The Southwest Portion of the Great American Roadtrip
We arrived in Vancouver after a 9 day long trip through America starting in Maine, going south to North Carolina, west through Tennessee, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California and all states between until we reached the border of BC. I'm slowly putting together some of the panoramas that we took along the way. These images are pretty big and will show up slowly on a dial-up connection. If you'd like to see the region on Google Maps, click on the photo and a new window will popup with a zoomed in view of the area photographed.


ROUTE 66
After reaching Oklahoma City, we joined the I-40 to travel west. The I-40 replaced the original Route 66 whick is now refered to as Historic Route 66. Here's a photo of an old section of it in (I think) New Mexico as we got closer to Arizona. If you look at the curved area, you'll see how the road eventually ends in the middle of the field. Many parts of the old road have been destroyed or have worn away in this manner. Unfortunately I don't have a google map for this location.




GRAND CANYON
Once reaching Flagstaff, Arizona, we took a side highway to the Grand Canyon. The air was unusually thin in Flagstaff because the area around it sits at a high elevation of somewhere between 6000 - 7500 feet above sea level. The next images are larger in file size to preserve some of the detail in them. At it's widest point, the Grand Canyon is 10 miles across. That's insane.

This is me and this photo was taken by Dave.


I took this one. I don't know who this guy is but he took a photo of the two of us with the Canyon in the background a few minutes after I took this shot.


This shot is of an area of the canyon called The Abyss. Had we seen it first I'm sure it would have lived up to it's name but, really, the whole Grand Canyon is an abyss. To get a sense of the scale, check out the "tiny" full grown trees on some of the ridges in the far left of this photo.



DRIVING HISTORIC ROUTE 66
Somewhere between Gallup, New Mexico and Flagstaff, Arizona and starting just passed the area of Williams is a turn off to a longer section of Historic Route 66. This route has little to no traffic and takes those who drive it through the most amazing expanses of open space. There is nothing around to give a sense of scale. This photo was taken in the middle of a valley. Start at one end of it and slowly scroll in the opposite direction and you'll have a 360degree view of what I saw standing on the side of the road. Click on the image for a Google view of the area. Those ridges in the photo? They're the rocky edges of this valley you see in the aerial view.




LAS VEGAS
At the end of this section of the old road, we arrived in Kingman and headed north through more desert to Las Vegas. Vegas is big, bright and very difficult to get panoramic photos of because everything is moving and blinking. I did manage to get one wide shot before getting distracted by sparkly things. We stayed at Treasure Island which is a hotel with a tropical pirate theme. Arrrrrr. You can see a section of it in the back of this shot. It's the building that says Island across the top.




THE DESERT
We stayed in Vegas for a night before departing for the desert toward California. The Southwest desert is beautiful. I knew we weren't going to make it to Joshua Tree National Park so I made it a point to stop the car for some photos as we were coming out of Nevada and into California.



In case you're wondering, the joshua tree on the cover of the U2 album of the same name is in Joshua Tree National Park south of the section of the Mohave Desert we were travelled through. The tree on the album cover fell under it's own weight at some point over the last few years.


I'll be putting up more images over the course of the next week. We're in Vancouver now but staying with a friend until we move into our new place. I'm hoping that I'll have the time to catalogue all our photos in this manner eventually but these are some of the more interesting ones of landscapes that grabbed us.