the end of the climb up.
The return journey was significantly harder, obviously, but the kids coped so well. Ironically, we made it up in less time that our descent! 50 mins up, probably because we didn’t stop to take many photos. It was a great sense of achievement for all the children, so we were all on a high!
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| Sunrise |
A quick lunch and we decided to keep exploring. The Grand Canyon National Park operates several shuttle buses to get people further away from the visitors area. We used the shuttle as a hop on/hop off ride, and walked along the rim between some of the stops. All of the view points offered different views. From some you could see the river clearly; others showed a different perspective of a smaller canyon within the big one. All stunning and we decided that we wanted to see our second sunset from one of these view points, which we did. The shuttle buses run until one hour after sunset, so it was a great service.
The next morning, we headed back to towards Vegas. Grand Canyon is about 280 miles (450 kms) from Vegas. All the travelling in our van was taking longer than we expected. We had wanted to visit at least one of the surrounding national parks - either Zion, Bryce or Sedona, but decided against it as it would have meant more time just driving. We had a short stroll around Williams, of Route 66 fame before continuing back to Vegas and its hot weather, then a swim, beer and dinner! The extremes on this trip were fascinating: snow coats on one morning and temps of 30 degrees the following afternoon; 200 m below sea level one day and then 2000 metre above the next day! Driving time from the Canyon back to Vegas was around 6 hours. Van had to be returned early the next day before we flew back to Montreal.
The big question now is whether or not we would do the RV van again. The advantages to begin with:
- Tony, being the farmer at heart, had no fear driving this thing. It was 30 ft long, so once he worked out how wide he needed to take the corners, he was fine. Of course we were also driving on the right hand side of the road, so it was a challenge. I didn’t drive at all!
- it was great being able to pull over whenever we wanted to have lunch and give the kids snacks. On the days of longer drives, pleasant looking cafes were few and far between: so to be able to eat our own snacks and lunch was great. This was also great with toilet stops.
- It made our food choices much better and much more cost effective, rather than eating out all the time.
- Kids loved travelling in the back. They generally sat at the table, with Olivia and Sophie facing forward and Lach happy to travel backwards. He could travel backwards and have his head down in a book or the iPad and not get sick! The rest of us couldn’t do that. They also played games a lot of the time. On one of the seats, you could be buckled in but still lie down, so several of us had good snoozes along the way.
- We love the food section at Walmart!
- Our own flushing toilet and clean shower was great … we saw many awful toilet and shower blocks.
- Emptying the waste was easy and you could do it at your own site at most of the RV parks. Not nearly as a pain as we expected.
- We had town water and heating at all the van parks, although we were self sufficient for a night or two, had we needed it.
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| Inside the RV. Only one child slept up the top (usually); the table and couch also folded down to become beds. |
The disadvantages ….
- not having other transport. We needed to plan our trips as once we pulled into the RV park and hooked up, it was a pain to unhook everything. Only once did we nearly drive away with everything still connected - thankfully Tony did glance back and realize. To drive away during the day, we also had to clear all the benches and make sure everything was secure, so the kids got sick of packing things up all the time.
- The beds were bad!
- Where the temps were cold, the van was very cold. We all froze on the first night at the Grand Canyon and the second night, we all wore many more clothes to bed but still got cold.
- The supplied kitchen kit was extremely basic…… hard to do much at all. Wine was drunk from the coffee mugs!
- The cooking was terrible. As you are considered self-sufficient in an RV, there are few bbq facilities. I had expected that we would bbq each night as our meal. The park at the Grand Canyon was the only location that had a bbq. It consisted of a grill that had wide gaps between the grill bars, so we couldn’t cook bacon on it, let along eggs! It was also a charcoal bbq, (no wood allowed) so it took ages to get going.
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| Cooking was a challenge. There is wine in the coffee mug! |
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| Lunch RV style - in the car park |
We haven’t decided which one wins! Sleep and food are pretty major factors, but with the kids was important too. In saying that, we all had a much better night on our last night in Vegas, where it was warmer. We were able to eat outside and slept better in the warmer temps. If we set off from Montreal in summer, with much more preparation from a home base (such as bringing along more cooking supplies like sauces, and small amounts of food, also some better sheets) we think it would be easier. We would also bring a gas bbq along!
A great adventure ... we loved (most) of it... and we feel so lucky that we could see the Grand Canyon.
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