Greg and Mandy's Travels

Apr 13, 2025

Palm Sunday today, and the town of Walpole, New Hampshire was having a fund raising pancake breakfast in the town hall. Brendan spied the notice that said ‘admission by donation’, so that’s where we headed for breakfast. A lovely spread, and really friendly community, though you could hardly call New England multicultural.

Packed up and left our Airbnb, driving in a different direction to look at more of the covered bridges. After spotting and driving over a few, we stopped at the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park to give the girls their promised bushwalk. Well, Kaia didn’t actually get out of the pusher, but Hayden got a walking stick and led us on a nice hike around the park, billed as her practice for tackling the Dolomites in a few months time.…

Apr 12, 2025

I channeled my inner Clint Eastwood and, together with Brendan and the girls, we went searching for the famous covered bridges in neighbouring Vermont.

Now anybody, and I’ll bet it isn’t you, who is up on their US geography will realise that Madison County is in Iowa not Vermont. However, Meryl Streep has moved out of Iowa and there are only six original bridges left there, so we reasoned that Vermont was a much better bet if we wanted to see the real thing as they have over 100.

Unfortunately, what we didn’t expect was to wake up to snow.…

Apr 12, 2025

After an early tea, we took the subway into town, walked a few blocks to the Jordan Hall, and settled in for a fun evening with the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.

Quite a few of their standards and party pieces, with a selection of new material. Seven in the touring ensemble, but a lot of the old familiar faces were missing, presumably as they are now at the stage of not wanting to spend several months away touring at their age. The orchestra has been together now for 40 years, so it’s not that surprising for the originals.…

Apr 9, 2025

A long drive today to get back to the Salt Lake City airport.

Wandered down to the breakfast building dressed in our jackets and beanies just after sunrise. When we had eaten our fill, we returned to the room, checked out, and hit the road.

I’m always impressed with the quality of American roads. Even though ours was a relatively back road, it was still four and sometimes five lanes with regular passing lanes. Made good time and eventually ended up on the I15, which is the road we started on, joining Las Vegas through Salt Lake City right up to the north of the country.…

Apr 8, 2025

A depressingly large number of years ago when I was planning our first trip to the United States, I mentioned that we were going to the Grand Canyon, and a friend said that I shouldn’t miss Bryce Canyon because they thought that it was better. I wasn’t sure, I’d never heard of it, but I added it to the itinerary.

She was right. Yellowstone is huge, Denali is awesome, and the Grand Canyon is, well, grand, but Bryce Canyon National Park is our favourite, and today we were saying hello again.

So, the brief story is that a certain Ebenezer Bryce, who was born in Scotland and migrated to the US when he was just seventeen years old, settled in the Paria Valley, near the canyon’s eastern edge in 1875.…

Apr 7, 2025

Spurned the coffee at our cruddy hotel in Green River and drove on to the next town, which isn’t a small task. Hanksville was the first sign of life 80km down the road. It’s like being in outback Queensland. There are literally no services, towns or houses for an hour at a time, and yet you are traveling on a 4 lane road. The sign in Hanksville said that the next service was in 240km. And there was a girl hitchhiking! And yet, it was one of the nicest moments of the trip for me so far. We paid for our purchases with a very friendly guy, and sat out in the sun on a bench in front of the servo, drinking our vanilla lattes, watching people come and go, bopping along to the bootscootin music on the speakers, and just soaked up the vibe, Lovely.…

Apr 6, 2025

Across the Colorado River from the Arches National Park is Canyonlands National Park, and that was our destination for today. The Colorado River gouged many canyons along its way, and Canyonlands was an opportunity to see another set of them.

We started by driving to the end of the park and the Grand View Point lookout where you had a 270° panorama of the Canyon and the Colorado river. Across the river you could see many of the sites and monuments that we visited yesterday in the Arches National Park.

The canyons formed in this part of the river seem like a cross between those of the Grand Canyon and Bryce Canyon National Parks.…

Apr 5, 2025

Not much in Green River to tickle the taste buds, so we ended up at the local servo at breakfast time to fill the car and get our morning coffee.

It was our day to explore Arches National Park, but the far more pressing need was good coffee and something decent to eat. We certainly found that at a wonderful bakery in Moab near the park entrance, but I’ve never paid $60 for two coffees and two cakes in my life before. Everything around the national park is incredibly expensive with hotel rooms in the range of $500–$600 per night, which might explain why we are in a cruddy Super Six way down the road.…

Apr 4, 2025

Paid another visit to the really interesting Natural Groceries shop first thing. It’s an amazingly large shop with organic vegetables, and aisle after aisle of every health lotion, potion, capsule, tablet, spray and powder ever manufactured. Unlike supermarkets back home that stock one brand and a home brand, this had every item made by every brand for every line. There were cures for ailments that I didn’t even know existed. The aisle for men’s complaints included remedies if you had a deficiency of something, and a remedy if you had an overabundance of the same issue. Casting my eye over the labels gave me a great sympathy for the plight of the American male, but I didn’t manage to find a lotion to give you orange skin.…

Apr 3, 2025

Now, if this all gets too much, watch this excerpt from the musical Book of Mormon – it’s one of my favourites https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKkLV1zE8M0

Had a reasonable night’s sleep, with a few fits and starts as our bodies struggled to cope with the 12 hour time change. Woke up to a cool morning, and as we sat and ate our breakfast at the hotel, it started snowing gently. We’re not in the Philippines any more Toto.

First stop of the day was a local supermarket to stock up a couple of things we couldn’t replenish in the Philippines, or we couldn’t carry on planes.…