Category: USA trip

The Holiday Motel, Los Banos, CA is not everyone’s cup of tea.  It is the cheapest place I’ve stayed and for $35 a night you don’t expect much. But I don’t want much – wifi, a shower and a bed will do it. The wifi works, the shower works (I’ve washed myself and some clothes…

I take back all I thought about Nevada – I like it!  Even quieter roads than Utah, looks like the Flow Country, has clownish motels and has a few birds too.  As I left Nevada, with a touch of sadness, but quite quickly as it was on a long downhill straight off the White Mountain…

I didn’t want to come to Nevada but I’m staying two nights in the Clown Motel in Tonopah.  There are clowns everywhere – in the motel office, on the doors, on the walls and, yes probably, as guests. All I knew about Nevada was that Las Vegas was in Nevada – a rather popular but…

Part 1: Arches National Park is a landscape feast.  It has the red cliffs of Marble Canyon, the weathered sandstone of Badlands NP and the majesty of Sion NP all rolled into one.  If you think I liked it, you’re wrong – I loved it. I visited it first late yesterday afternoon and stayed until…

I think yesterday was so lovely I didn’t have room to tell you all about it. Let’s backtrack just a bit.  I crossed the Mississippi River, heading west. The river forms a notional boundary between the forest area (to the east) and the Great Plains (to the west). Obviously it’s not a hard and fast…

It’s been a long day – starting in Indiana a bit west of Indianapolis and ending in Kansas a b1t west of Topeka.  You can tell it was a long day when I say that the first words I heard were from the satnav saying ‘stay on the I70 for 200 miles’ which only got…

It’s been a long day and I’ve covered a lot of miles.  But I also met someone I have only previously ‘met’ on social media.  Hope to see her again soon – at the Bird Fair, I hope. Let me take you back nearly, but not quite, two weeks to when I picked up this…

The ospreys, herring gull, turnstone and swallows could have been in Scotland – even the brood of goosander ducklings and the distant great northern diver could have been Scotland, but these were common merganser ducklings and a common loon. And they were with hooded merganser, spotted sandpiper, ring-billed gull and purple martin so we were…

Today has been a holiday here in the USA just like back in the UK.  Here it is Memorial Day where those who fell in battle are remembered.  There are stars and stripes all over – and I like that.  Remembrance Day in the UK, with its poppies, is moving, but the only time you…

Pennsylvania isn’t named after the Penns for nothing – and nor is it called sylvania for nothing.  It’s full of trees.  It’s the most tree-rich state I have seen so far. As I drove up the Allegheny river’s course there were trees everywhere.  Trees and rivers. It’s May and so the mayflies are flying.  Here…