My 1st USA trip: The Grand Canyon

When I knew I had the approval to go to the Keystone symposium, I have been planning madly how to squeeze in some sightseeing around. At Keystone, I was supposed to follow a tour to see the amazing intercontinental divide but that didn't happened due to some miscommunication. 

In the end, I managed to squeeze in Flagstaff + Grand Canyon for a weekend trip. Of course, I was greedy and hoped for more, but oh well...there's just so much time!!! A lot of hard work + research had gone into this to make it happen. I even joined Couch surfing group to try to get free beds, haha which workout fine. 

I did not stay behind for the last free & easy day of the conference and opted to fly out straight from Denver to Flagstaff (3-4 hrs from Grand canyon south rim). But it's just so hard to match all the connecting transportation, which ended up I missed the last public van to Grand canyon the same day I touched down (just minutes away??!!). 

I was pretty stubborn and persist that maybe I can hitch hike though it's forbidden in US law. And in fact I did had that prepared as my last option and done my research. Caught a cab to one of the nearest petrol station and tried my luck. However, hitch-hiking prove to be pretty hard when u are out of luck. It was approaching evening too, so everyone was heading home. Those I met at the petrol station if any just came down from Grand canyon and heading further south. One even offered US$100 to take me up there, but no way, the public van only cost 30$, I'm not that desperate, haha. 

My 1st USA trip: Keystone, Colorado

From Denver it takes ~3 hrs without jam to get to Keystone which had a base elevation of 2830m already. The highest town/resort I have been so far. 

I was here for a 5d4n conference, 

the 1st day it was already snowing and everywhere was covered with snow and looked grey

The snow was really deep, if it wasn't for the clearing of the snow on the roads, it would be so hard to walk on them. Your leg can just sink in them and it's hard to pull yourself up.

My 1st USA trip - Denver March 2011

The ride from Adelaide - Sydney - Los Angeles - Denver was my longest flight so far. Although the crews of United Airline were friendly and nice, the limited space in front of the seat is making it hard to breath and zzzz. 

Didn't have much sleep from Sydney to LA. To make it worse, I was sitting in the middle of the 3 seats, it's hard to get to the toilet and the one sitting on the right is a bigger size person.

Oh well...I still make it to LA, but not with other unexpected problems!!! (I'll leave that part out)

Because of the UNEXPECTED problem, I only reached my sort of backpacker hostel in Denver at 10-11PM instead of 5PM (USA is not good at backpacker hostel, they have more motels and hotels somehow).