Epic Round The World Trip Adventures! Stunning Photos & Articles - A fascinating gap year travel journal covering every stop of their journey.

Route 66 - USA
Gap Year Travel Journal

(25th August) Route 66 to The Grand Canyon
We flew from Long Beach to Las Vegas where we spent one night in the Imperial Palace Hotel. The following morning we left to drive to the Grand Canyon. Our first stop was the Hoover Dam on Lake Mead, about an hour's drive from Vegas. The dam was built in the 1930's and many men lost their lives during the perilous construction. There is a huge memorial to them. The photo here shows the huge wall on the opposite side to the dammed water. You can't really appreciate the scale of this thing until you stand looking down it - but it is vast - 726 feet high. They are in the process of building a new self-supporting arch bridge to go right over the top of the valley and the Colorado River to alleviate the traffic passing through here. We were attacked by a vicious gang of thugs while here - fortunately we managed to get a photo of one of them - wild chipmunks! They are so cheeky, they run at you in search of food. Jo had one stand on her foot and was worried they would run up her leg! They were everywhere but so sweet and really small - about the size of a small guinea pig. The road trip from here to Kingman on Route 93 was quite barren as you can see and it was like being back in Australia on the long straight roads with nothing either side. From Kingman we headed east on the I40 towards Flagstaff. This road criss-crosses over the original historic Route 66. We slowly started to gain elevation (rising to 5000 feet above sea level) and the scenery started to change. It became greener and lusher and we had some awesome views across lush valleys to green mountains as the backdrop. We turned off at Seligman onto Route 66. This is a small hick town with only a few tourist shops, restaurants and bars. Out through the town though we had a 17 mile drive along Route 66 through beautiful green open pastures - a very pretty drive behind a yellow pickup. We drove on to Williams where we turned off north for Tusayan - a tourist town 2 miles from the South Rim of the the Grand Canyon National Park. 270 miles from Vegas in 6 hours of very easy driving.