Vegas was next on our hit list but what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas but if you want to know what happened you should watch ‘Swingers’, ‘Very Bad Things’ and ‘The Hangover’ times it by ten then add Hugh Grant into the mix then you might have an idea how two days in Sin City panned out. So if you haven’t seen these films get a Blockbusters card, but basically the drive was great to start with shouting “VEGAS BABY, VEGAS” with so much gusto we convinced ourselves we would be rolling in money baby then by the middle it panned off to more of a question “Are we there yet?” and at the end we couldn’t care less when we rolled into town. Once we got there and settled everything was money baby but unfortunately after shots on the roof we woke up in a trashed room and couldn’t remember what happened that night. We realised we lost one of our friends and we found a baby (Carlos) with a 400lb Bengal Tiger in the suite to which we embarked on a fun filled journey of hope and hilarity to locate him finding out along the way one of us was married to a hooker, we kidnapped and found an irate Chinease gangster in our car, stole a cop car, got tasered, met Mike Tyson and your more likely to end up on the floor than the roof after Roofys. Like all good stories we all grew together emotionally realising we were the three best friends that anyone could have and tigers don’t like cinemon. add to this a few trips to the Mojave desert to dig some holes for the accident we had in the suite and the friends we thought couldn’t keep their mouths shut and you get a very general view, like Tennacious D this is just a tribute to one of the maddest two and a half days of my life and if Charlie Sheen was there he would agree although he probably wouldn’t have kept up with us. Winning!



Vegas is an adults play ground in the middle of the desert but instead of jungle gyms and sand pits you have casinos and bars in the form of famous land marks of the world. you have the effle tower, lady liberty and a water light show looming over the strip while the hotels have everything you want and if you do want to escape you have to exit and enter via the casino which in itself is like a maze where no one really wants to tell you how to leave. The strip is the new centre of Las Vegas where you have Ceasers Palace, Planet Hollywood (where we stayed), Bellagio and Paris situated along the bustling street however I was charmed by downtown which used to be the old centre of town before it expanded and this is where you will find the old school casinos like the ‘Golden Nugget’ where the minimum bet is low and the table drinks come fast. It is also here where the croupiers will likely tell you how best to play your hand as no one wants someone hitting on 17 or splitting 10’s. People always said that you should only go to Vegas for five days and we met some English holiday makers staying there ten days well lets say that two days was two days too many so after ten days I would be in a rehab clinic!

America is certainly the place where the customer is always right, I really like the way that you call the shots and service is of a top class where with every meal you are served free water and once you have three sips it is refilled. You can choose a meal on the menu and practically rearrange all the ingredients and make it something else without fear of the staff spitting in it or worse. Travelling you meet people with all manor of jobs and I met a chef once who told me he cooked a carbonara sauce with urine to some awkward customers, surprisingly he got good reviews on that secret ingredient I for one thought it probably tasted like piss.



When we finally left Vegas we took a drive to the Grand Canyon which is only a modest 5 hour drive away and considering the state some of us were in it was not the most fun drive, one of us had alcohol poisoning and the rest had barely 3 hours sleep over 2 days so this was a very very long drive. So Vegas is in the state of Nevada but to get to GC we had to get to Arizona, so when I think of Arizona I picture more a remote Mexican style landscape filled with dust and cacti but when we got there it was more Colorado than Cancun with there being snow topped mountains, pine trees, log cabins and even snow on the road. Due to the length of the drive we opted to stay in Flagstaff where we found a cosy motel where once there we didn’t leave and just watched bad American TV and ordered take-out (Americas number one sport).



The Grand Canyon is such a grand canyon and it felt amazing to see it standing there on the edge and glance down in to the Colorado river. There was an attempt by the park to encourage people not to venture across a certain point but these larger than average rocks dotted along the track were never ever going to stop me from getting close to the edge and getting a fantastic picture. It felt very surreal standing on the edge and staring into this wide canyon seeing it on many a film but this moment I remember for the rest of my life. It is a shame that the pollution from California actually affects the visibility and this is the same throughout America with clear skies but the scenery only a matter of miles away seem hazy.




Unfortunately our time here was short so we were not able to trek it or even walk the rim of it as we had to get back to LA as Mike had a photo shoot to fly to.

Grand Canyon stats (courtesy of Wikipedia):

The Grand Canyon is 277 miles (446 km) long, up to 18 miles (29 km) wide and attains a depth of over a mile (6,000 feet / 1,800 metres) Nearly two billion years of the Earth's geological history have been exposed as the Colorado River and its tributaries cut their channels through layer after layer of rock while the Colorado Plateau was uplifted.

I can say that I have been to the Grand Canyon but I have also been to a deeper canyon, Colca Canyon in Peru!

After heading back to LA in a mammoth 9 hour drive we still had to get to San Francisco but that drive was too much so we negotiated the awful LA traffic and headed toward Santa Barbara where we stayed the night.

San Francisco has become my favourite city taking Sydney’s crown after a long time being the king. San Fran has so much character from the instantly recognisable Golden Gate Bridge to the dizzingly steep hills and Alcatraz which is situated a lot closer to the shore than one would think. There is obviously the vibrant gay scene restricted to the Castro Qtr but when there it is very gay with people looking like Dale Winton crossed with Graham Norton taking their dogs for walks in their handbags. I went to this quater once and that was to eat in the famous sandwich shop ‘Ikes Place’. This place has featured on many food shows and has many plaques and awards hanging in the store but it was not what I expected as there was no where to sit down it was more order and go and just like America you have far too many choices from the breads to the cheeses so choosing was an ordeal it was just lucky there was a massive queue which gave me plenty of time to make my decision; The Ex-Boyfriend…..yes I had to ask for that but that was better than asking for the ‘One Up The Arse’ which was basically a Nuttella covered baguette. Yes the sandwich was probably one of the best I had tasted.




Another popular place was Height and Ashbury which is a bit like Carnaby Street crossed with Kings Cross in Sydney with lots of boutiques and hippy shops selling tie dye shirts to peace stickers and drunks stumbling in the street. One funny thing that happened was crossing the road there was a drunk who looked like a homeless Burt Reynolds preaching to us some mumble jumble upon entering the nearest store a chap followed us in and told me that he gave the old drunk a cigarette so he should be mellow now. The guy stood there for about 6-7 seconds waiting for something so I told him ‘good job’ he then waited there another 6-7 seconds then smiled and skipped off.

The weather here is a lot like London’s but when we arrived even with rain predicted we had glorious weather so I took a day walking around the city taking in the sights and even though San Fran is quite small compared with other cities the hills are outrageous, you may remember these from the film Bullet and after about five hours negotiating these hills and seeing the most windy road in the world my feet were covered in blisters with no less than two on each toe.

On the way out of San Fran I got to see the weather turn with half the bridge covered in a thick fog but soon as we left and headed north towards Nappa it turned out to be a great day for wine tasting.