Kev's Super Happy Travel Blog

I'll be leaving America tomorrow to head over to sunny Peru. So here are a few more phrases I've overheard; I imagine the number of phrases I overhear and understand will soon decrease as I can't speak Spanish...

• "Dude it looks like that evil slime from Ghostbusters!"
  
• "Awww, I really like my tight little hole."
  
• "What sex is Scooby Doo?"
  "Male."
  "And Scrappy Doo?"
  "Male."
  "But surely they're both androgenous?"
  "Yeah, but they're not gonna draw a large pink cartoon schlong on them are they?"
  

My last tour with the N.C.C. was a four day jaunt back to Dayton State Park for more trail work. We were finishing the trails off that we'd started before and then tidied up a whole new set of trails over the road at an abandoned mill.

The work was a lot harder this time as most of it involved carting huge rocks around and digging/chiseling holes to put the huge rocks in. It did look damn good when finished though, if I do say so myself. Pity my camera battery ran out before I got a photo...

We invented a new term: "denascarifying". That is the act of removing a banked curve (a NASCAR turn if you will) from the trail by digging up the earth from the banked side and moving it over to the other side until the turn is level...

Whilst I am in the US I thought I should visit Memphis. Two main reasons:

• Graceland, home of Elvis. I'm a big Elvis fan so I needed to do this pilgrimage at least once in my life...
  
• Sun Studio, birthplace of rock 'n' roll. Again, big rock 'n' roll fan so I had to visit Sun...
  

I started on the first day with a trip to Graceland. I was half expecting a load of tacky stalls and exhibits pissing all over the life of The King, but happily that wasn't the case. The mansion itself has been kept pretty much as it was when He lived there. It is kind of sad walking around though; you get the feeling that the place is just missing so much without Elvis alive in it.

There are several exhibits over the road too, such as trips around Elvis' private jets and car collections.

You can also get a tour of the various suits he wore over the years and various other memoribilia, such as the hundreds of gold and platinum discs he won.

After Graceland my next stop was Beale Street, sort of the heart of downtown Memphis. I first stopped in Coyote Ugly for a few beers. Whilst a fun place it was pretty dead on a Wednesday... I think the weekend in Memphis would be a lot more fun! I then proceeded to B.B. King's Blues Bar for more beers and some live music. Memphis is very good for live bands; there seem to be loads playing every night you're there.

The next day was Sun Studio. There is a very good tour around the studio, despite there being very little to actually see there! The studio is still in use today; tours stop at 6PM and they let bands in to record there. I'll have to save up some cash and bring my guitar next time...

I then managed to get stuck in Memphis for an extra night; snow at Dallas had stopped all flights through there and American Airlines couldn't get me out until the next day. Which means I had to pay out for a hotel (admittedly at a reduced rate) for the night. I have come to the conclusion that American Airlines are pretty bad; they repeatedly messed up getting me a new flight and other airlines would have covered the full hotel cost. (e.g. British Airways who covered a hotel for me when the airport I was due to fly from went on strike...)

One of my English compatriots came up with this idea. Basically the challenge was to get ourselves photographed with one hundred different ladies over the course of an evening. The idea being that this would also get us talking to lots of ladies. Nice. There were six of us in all, three English and three American. The overall target was 100, with a mini-competition for a round of beers as to which national team could get the most. Obviously we had to have some ground rules:

• Don't approach single women, only groups; we didn't want to scare the hell out of people.
  
• Don't approach women with men; we didn't want to get our heads kicked in.
  
• No team blocking; the overall goal is the 100, the team with the most is the second goal. Therefore one team couldn't stop another from getting photos.
  

There was talk of a points system too (e.g. twice points for women kissing you in the photos) but we never bothered to agree on a set of rules for that...

We decided to start at the south end of the strip and work our way north to the hotel, hitting as many casinos on the way as possible. Team America got an early start on us by getting several photos on the bus on the way down there...

First place we spent a decent length of time was the MGM Grand which got us quite a few photos.

We then managed to weave our way between the casinos, cleverly getting more and more drunk whilst chanting football songs. We lost people in the group, we got flashed by ropey prostitutes, we played beer pong, we gambled, we generally behaved as one should in Las Vegas...

Sadly the beer affected our efforts later on in the evening and we collapsed back in our hotel sometime after 5AM.

Final count of ladies for the evening: well I'm not quite sure. Still collating all the photos... However I know we got photos with at least 70 different women. Which is pretty damn good if you ask me.

In our six days off we decided to head over to Las Vegas for a few days of vice in Sin City. Team England hopped on a plane and arrived in Vegas about lunchtime. We headed over to our hotel to check in and try and catch the second half of a Champion's League game.

We were staying in The Stratosphere, a hotel and casino located at the far north of the Las Vegas strip. It has a large tower as part of the complex, which is the tallest free-standing structure in Nevada. It certainly gives you a good view of the town.

There are even rides on top of the tower...

Anyways we settled in for a few drinks whilst waiting for our American road tripping friends to arrive so we could begin The Night Of One Hundred Ladies...

The last day. More fence destruction in the wild. Luckily we managed to get hold of some machetes.

I got the path clearing job. That was fun; hacking the hell out of wildlife with two machetes in the name of conservation. It's only a pity the machetes were as a sharp as a wooden spoon. Whilst they worked fine on the old, dead trees the reeds were having none of it. Many of them fought back, smacking me around the face with carefree abandon.

We ended the day clearing out the remnants of a previous team's fence destruction, i.e. lugging large coils of fence wire around the place. Fence wire that had clearly been sitting there for several years given that plants and shrubs had decided to grow through most of the discarded piles of wire. This job is never simple...

No more wading today; the other half of the crew got the remaining rubbish cleared out. But there were still plenty of fences to rip up and rubbish to cart around. Lucky us!

However our new fences were quite near our campsite, which wasn't too bad. The only problem was they were in the middle of a large number of trees, reeds, mesquite and various other spiky plants. Nature is sure good at hurting your average conservationist.

Day four got a little tricky. The morning was more carrying and transporting of rubbish, but the afternoon got tricky. There was one tiny little piece of fence in the middle of nowhere. Half the crew had ripped it out in the morning leaving my half to carry the rest of the rubbish back in the afternoon. There were no really large posts and most of the stuff wasn't too heavy. However we had to carry it for a 30 minute walk through swamps, bogs and streams. In very attractive waders:

I say waders. For me usually waders are waterproof. These had more holes than a second hand dartboard.

I'm still not sure why we had to rip out this fence. We were removing fences to make access easier for the general public. But no member of the general public in their right mind would ever wander out there. Even if they had good waders.

The work suddenly got a lot harder... We moved to a new area to rip out more fences, however this time all the posts were very large lumps of wood. Cue a day carting heavy stuff... Helps keep me fit I guess, although it did rip the hell out of my shoulders.

Hardly the romantic way one usually spends Valentine's Day. But then again Al Capone once ruined a romantic night out for many diners by massacring them so there have been worse.

The sunset did help increase the romance content of the day, but the lack of shagging brought it right back down again.

More barbed wire fences on the second day, but only for the first half. The second half of the day was an educational day. We get these every trip or two where we learn about the local area from someone who works there. Amber, the project manager at Ash Meadows, gave us a talk about Ash Meadows and some of the endangered species there. The one that we learnt most about is the Devil's Hole pupfish. This little fish lives only in Devil's Hole which is a small geothermal spring in Ash Meadows. There were various caves formed in Ash Meadows around half a million years ago. These got separated over time, meaning various species were cut of in the caves and evolved slightly differently over the years.

There are only 38 pupfish currently in Devil's Hole. Man made irrigation earlier this century caused the water level in the hole to drop which in turn killed a lot of the pupfish. After various court battles in the 70s they were eventually protected. However the population has still declined since then. Largely due to the people 'protecting' them; in 2004 they put a few cages down there to trap pupfish for studying, came back the next day to find the traps had fallen into Devil's Hole and trapped and killed about two thirds of the population... Attempts to get them to breed in hatcheries aren't having much luck either; currently most of the fish that are bred are born with leukemia. They also currently have a feeding station which gives the pupfish food everyday at the same place from three. Of course this has had the effect of domesticating the pupfish which doesn't help for the long term survival of the species...

Personally I reckon let them die out. The little buggers have had millions of dollars thrown at them so far which I'm sure could be better spent elsewhere.

Towards the end of the educational day we noticed a dust storm starting in the distance.

I'd never been in a dust storm before; it's certainly an exhilarating experience. I just wish it had died out quickly so we didn't have to camp in it that night...