Sick, shopping and planning road trip

Today I woke up sick, feeling cold and light-headed. Got in the shower which warmed me up a bit, but the best thing for warming you up in this house is the bathroom wall heater. It is built into the wall and stands vertically. Once turned on the amount of heat that comes out from it is amazing. I definitely want one of these at home.

Bathroom heater

After the shower I did not feel any better so it was back to bed until after midday when I arose feeling a little better.

Ros and I went off to Farmer Joe's to do some food shopping. Food shopping is very strange in the U.S. Trader Joe's is mostly like our supermarkets, but you cannot buy ordinary white cane sugar there, you have to go to CVS Pharmacy. I kid you not! And both stores have alcohol for purchase, from wines and beers and up to spirits and liqueurs. Amazing! They are big on organic foods over here, just about every food is labelled as organic or has an organic variety.

When you go to pay for your shopping, you give the trolley to the packing man who packs it into paper bags for you, all the while holding a conversation with you. They do not have PayPass for credit cards over here, you still have to sign for purchases, and not on the docket either, on a screen with a stylus.

After that I started planning our road trip for next week, booking hotels and planning routes. We have decided to skip the Grand Canyon Skywalk as all the reviews about it are terrible. Apparently you pay about $50 for admission, can wait up to 1.5 hours to get onto the walk, no cameras or mobile phones allowed, but you can get your picture taken by staff for the bargain price of $15 per photo. The photos are very small and posed cheesily so they are not worth the cost. To top it all off, you are only allowed on the walk for about 3 minutes before you are shuffled off to the exit. Definitely not worth it, so we will just revisit the South Rim. I was planning to go to the North Rim too, but that is closed for the winter.

Anyway, next Tuesday we will set off for Las Vegas and stay the night there. It is about 5 hours from Los Angeles over the excellent interstate highways here. On Wednesday we'll travel out to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, then push onto the Arizona Meteor Crater, before returning to Flagstaff to stay the night. Next day it's up bright and early for the 5 and 1/2 hour trip to Bryce Canyon in Utah. We may stop off at Zion Canyon on the way. From there it's back to Las Vegas for another overnight stay, then back to Los Angeles on Friday.

Tonight it is back to Luke and Michelle's place, just a 10 minute walk up the road for tea. Hopefully Josh and Sam will join us as well.