Arizona: the first in a mini-series

Although I'll be posting this after arriving home, I'm writing it in Flagstaff, Arizona, sitting outside our RV (otherwise known as a mobile home to all you UK folk and, funnily enough, the French too - who call it un mobilehome) on a balmy August evening. Family Buckley is on a road trip, American style. There have been (many) pancakes with bacon and maple syrup, a good deal of fried goods, too many meals served with 'whipped butter' and the occasional root beer. There have also been long, long, straight roads, plenty of cacti, and lots and lots of trucks.

Since other people's holidays really aren't very exciting to read about, I'll try and keep the entries relatively brief. But Arizona deserves a bit of good PR. It's largely known for being hot and deserted - in both senses of the word - and for laying claim to one of the seven natural wonders of the world, The Grand Canyon. But the one thing that has struck me in the days since we arrived is the enormous variety of terrain and landscapes in a relatively small area.

The RV signifies the second half of our stay in Arizona and the start of our holiday proper. We arrived a week ago for a conference in Flagstaff. Alec and I hung out in the hotel for a week, while Andy did some clever physics. In the midst of this, I also turned Thirty (I think it deserves a capital letter). Although there were no fireworks or surprise parties or even, in fact, a card from my husband (the less said about that the better), it turned out to be a good day. We drove east of Flagstaff to see the 'world's best known and best preserved' Meteor Crater: nearly a mile across and 550 feet deep, there's no denying its a Very Big Hole in the Ground. At $16 a pop, it ought to be. Sadly, the visitor centre is about 30 years out of date and the exhibits tangential to say the least - after all, there really isn't a lot to say about a big hole in the ground. 

The celestial object that caused it was about 45m across and travelling at 40,000 miles an hour when it hit, which are impressive stats, but that is about as far as it goes. A little disgruntled, we headed back to Flagstaff and north to the Wupatki National Monument. The first thing you need to know is: it's not a monument. The US seems to have chosen to call sites of national or historic interest 'monuments', the equivalent if you like to our national heritage sites in the UK. The Wupatki 'monument' is actually a series of early American Indian settlements, pueblos, which have been found scattered across the barren Arizonan landscape. Built around 900 years ago from simple bricks and sand-based mortar, they seem older than they really are. 

If you consider that Durham Cathedral was built and already been worshipped in around the same time, they start to look a little sad. But they are an unusual feature out in the hot Arizonan desert, in what is in any case a 'young' country. More impressive, however, was the lava field we drove alongside to reach them. Having been created when lava cascaded down from the volcano at Sunset Crater around the same time as the Wupatki settlements developed, the lava fields now look like ridiculously deep overturned fields of earth. Except that this 'earth' is solidified molten rock. I've never seen anything like it.

That stuff that looks like ploughed earth? Actually solidified lava.

The lava fields were just one of the many incredible vistas we've seen as we've driven across the state. When we left Phoenix airport (ground temperature: 41 degrees) and drove north to Flagstaff, we passed through cacti country. Barren, sandy and rocky, with poker-straight roads carving through the middle of it, this was exactly how we had pictured the Arizonan landscape. But as we headed north and climbed up towards the plateau on which Flagstaff sits, we found mountains, forests and an abundance of vegetation. We are back in Flagstaff rather unintentionally. After leaving the conference, we drove back to Phoenix to collect our RV. Enthusiastic and woefully over-optimistic, we intended to drive north to Saint Johns (roughly 200 miles north east) that same afternoon. Unfortunately we hadn't checked any topographical maps (Arizona is flat and dusty, right?) and we soon found ourselves limping through an unwieldy mountainous landscape that our rattly old RV simply couldn't cope with (in fact, this will turn out to be just one of an impressive series of bits of misfortune during the trip...). The scenery was staggering, all the more so because we passed through a dramatic thunderstorm en route, but by 7pm we'd only traveled 80 miles, so we called it quits and holed up in a roadside RV park for the night. The next day - today - we had to rethink our plans, which had originally included driving still further north to Bluff, Utah by tonight to see Monument Valley. Looking at the huge expanse of map ahead of us, and having now become accustomed to our RV's rather leisurely pace (if the road signs specify a 55 mph speed limit, we can be fairly confident we won't be managing much more than 30), we've scaled back. The stop-off in Flagstaff tonight is part of our new journey towards Page tomorrow, and the Grand Canyon the day after. Happily, this change of route allowed us to see the Painted Desert today: a vast, rolling area of rocky desert in which the rocks are stratified in different colours. While much of the Painted Desert is nothing out of the ordinary, some of the vistas are breathtakingly beautiful, such as the lookout we found just north of Winslow.

Arizona continues to amaze and surprise us, and we haven't even seen the Grand Canyon yet. With a bit of luck, out RV will manage to trundle all the way up there.