We set off this morning on the 1st proper day of our roadtrip from LA.
We had a drive through Joshua Tree National Park (but not quite to
Twentynine Palms) – see photo, and then continued through the desert
to Blythe for lunch. Afterwards the news broke all of a sudden on the
radio that Micheal Jackson had died!! Very, very wierd.

Throughout the desert, into Arizona, past tall cacti, endless MJ songs
played on the radio all the way to Pheonix.

We arrived just outside of town at our Best Western in Scottsdale to
cops in the lobby, attending to some sort of disturbance in the hotel.
Dispite that we have a very nice room with an enormous bed.

The TV is full of MJ news (and very occasional news about the death of
Farrah Fawcett) so we went out for a really nice tea just down the
road at The Orange Table.

Tomorrow we move further East…you can’t BEAT IT!!

Another day, another park. Today was Universal Studios Hollywood.

Ben was sad to see that Back To The Future and ET rides had gone but
pleased that they have been replaced by equally good (if not better)
ones.

We started with The Simpsons which replaced Back To The Future and was
an excellent motion-master type ride. Quickly followed by The Mummy
which replaced ET and is a pitch black indoor rollercoaster which goes
forwards and then backwards – really good fun. So much so we rushed
around to go on again.

We got drenched on the Jurassic Park water ride, did the backlot tour
and had some lunch. Our afternoon was spent watching all the shows and
3D movies, after which we were ready to call it quits and head back to
our hotel.

Tomorrow we may go back as we were given a second day for free but we
will pick up some supplies before the road trip begins on Thursday and
see if we have time. Think we’ll also have a lie in as these theme
parks are tiring!

We arrived in LA yesterday (Sunday) and picked up our hire car – a
Chevrolet HHR which isn’t too bad actually. We went and bought a Tom
Tom GPS and treated ourselves to an In-N-Out Burger before heading to
our motel. An incredibly successful day.

Today we went to Six Flags roller coaster park and had a ball of a
time. The queues were nice and manageable so we both went on all 8
‘extreme’ coasters including Goliath (see pic) which is very high and
X2 which spins you around throughout the ride. Our favourite was the
Batman ride which is even better than Montu in Busch Gardens, Florida,
although similar so we went on it twice!!

We finished the day at Red Lobster – a great seafood chain restaurant
we have been to in Florida. The cheese biscuits were as good as usual!!