Returned home yesterday afternoon after a fortnight in Vegas (MGM Grand), never been to the USA before, so it was quite a sight to see the amount of traffic actually travelling up and down "the strip"....some folk even doin power slide u-turns in their super cars.
We hired a Ford Escape, we call it the Kuga over here but when we went to collect it, they hadn't had it returned, so we were upgraded to an eight seater Buick - not sure what model but it was great to have the space, with my mate and myself occupying the front and leaving the girls doing their chatting/photo snapping from the rear. I let my mate drive on day one, as I had a stiff neck and couldn't turn my head to the left too much.
We drove out to the Hoover dam and Boulder city to start with on day one and took a steady drive back. Day two was shall we say "interesting"
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The plan was my mate would drive us to the Skywalk at the Grand Canyon, it's on an Indian reserve - Hualepei or something like....and I would drive back. The vehicle had a sat nav built in but my mate had his Tomtom which he had purchased and updated to the latest USA maps before we left. They both sent us off to the I-93 iirc, then there was a discrepancy. We were using the Tomtom for the journeys but I was playing/monitoring the built in one. Which at one point said we needed to turn around....the Tomtom said we should carry straight on. We pulled over and all four of us discussed it, with his wife saying her phone GPS was also saying carry on. I argued that I had hit the "attractions" button on the built in one and the word Skywalk Canyon was there and I had pressed it...so it was surely the one to follow. I lost the argument and on we went....
Eventually we turned off the main road, having travelled through Kingman and along Route 66, onto what I can only describe as a "dirt track", signed as " now entering Hualepei Reserve". After about eight miles on this, at about 15 mph, we came across four Indians (tribal ones) who were repairing the road due to a landslide. One stopped us and said "you have certainly come the scenic route to get there, unfortunately the road is unpassable any further", due to the rain we had had two days earlier. My mates wife was already flapping about not being insured on "dirt tracks"....so we ended up turning around and returning back towards Kingman. By now it was after 4.00pm and too late to go the other route anyway........so we ended up having effectively driven almost 200 miles and got nowhere.
I now understand what happened, the skywalk is by a road called Buck and Doe road (the dirt track we were on) which my mate had put into his sat nav.....unfortunately this road is 134 miles long and his sat nav sent us to the other end of it
The irony of it is, one of my mates favourite sayings is "all the gear....but no idea" ..... how very true.
It was quite funny tbh and I have hours worth of meaningless chat and straight line road footage from my dash cam I had taken with me.
Note to self - visit ocUK forum for travel tips next time
TLDR; couldn't find the Grand Canyon
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