A Drive Down South

Things have been going well here in the UK. Work has been busy, but not in a bad way. I feel like I have been getting a lot done, which is always a good feeling.

The weather here has been particularly cold and snowy. As so many other things, "cold and snowy" is very relative. This winter is officially the coldest and snowiest on record since 1979, but the temperature has been barely below freezing and there was only about two feet of snow.

I, for one, have really enjoyed the snow. Besides the fact that we have had multiple work delays because of the weather, it has been nice to see everything covered in white. When I lived in Hawaii I didn't ever travel anywhere cold in the winter. I stayed around the islands and would spend my Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, Martin Luther King Day, and Washington's Birthday either at the sand bar on Oahu or at another one of the Hawaiian islands.

Last weekend Kate and I decided to drive down to Stonehenge and Bath in southern England. It was a trip we had planned for New Years, but ended up postponing due to buying a bunch of furniture at an auction.

The trip was good. It was a lot of driving for what we saw, but it was also a good test run for future road trips. We plan on going to continental Europe for some longer road trips, but I have a really hard time paying the going rate for European hostels. No, $30 a night (per person) might not seem like a lot, but I grew accustomed to the $2-6 rooms in Asia. Anything more than that seems like too much money to pay for little more than a dry place to sleep with no privacy.

Solution: turn the Daewoo into an RV! I used to sleep in my Honda whenever I took long drives and I was a big fan of sleeping in the car in New Zealand. The only bad part of the NZ trip was that I didn't have a sleeping bag and it was below freezing outside. I didn't necessarily sleep that well, but the fact that I wasn't paying anything on top of the price of a rental car made that fine by me. With a sleeping bag, I would have been sound as a pound, even without any alterations to the car itself.

The Daewoo is not a lease or a rental, so I can do anything I want to it. None of the interior electronics work (radio, power windows, lights, etc), it is relatively small, and isn't really a joy to drive with the lack of horse power, excessive road noise, and questionable brakes.

Despite that, I think it will make a good RV. For one, vans are too obvious and in places where sleeping in your car is illegal, you are going to get caught. On top of that, roads here are narrow and fuel is crazy expensive (currently about $7.60 per gallon in the UK).

Like I said, last weekend was a good test run. Updates to follow...

Some highlights:

Stonehenge: we spent about 10 minutes here. Not very exciting, but an obligatory item on the "things to see" list if you live in England.

3000 year old open air Roman bath fueled by natural springs in Bath, UK. It was pretty expensive, but we had the place to ourselves all morning. Sitting in an ancient hot spring watching the clouds roll by on a Sunday morning in the middle of January is time well spent.

Sherwood Forest, like in Robin Hood. I am genuinely curious as to whether or not Nottingham still has a sheriff.


More Monday night fun.

Holidays Complete

The remainder of our trip to Wisconsin went well. After skiing/snowboarding, Kate and I made our way to Las Vegas for a few days. We picked up the rental car and checked in to the MGM Grand around 4:00pm on Tuesday afternoon. The hotel has over 5,000 rooms, which is a bit mind boggling to me, but as long as we made it to correct elevator bank, we didn't get lost. The hotel and casino, as far as I could tell, took up over a city block of real estate. It was big.

At any rate, we checked-in, dropped off what we didn't need, got some groceries, and made our way to the Grand Canyon that same day. It was a pretty long drive and I was fighting off sleep for a while before we decided to pull off the road to sleep. Sleeping in a car is never the most comfortable undertaking and the fact that the temperature outside was well below freezing that night (Arizona... who knew) didn't help. After about 6 hours of rest, we drove the final 30 miles or so to the park.


We started off going to a couple of look out points before talking to the rangers about hiking. They told us that we needed poles and crampons due to the snow and ice on the trail. We rented the poles (very helpful tool) and Kate bought some crampons. We were on the trail by 11:00am for about 4 hours of hiking.We had decided to hike Kaibab trail, based on recommendations by multiple friends and websites. Ooh-Aah Point, about a mile down the trail, is noted as being the best single point for viewing the canyon. We spent about 30 minutes there and could have stayed longer, but groups of Japanese tourists and college kids in aviator sunglasses and bandannas were starting to pile up behind us, so we moved on. The trail wasn't too crowded (rumor has it that it can be packed in the summer), but it certainly wasn't deserted, either.

For anyone who hasn't been to the Grand Canyon before, my recommendation is to go. We only made it about 3 miles down the trail in 2 hours due to stopping every 50m in order to take in the views. The red rocks, black shadows, white snow, green trees, and numerous other shades in between made for breathtaking view from all angles. We could have definitely spent more time in the canyon, but we turned around, as planned, at Skeleton Point and made it back up to the top in under two hours.

After hiking, we went to a few more look-outs before starting back towards Las Vegas. It was another tiring drive back to Vegas. Something about long stretches of road at night do not agree with me. Driving puts me to sleep, I'm finding out. Bad news if I had to drive a lot at night, but I've spent the last 5 years living on islands and never driving far, so maybe I'm just out of practice.

We made it back to Las Vegas around midnight and slept in the next day until almost noon. I have no way making a comparison to any other hotels in Las Vegas, but I can unequivocally say that the MGM Grand has some really comfortable beds.


We spent Thursday walking around to the different casinos and got the obligatory prime rib, crab legs, etc buffet that night. Las Vegas wasn't really my scene, truth be told. I'm glad I went, but I don't see a need to ever go back. We didn't gamble (no spot for putting pennies in the penny slot machines!) and didn't spend any money on shows or shopping (besides groceries). We didn't even stay up past midnight.

Las Vegas City Center Water Swirly Thing. Kind of fun to watch...

Highlights from the rest of the trip include attending my little sister's college graduation, hanging out with friends, family, and relatives, some more snowboarding, and a lot of doing nothing in front of the TV. It was a good trip, but by the end I was ready to get back to work and away from the TV.

For New Year's, Kate and I were planning on going to Stonehenge and Bath, but that fell though. There were warnings about the weather and we stumbled upon an auction that resulted in buying a mahogany dining room set and a couple of really comfortable, oversized couches. We could have waited until Monday to pick them up, but the only vehicle for moving available was my Daewoo Lanos. We needed Friday to get two couches, a dining table, four chairs, a side table, and small hutch to the house. A good portion of Saturday was spent moving four old couches to the tip (garbage dump).



I was happy to get everything sorted over the weekend. The dining set is the right size for our small place and the 8' x 4' two-seater couch could very well be the most comfortable couch ever made. At any rate, we should be all set on furniture for the remainder of our time here in the UK.