Since my last update, we flew from Rapid City to Las Vegas, spent a few days being cooked in the heat and took it a few shows, and then drove through to Los Angeles.
Days 30 – 35 – Las Vegas
There’s a heap of photos to come, but in the meantime, here’s some shots from Las Vegas plus the helicopter flight over the Hoover Dam and Grand Canyon.
Day 35 was driving from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, so not really any photos!
Day 36 – Los Angeles
We arrived late yesterday, checked into the hotel then went for a wander around Hollywood…… it was mad, and quite frankly not enjoyable. So today we jumped in the car and went further afield to the California Science Center to see the space shuttle Endeavour. This takes our tally of space shuttles to 3 for the trip. Not too shabby considering that there are only 4 of them remaining. We will get to see the fourth – Atlantis – when we are in Port Canaveral in September. We also added another Lockheed Blackbird to the tally. This is an A-12, but it is also the only A-12 trainer made, and has two cockpits.
The next stop was down at Long Beach to see the Queen Mary from a couple of different angles, and then off to the port of Los Angeles to see the second Iowa class of battleship for the trip – BB-61 USS Iowa. There will be a third later in the trip when we will see BB-63 USS Missouri in Pearl Harbour.
Day 41 – Drive to Monterey & WSBK @ Laguna Seca
Squirrels! Driving up the coast there are several spots that you can stop and enjoy the scenery. At one such stop it wasn’t the scenery that held our attention, but the colony of squirrels. So cute!! Apparently not so cute to the locals…. After the squirrels we saw elephant seals also. Once we made it to Monterey it was off to Laguna Seca for the US round of the World Superbike Championship.
Day 42 – Aptos
There’s not much happening in Aptos, or around it. What is of interest here is the SS Palo Alto, a concrete ship first launched in 1919. It is in considerably worse condition than when I was last in Aptos in 2011, having been broken further by storms in 2017.
