Ian Rambles
The Caddy started without problem first thing in the morning as I moved it into position to load our bags. An hour later it was dead and complaining like a toddler! Excellent service from National though. Supportive response on their 1-800 number and an engineer rapidly alongside - gave the boys a chance for an extra swim so not all bad news.

Fiona's Journal
This was a WOW!!! day. In fact it was a day in which we simply ran out ways to express the feeling of WOW!!!

Actually it began rather badly with the car refusing to start. A feeble click was all I got on turning the ignition key and then up came a whole row of red light symbols and a scrolling list of warning messages “Service Power Steering”, “Service Braking System”, “Check Oil Level” etc etc etc It sounded like multi-organ failure to me and in an animal this is almost invariably terminal. Luckily we had taken out AAA cover with our hire car contract and they sent someone from the nearest approved garage. He diagnosed nothing worse than a flat battery so euthanasia would have been premature! We had left the SatNav plugged into the cigar lighter, and switched on, over night and this super-brained car, which can remember individual drivers' seat and mirror settings and restore them at the touch of a button, is not bright enough to switch off the power to the cigar lighter when the battery starts to run low. And we just forgot because we are human and meant to be fallible, aren't we?

So we set off, rather later than planned. We made a brief stop at The Jack Rabbit Trading Centre, one of the oldest trading posts on Route 66, where we bought real old fashioned Cream Sodas (yum) and I bought a brightly coloured, woven bracelet with a tiny ceramic lizard in it. About 30 miles West of Holbrook we diverted North, off Route 66 and on to State Highway 87, which took us through the Painted Desert. This is where the wows started. The terrain became progressively more rocky and mountainous and the road more and more like a roller coaster and such fun to drive. Then as we headed up into the higher mountains, the road wound its way up the steep rocky mountain sides with ever tighter turns and hairpin bends. The ground would suddenly fall steeply away below us on one side while a scree of small red rocks looked ready to shower down on us from sheer mountainside on the other. It brought to my mind the Glen Baxter cartoon “Fruits of the World in Danger, No. 23 the Kumquat”. For those who don't know it, I could not begin to explain – you will have to seek it out if you care, and it might not be no. 23 but it is definitely the Kumquat!

The colours of the desert plains and mountains were spectacular and the description “painted” was entirely apt. The red colour in particular, looks as if it has been streaked on with a large, stiff-bristled paint brush. In fact the whole effect in some views was of a massive painted scenic canvas. We all said Wow! a lot and the boys used “awesome” even more frequently than they normally do, only in this setting it did seem hyperbolic.

About 4.00pm we reached the Grand Canyon. That was as massive and awe-inspiring as everyone tells you it is but for us it slightly lost its impact because of what had come before. What's more we had flattened the batteries in both cameras, in the Painted Dessert, so we manged only a few mobile phone pictures of the Canyon itself but enough pictures have been taken of that anyway, haven't they?

We headed back South and rejoined Route 66 at the town of Williams where we booked into a motel and then went and watched some street theatre. Main Street was closed off and they staged a dramatic reconstruction of a gunfight that may or may not have actually occurred in Williams in the 19th Century. It was very funny and involved a lot of noisy firing of blanks and the boys laughed at me jumping out of my skin as much as they did at the play.

Arthur's Log:
The Grand Canyon was not as impressive as all the hype when we first saw it. But when we went round the head we first stopped at and could only just see the first viewing point we'd stopped at from the second, there was a huge whoooooosh of vertigo as my brain prosessed the new new scale info told me just how big it was.

We stopped in a little town for the night and mum had spotted somthing going on up the road so we went for a look. Some guys were having a mock shootout. (real guns firing blanks). It was a laugh, with lots of pulling people out of the croud and shooting themselves in the foot and so on.

The Harry Report
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George's Musings
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