From Pretoria to Trumpland: My Life's Journey

    On a hot, sunny, August day, my friend Joan Thomas and I set off at 1.30 pm from Peachtree City, Georgia, on the fourth of our road trips across the vast USA. Joan had harboured an inexplicable yearning to visit the Mall of America in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as well as Fargo in North Dakota. The Mall of America is purported to be the largest mall in the USA, and Fargo I associate with that 1996 Oscar award-winning movie with the same name. Despite my only memory of the movie, a dark comedy crime  thriller, being of snow and a flat landscape, I was happy to accompany her on this new adventure. Instead of her large old comfortable 1995 Buick, we packed our luggage into her 2006 red Volkswagen beetle, which had been acquired some months earlier as a replacement for the trusty old girl. Except for the two objectives mentioned above, we had no fixed plan or route, and the only constraint was that we had to be back in Peachtree City by 18th August so that I coul...

We left Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon Dam close to noon on Saturday 23rd May blissfully unaware that it was the Memorial Holiday weekend. Joan had not been to the Grand Canyon before, while I had visited this outstanding natural wonder in Arizona back 2003. So to enable her to cross this attraction off her Bucket List, we headed south. Our calculations showed that we could get to Tusayan, a village at the south entrance to the park, where we could find accommodation before nightfall. The total distance was about 130 miles.  The Colorado River wa.a..ay down in the canyon  Wild flowers on the south rim of the canyon A large part of the route was through the Navajo Indian Reservation and the Painted Desert. The South Rim of the Grand Canyon is the most popular side. It has about 35 miles of paved roads, and there are many excellent observation points from where one can view the canyon.  While we were driving through the park a sudden rainstorm overtook us. But des...