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Across the USA

E hatisitsoe: 25.11.2017

Our USA tour started with a three-day stopover in New York before flying to Las Vegas to start our tour of the West Coast of the USA.

Our hotel, the Edison in New York, is in a great location, just a few steps from Times Square. Unfortunately, the rooms are very small as is often the case in New York.

On the first day, we took a trip to Central Park. When we wanted to leave, we saw that there was a lot of police presence and everything was blocked off. In New York, it makes you worried when you see four armed police officers every 50 meters on both sides of the street. However, we soon found out that there was a parade on 5th Avenue due to a holiday in Puerto Rico. It reminded us a bit of celebrating Carnival in the middle of summer.





Afterwards, we visited the obligatory Empire State Building and Times Square in the evening.







A walk on the Brooklyn Bridge offers a beautiful view of the New York skyline. From Battery Park nearby, you can see the Statue of Liberty or take the Staten Island Ferry for free and enjoy the view of the skyline. If you stay in Downtown New York, a visit to Ground Zero is a must.






After our short stop in New York, we continued to Las Vegas. Unfortunately, even though the flight is five hours long, United does not offer any food or entertainment, which made the whole thing quite monotonous. At the airport, we picked up our rental car and the guy from Alamo tried to sell us various extras, but he wasn't successful, so he started calling everything in the car "basic". After we had chosen our car, we drove to our hotel, Hampton Inn Tropicana Las Vegas, which is a bit off the Strip and doesn't have its own casino. However, the Strip is within walking distance. It's strange that breakfast is completely served with plastic cutlery and dishes that are thrown away at the end.

We didn't really like Las Vegas. You can see the Strip with all its replicas of Paris, Venice, New York, etc., but away from the Strip, it's rather dirty and there are many people who have come there looking for their luck and have lost everything. The casinos didn't appeal to us either, as they are dark and musty and most people there don't seem to enjoy gambling.








The next day, we headed out into nature to Red Rock Canyon. This is a relatively small national park where you can drive along a scenic road and stop at interesting places for photos. The different colors of the rocks are very beautiful, and the vastness of the landscape is impressive.
















We used the remaining time for shopping, which I can highly recommend, as things there are really cheap. We originally wanted to visit the Hoover Dam and Valley of Fire, but as it was getting hotter (about 35 degrees), we decided not to.


The next day, our tour started. The first stop was Zion National Park. Unfortunately, it was high season in June and the park was completely overcrowded. The first challenge was finding a parking spot somewhere in Springdale. From there, a shuttle takes you into the park. In the summer, you can only travel through the park with the shuttle bus. After about an hour of waiting, we finally got a spot on the bus. We drove to the last stop and then took the bus back to the stops that were interesting to us. In Zion National Park, you find yourself at the bottom of a vast canyon that is quite green due to the Virgin River. Since we had very little time, we only took a short hike to the Emerald Pools. After a much too short visit to the park, we had a two-hour drive to Page ahead of us.











When we arrived in Page, we quickly checked into our hotel and went straight to Horseshoe Bend, where we unfortunately arrived shortly after sunset.





The next day, in addition to visiting the Grand Canyon, we also booked a tour of Lower Antelope Canyon, as it looked absolutely beautiful in photos. We had signed up for the first tour of the day. The colors and shapes of the canyon, formed by flash floods, are very impressive, and I have never seen anything like it. Our guide showed us how to adjust the white balance on our phones' cameras so that the phone can detect the fluorescent particles in the rocks, making the colors in the photos even more beautiful than what you can see with the naked eye. The Lower Antelope Canyon is relatively wide at the bottom and narrows as you go up. This creates the effect of small beams of light shining into the canyon at certain spots. After that, we had a 2.5-hour drive to the Grand Canyon Visitor Center.

Photo without white balance / Human view
Photo without white balance / Human view


Photo with white balance
Photo with white balance

























The next morning, we set off early as we had the longest stretch of the tour ahead of us. Our route took us from Williams on the Route 66 through the desert to Joshua Tree National Park and then on to Palm Springs. The drive was very exhausting because we had temperatures between 45 and 50 degrees in the desert, so the air conditioning couldn't cool the car properly, and we were a bit worried about the car's coolant as we encountered very few cars or villages where someone could help in case of a breakdown. 


122 Fahrenheit = 50 degrees

Joshua Tree National Park also has a scenic road through it. However, due to the very high temperatures, we only made very short stops. From time to time, I looked at the soles of my shoes from below to check if they were melting. All in all, we didn't find the national park as beautiful, as it is very barren and mainly consists of sand, rocks, and Joshua trees. Perhaps it was also due to the temperatures that we couldn't fully appreciate the national park.
















When we arrived at our hotel in Palm Springs, we broke our temperature record again; it was 52 degrees there. Since all hotel rooms have direct access to the outside, the air conditioning didn't really manage to cool the rooms. As is typical in America, we didn't feel like walking, so we also drove the few hundred meters to McDonald's by car.

The next day, which we still had in Palm Springs, we took the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway to Mount San Jacinto. The mountain station is at an altitude of about 2600 meters, so we hoped that it would be pleasantly cool up there. But it was still over 30 degrees. Nevertheless, we didn't let that stop us and went for a hike up there.


Lastly, our journey took us to Los Angeles. Not without making another small shopping stop along the way. The closer we got to LA, the bigger and busier the streets became. We had a hotel right at the airport, where we had to pay $25 parking fees per day. On the one free day we had, we took a trip to Santa Monica Beach. We had originally planned to visit the observatory, but unfortunately, there, too, we would have had to pay exorbitant parking fees. On the way back to the hotel, it took us forever because all the streets were completely congested, so we didn't feel like going anywhere else. The next day, we had a 12-hour flight back from LA to Frankfurt.
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