8.-18.10.2000 me and Dr Heli Jutila together with her brother Harri Erkkila and his girlfriend Aila Nylund took a 6 500 kilometers trip from Lafayette (LA) to Grand Canyon (AZ) (& back). Nights we spent in motels ranging between some $ 30 & 50. First halfaweek it rained in the deserts of TX, NM & AZ (two mornings we even scraped frost away from car windows), I saw pretty few birds, but the landscapes were jolly impressive – from white gypsum dunes to mountains, mesas & gorges, from cactus deserts to magnificent spruce woods, driving like easy rider with automatic speed control on sunny interstates or on the suicide strips of mountain serpentine roads by night and Dallas spaghetti ways with bangkokian traffic.

Temperatures ranged between –5 and +30, so all sorts of clothes were needed. There are nowadays many good tourbooks available: we used Lonely Planet’s, Moon Publications’ and Mobil Travel Guide books (most of them borrowed from libraries of Louisiana and Finland). The last lists very well the accommodations, and "Moon" is the US equivalent for LP. Moon seems to be little more nature-orientated than LP and its guides contained best sight information. It is always a good job to pop into different states travel infos, usually there are proper roadmaps available for free. At least TX has also published a brilliant town guide and we caught a free discount magazine to SW USA.

Only once, after 2 055 kilometers, we had a minor oil problem in our Dodge Intrepid (from 1995, 196 000 km behind).

Here’s our route:

Temperature has overnight sunken from the 30 degrees C to well below 15, and wind makes it chilling. Gone are our hummingbirds (Archilochus colubris). On the way to pick Aila & Harri from Houston, we visit Lacassine Pool. Summertime it uses to be one of the best birding sites in LA for thousands of herons, egrets & ibises from over a dozen species have their meals there. Now it is almost empty.

From Houston to Austin we drive in rain. In the middle of TX capital there is a bridge over the river. From April to October there lives hundreds of thousands mexican freetailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis), who leave the bridge daily in the sunset. It is said to be spectacle, but unfortunately we arrive to Austin by night.

We took the Austin route because we intended to visit National Wildflower Research Center in the morning. Of course it is closed because of some US holiday, but yet we stroll there, not caring about closed gates nor the rain. (The holiday honors Chris Columbus, the last guy who discovered America – after all the inuits, Indians & vikings..).

From Austin the landscape changes. Most of LA & TX are dull plains, but now we observe gently sloping mountains (and lots of vultures). From Johnson City we get proper coffee from a gas station. The town is named after some US president. Fredericksburg is seemingly a deutsche town, so we make our stop only in Sonora.

After Fredericksburg landscapes are getting drier. No more grasses under oaktrees, forests become sparse and we can see for kilometers gently sloping mountains. Most common birds are vultures (Coragyps atratus & Cathartes aura). As we stop at Caverns of Sonora, it has started to rain.

The Caverns are privately owned sight, but it doesn’t make a difference. Was the sight in private or public ownership, in the US you have to pay 2-10 dollars to get in (in Grand Canyon its $ 20!). Here everything costs – even that, when waitress asks you "Is everythin’ OK?". Cheap eating in USA is just an urban tale - You can eat cheaper in Fennoscandia.

The caves are magnificent, though: well worth visiting. There are total so far eight kilometers of them, and the 2-km tourist route shows a wide variety of very strange mineral formations from straw-like baby stalactites to wind-eroded caves. It is amazing to note, how fast these geologic processes are: geology always tells us about slow processes. The structures in the cave were assembled since 1960’s and yet many of them are under thick stone! Temperature in the cave is constantly 21 centigrades and relative humidity 98 %. Cave was found only in the 50’s and it’s not been used by Indians or bats, as many other caves in TX, NM & AZ.

Landscape from the Caverns Of Sonora.

In the evening we arrive to Fort Stockton. It lies on a dull desert plateau, and it’s there because of crossroads. Night is cold and we enjoy cappuccinos in gas station before goodnight. There is at least a deciliter of sugar in the mug. Only place in the US to get proper coffee is Louisiana!

Nice morning! All clothes on, get a complimentary cup of coffee from the motel (milder as tea), and scrape frost away from car windows with a cassette cover. So it is freezing in the southern US desert. We hit the road before sunrise, and it is a nice sight from the rear mirror.

Between Van Horn and Rio Grande valley we drive again among magnificent mountains. In Rio valley soil gets sandy with even dune landscapes (the desert so far had been rather stony). High mountains on the Mexican side.

Those magnificent mountains of W Texas.

El Paso is USA:s largest border city and Ciudad Juarez is same to Mexico. To visit border-Mexico is easy, no visa is needed. Just park the car on US parking lot ($ 3) and walk over Rio Grande. There are plenty of taxi chauffeurs offering a ride in Juarez, but we can very well do our shopping on the bazaar-like nearby streets, where you can also try the noble art of haggling over the price. One notice: Mexican peso is marked as $, but the prices are much cheaper than US$. At last weather was somehow warm.

As we walk back to Paso, US checks the passports. Be sure you have there with you the "departure record" card, that visitors receive in the plane when entering USA. We enjoy coffees in cafeteria (which in fact was a pub, as they tend to be anywhere) and the aged waitress advertises us to skip the Grand Canyon and visit Gulf Of California instead. It’s not so far from Tucson, and Mexican food & accommodation is cheap. We seriously start to consider this – we already have left Carlsbad Caverns & Guadalupe Mountains off of our original route.

From Paso we drive to NM, via Las Cruces to White Sands National Park. Just east of Cruces there are high Organ Mountains with recreation areas. The pass between Cruces & Sands is high, so it put the Intrepid under pressure. Oil system has some problem, but luckily the weather is not hot to threaten us with overheating.

White Sands Missile Range is world’s largest military area and the site of the first nuclear explosion (so it wasn’t in Hiroshima). It completely surrounds the National Park, and time and again there are fighters in the sky. Still we experience brilliant silence there. Overall, stopping in these southern deserts one can hear a great emptiness (especially after spending several months in densely populated Cajun Country). No matter how loud you shout, the hundred-kilometer barren landscape eats your sound very quickly. No one can hear your scream in the desert...

White Sands consists of gypsum sand with a very interesting history (that I’m just now not going to revisit) and utterly fascinating today (I am available to give a presentation...). The area looks like snowfield, but You can very well survey it with sandals. In plantless areas you can get snowblind. This is active dune field with dunes over five meters high. Folks are encouraged to walk over there, because footprints will be swept away by wind in couple of days. Again it is amazing to realize the speed of geologic processes, as the dune cores are impacted under pressure into sandstone. The tour guide is good (as they seem to be anywhere in the US).

In the golden days of Spaniards the local Apaches slaughtered a campful of passing Spanish here. History repeated itself fifty years after and so the location was named Las Cruces (Crosses). There is well advertised Natural Museum in Mesilla Valley Mall, but after oil service we hurry towards Grand C.

After Cruces there is again dull desert plain and rain. Yuccas start to be common and Heli notices a coyote (Canis latrans) on the roadside. In Deming we try to get into Shakespeare ghost town (private sight), but don’t find even a ghost there. So we pop into Steins Railroad Ghost Town just before AZ border. It is open and Larry Link, who purchased "town" in 1988 takes us to guided walk. Actually Steins is a little village, but here in States one only needs two households to build a town.

The Links have cleaned the place for 12 years and they have left the interiors in their original settings. The houses are jolly more impressive in their authenticity than any clean museums. Well worth stopping especially as Steins is located just on the I-10 roadside. Links have also plenty of small cattle there, and now there is a Finnish 20 mark bill on the wall in the middle of US dollars (& even Russian ruble) left by tourists.

Again are we in the mountains (& continuous rain). The first village in AZ side is called Bowie and the second Willcox (in W TX there was her first name, Toyah – some trivia from 1980’s popmusic...). In Johnson we stop to see The Thing. This cafeteria/Indian souvenir shop/"museum" has been advertising on the roadside since TX, several hundred kilometers. The museum is a curiosity collection from 1800’s & 1900’s (eg. Adolf Hitler’s car and a wooden carved natural-size diorama of inquisition) and "The Thing" is "a mummified corpse, whose identity is yet to be revealed". It looks like a short human with monkey face, and we think it is carved out of wood.

Before Johnson there are beautiful massive porphyry monoliths on the roadside. Then, close to Tucson the saguaro cactus (Carnegiea gigantea) appear in the landscape. They are those cacti that You think of when speaking of cacti, but in fact they are here at their northernmost ranges. We drive a loop in Saguaro Nat’l Park E of Tucson in rain just before sunset. In some less wet day the hiking trails among different cacti would have been a must.

Place was originally named by Indians as "Stjukshon" ("By The Dark Mountain"). The Spanish spelled that mountain "Took Son" and the British left the k away, so the city is naw pronounced "Tuson" – and the mountain is now called "A". That’s because in 1910’s the students of University of Arizona (U of A) painted a large A on the mountain side. New students now repaint it yearly.

S of Saguaro NP there are Colossal Caverns and W of the city praised Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. Instead we have a dinner in the city before heading north.

We have come into decision not to try swimming in the Pacific (that the El Pasoan waitress proposed), after all; it’s a long way to Grand C. We also do not visit Biosphere 2 just NE of Tucson due to wrong timing. Biosphere 2 is (who doesn’t remember) "an experimental spaceship" constructed on Earth in order to study man’s possibility to travel in space with ecosystem (Biosphere 1 = the Earth). This thing was built in the 1980’s by curious millionaire. The place was inhabited by selected scientists and it should have been completely isolated from this world. The experiment did not quite succeed (as far as I remember), but produced plenty of useful information, though. The tourbooks say that visitors are not allowed inside this "earthship", but nowadays they do.

After Tucson rain stops in the night and almost full moon illuminates landscape especially nicely as we pass the steepsided Picacho Peak rising over the plain. At the motel in highway crossings of Eloy, the air is for the first time so warm that we hear crickets (Gryllus).

Sky is perfect clear for the first time. We really can sense the dry desert atmosphere. After Phoenix (with its satellites Chandler, Mesa & Scottsdale) we head into very panoramic mountain range towards Flagstaff. On the S slopes of these Superstition Mts we observe last saguaros. One of them has rather annoying outlook...

Up & down long and steep slopes all day. After desert we suddenly are among thick pine forests.

Arizona mountains.

Tonto Natural Bridge is said to be the biggest of its kind in the world (in Lake Powell there is another world’s biggest natural bridge...). Anyhow this again is magnificent. Little stream has carved its way under limestone and left behind a bridge some 50 meters high. You can walk both over the bridge and under it. I take some twenty slides from the place (eg. from the little waterfall, that fell off the bridge) – and found next day in Grand C, that the film had not started to roll. @#$%^&*!

If there is some diversity among US towns, it is Sedona. It is blamed to be a new age center, but what it is, is like Mediterranean tourist target in the middle of (once again) spectacular sandstone mountains. Lots of shops and restaurants, and what especially makes the difference is that you can walk almost anywhere: there are several trails to forests & mountains, and the traffic waits for people strolling over streets (wherever they want). I eat utterly delicious tuna sandwich there at the sunset.

Then north to Flagstaff via nerve-racking narrow serpentine road in the very dark night. Sky is clear but apparently the road crawls in a narrow gorge, so I never know what’s ahead in 50 meters. We pass Flagstaff (entering the Route 66 area), and for a while drive at the altitude of 2 300 m (record to all of us) and take a motel in chilly Williams (the westernmost place on Earth to all of us). Like many alike places, the village consists of motels & restaurants along the main street – 66 (which, by the way, was a jolly good year!). The noisy air conditioning wakes me up all the time it goes on during the night.

Another morning with scraping car windows with cassette cover. In the mountain area between Tucson & Williams the main plant seems to be pinyon (Pinus edulis), but as we head northwards we again enter sparsely vegetated plain with plenty of grasses. Then there is Grand Canyon. Everybody has seen it from pictures. The ditch is just like that. When you have seen one grand canyon, you’ve seen them all. Even the geologic story behind the formation is not as fascinating as eg. at White Sands or Caverns Of Sonora. The Colorado River has just cut its way through rock layers. That’s it (and the entrance costs $ 20). (Though the others have different opinions...).

Inside the park there are several excellent stores, in case you want to purchase grocery, nature books, Indian pottery or Indian drumming cassettes (as someone does...).

After seeing the view from Mather Point (the usual first sight for tourists) we take a bus (free!) to the Kaibab Trail head and hike three hours down (& three back). The guide books advice that it takes twice as long to climb back as it takes to roll down. These guides forget, that it is a universal rule, going to a new place takes longer than getting back (on an even surface, because on the way there you take your time to enjoy the scenery, and when returning, you already know your way). So, because of the climbing, it takes as long to get down as it takes to return!

The Canyon stinks! Entering the trail, our first observation is smell of shit. Because the trails are steep and demand some kind of physical fitness, it is popular to have it done on the mule trips. These caravans use same trails as humans, but the mules do not use restrooms.

Going down is psychically irritating (staring at the abyss), coming back is physically tough. We do not manage it quite down to the riverbank (in fact, no hiker does it in one day). Some birds there are (practically all of them new lifers to me) and a vampire squirrell (Citellus nips me from finger, as I tease it. Feeding and touching wildlife is here – as in any natural park all over the world – usually strictly prohibited. As in any natural park all over the world, visitors do it).

On the free bus trip back we visit Yaki Point for another landscape. Why the name? Because the view makes you puke.

Then we watch sun setting on Mather Point. There’s absolutely no point doing that. (Says redblind).

After sunset all tourists on the area roam in restaurants. After eating all tourists roam back on the viewpoints to see Grand C by night. After all, it is now full moon (and Friday the 13^th...). (To literate folks: Douglas Adams must have been here – The restaurant at the end of the Universe!).

We continue our journey eastwards. Aila & Harri want to do some riverboating, and the place to start this is almost two hundred kilometers away from the Canyon, in Page. (By the way, we visited Canyons South Rim. North Rim is 15 kilometers north of that, but to get there – it’s 300 meters higher than South Rim - by car one must drive 340 km).

Again in darkness we drive across gently undulating hills and forests of E Grand Canyon, observing plenty of elks & mule deers (Cervus elaphus & Odocoileus hemionus)– have to drive with caution. For a while we also give a hand to an Indian couple, whose car had stopped in the middle of the road. Their battery is dead. Because these US cars are nowadays so thoroughfully electrified, nothing can be done (not even pulling the car aside, because automatic gear was jammed) until someone with jump start cables stops.

We try to get a cheap motel room from Tuba City. Prices range there between $ 50 & 100. Wonder why – the town is just middle of nothing and its central business district = Macdonalds. So we drive almost 100 km to Page in the middle of night.

Now, Page is something. It is seemingly surrounded by treeless deserts and mountains, between Glen Canyon & Lake Powell (the latter created by Glen Canyon Dam). One begins to wonder what do people do here for living? Water power and tourism. Besides that, since Grand Canyon we have traveled through Indian country, and there are plenty of them living outside towns.

Sun is shining (first shorts weather), Aila & Harri do the raft trip during the day as Heli and I take "a walk in the desert". There is a trail circling around the village and the landscapes are once again photographic, and should be more likely referred as landspaces. Especially the sandstone cliffs (petrified dunes of Navajo sandstone) are curved by water and winds into picturesque shapes. The elevations around Page are pretty comfortable to hike down & up. We visit the Lake Powell shore, where the cliff suddenly ends at over 30 meters dropping.

Mankind's major constructions: Glen Canyon dam.

Glen Canyon Dam just outside the village has again a well-equipped information center. E of Page there are eerie caves to visit. As the others return in the afternoon, we hurry back to Flagstaff in order to see Sunset Crater before sunset. On the trip we notice Indian marketplaces here & there on the roadsides. They may have been worth stopping.

Listening to the Indian drumming cassettes in these surroundings we (eh.. at least me) really feel the West. Radio stations play country music, but the drumming fits much more comfortably between the mountains. Even though landscapes between Page & Flagstaff look very much like gravel pit. Yet they are quite natural. It’s because of the plains around monoclines and mesas contain huge masses of more or less loose volcano ash. As creeks carve this surface, it starts pretty much look like a quarry.

Sun has already set as we are in the Sunset Crater. This is the most recent active volcano site on our tour, having been active between 1000-1250. There has been dead volcanoes on our route (eg. Superstition Mts in Phoenix), but this is has the easiest access. There is plenty of rugged black rockfield around the old cone (which is not accessible by car). The aa-lava field is still, after 750, almost totally free of vegetation although mountains are covered with pine forest.

Flagstaff could be nominated as motel capital of the world (yeah, it lies around 66). But we have enormous difficulties in finding a room! There is some school elders’ convention in town, and all the major places ore booked full. At last we take Pueblo Motel, a place run by native staff. Night is cold again (in the sunset we notice, that the nearby San Francisco Mountain’s top is covered in snow!), so cold that during the night we hear a mouse sharing the room with us. The motel is located between Route 66 and railroad, and when trains pass a town in USA, they use to whistle in every xing. Every half-an-hour we are woken up by passing alarm clock.

This morning we visit another type of crater. Privately run Meteor Crater is the place, which is pictured in every book describing meteorites. It is in the middle of flat desert, 1,2 kms in diameter – the first meteor crater described from Earth.

Then we pass some 66-towns (Winslow & Holbrook: the latter contains a "Wigwam Motel", where visitor can sleep in one of large concrete teepees). The afternoon we spend in Petrified Forest National Park.

Actually the forests have fallen down and the dark logs dot again the gravel-pit-lookalike landscape. These trees were millions of years ago buried under volcanic ash, and as they slowly decayed under soil/rock layers, different minerals replaced the cells and conserved the delicate tree structures. Several hundred kilograms of stony wood is annually robbed from the park and visitors are addressed not to do so – when caught, fine is minimum $ 200 + possibly jail (is this the story behind "Jailhouse rock"?).

This national park contains also several ancient pueblo sites and petroglyphs (wall paintings). In one of these we almost meet other Finns – a Swedish couple was traveling with RV (recreational vehicle, a minibus-apartment, that seems to be popular on US highways. Usually these vehicles tow a personal car behind them. Drinks gasoline like cactus water) from east coast to west.

We’ve been told that sunrise & sunset throws unbelievable colors on Painted Desert. It is the northernmost part of Petrified Forest. So we stare sunset there. You can easily simulate the view by standing on the edge of gravel pit. Presumably the red rock is something special to non-protanopian eyes.

Somewhere in the mesa.

Since TX we have been driving through large Indian areas. Especially active & visible they seem to be from NE AZ through NM, in the numerous pueblos. We had decided to visit Acoma Pueblo, because the book told so.

Acoma is a mesatop Indian village. Mesa is a flattop mountain with steep edges – a perfect location to build a village (pueblo): easy to defense (in fact Acoma Pueblo, also known as "Sky City", is so little mesa that I guess more proper geologic term to it could be butte). Acoma claims to be the oldest currently inhabited village in North America (and so claims Pueblo Oraibi in AZ, too...). They both have a thousand-year history. Nowadays there goes a road to Acoma, but visitors are allowed in only by Indian bus & guide. Photographing, audio- & videotaping and sketching are prohibited without special permission. A real Indian village, there we now go!

The very first sight to be visited in Pueblo is – catholic church! Most of these Indians are christians. Seems that wherever you go in USA, you always find a Bible. You may have heard how native Americans hide their dead over tree branches or under huge mounds. Well, here they have ordinary cemetery with nice white crosses. I want back on the road, listening Indian drumming and getting back to the mood!

Pueblo Indians are famous for their pottery and jewelry, and I must admit, that their figures are far more interesting than ours. Pottery figures are clear shapes and colours, and jewelry items usually contain some kind of tricky feature, it is not just a gemstone on a ring. They have some idea in them.

In the vicinity of Acoma Pueblo there is "Sky City Casino". Many casinos in USA are run by Indians, because they can allow gambling in reservates. So when You come to see the native cultures of America, be prepared to meet Casino Indians.

In Albuquerque we experience a minor desert storm. Dust and tumbleweeds fly over suburban streets. We take a turn to north, because Harri – a robot engineer – wants to see Los Alamos. We are there just after sunset, and what a scenic route it is: tall pine and spruce forests up on the mountains and deep cliffs. In the middle of mountain range there is amazing grassland valley: tens of sq km of plain grassland on a flat valley bottom. No trees or bushes nor houses – but plenty of elks grazing there like buffaloes.

Sunset in Jemez Mountains.

The Los Alamos Science Museum is (of course) already closed, so we have to admire The Little Boy outside (replica of the Hiroshima bomb. There’s another in Albuquerque). The bomb was developed in the Los Alamos military laboratories, and the town is still surrounded by mystic "Area code this and that" signs. They claim that nowadays it’s only nuclear research for acts of peace... In the middle of Alamos we eat one of our most pleasant dinners: a buffet in Chinese restaurant (here we could choose what and how much to eat).

Alamos is located up on the mountains, so the ride down to Santa Fe in the evening via serpentine road is (again) not a joyride. But in Fe we are back among gentle slopes and straightforward highway. We could have chosen a route via more populated Las Vegas (of NM), but instead we drive across desert through Clines Corner because of shorter and straighter road. We plan to sleep at CC, as tourbooks tell that it is some kinda shopping center. Books do not tell anything about motels, though. There is none. The trading post is "a major one" because there’s no other shops for 70 km. The only shop that is open in the night was gasoline station. So we continue 90 km east and at last found a myriad of motels in Santa Rosa (along Route 66).

The nightly ride across plains is not so dull, after all. During the traveling we watch simultaneously three different thunderstorms (the first lightnings on our way) in the horizon. Particularly nice it is because the sky is partly clear allowing moonlight to shine.

The final stretch had begun, as You notice from above kilometers. The landscapes turn into dull plains of N TX. I try to play those Indian drumming cassettes, but they just do not fit into this landscape. After the Great West TX is like a pancake. In fact this part of the state is called Staked Plains, because the Spanish voyageurs had to erect piles along their way in order to find their way back.

Texas.

In Amarillo we pop onto nearby fields. There is (almost along the Interstate 40) Cadillac Ranch: ten Cads from 1940’s to 60’s planted into the middle of grain field, hood in the soil and rear pointing the sky. A strange idea of some millionaire (with no idea –in Nebraska there is similar-type monument Carhenge, "Stonehenge" created from used cars. That’s what I call an idea). Anyway, tourists are adviced to bring a spray with them: the sight is free (!) and anyone is allowed to sign a message on the cars. I have a drawing pen with me, and of course its cap had slipped off and the pen is dry.

We eat sandwiches with poor Texan coffee in Memphis (I guess many boychilds are named "Elvis" here) and in Wichita Falls we take a hike in the Falls Park. Originally the falls of Wichita were destroyed in 1880’s flooding, and a hundred years later the locals constructed artificial falls there, because visitors always asked "Where are the falls?". Now the falls are ten meters high (that’s ten times higher than the originals).

Before Fort Worth-Dallas metropolitan area we pass village of Bowie – again (the first Bowie was in AZ). When an alien comes to USA ("alien" is any humanoid coming outside USA – Mexico, Canada, Europe, Betelgeuse 5...), he/she/it soon notices that there are same restaurant (Macdonalds, KFC, Cracker Barrel...), gasoline station (Chevron, Exxon, Philips 66...), grocery (Albertson’s, K-Mart, Wal-Mart...) etc. chains everywhere. Then the towns are alike with their main streets and shopping malls. Now it seems that in separate states they even have same names (Bowie, Memphis, Las Vegas...). So, are the US towns in fact "chain towns"?

The Dallas traffic is something, that guidebooks warn us, and they’re right. It’s a big mess. At least five lanes one direction, everybody’s driving overspeed. It is a rule, because there is no need to be afraid police stopping a car: doing so here would cause a spectacular chain accident. Drive there nighttime trying to catch your exit. If you choose wrong exit, you’ll be lost for kilometers. I have several experiences of that. I’ll never drive back there, thanks.

The final day. For a reason I would like someone to explain me, Dallas and Terrell areas are full of crickets. Usually these black critters are very shy, escaping people from several meters, but here are hundreds of them everywhere, on asphalt too. Almost like some biblian story about grasshoppers & Egypt (as a matter of fact, we will today drive across Alexandria..). One message the insects tell, is that its warm again. Aila & Harri, who have not spent recent months in 40 degrees, think that this 30 is too hot for a human being.

After some E TX villages we are back in Louisiana (home sweet swamp – and proper Community Coffee, not to mention Abita Turbo Dog beer or Casa De Sue wines!). Shreveport is the main city in N LA, famous (?) for its casinos.

Everybody knows that jazz was born in LA (New Orleans), but hardly no-one knows that the strangest pop band originally popped out from Shreveport. The Residents, who have been residing and recording in San Francisco (California), came from here. Or so the besserwissers claim. The thing is, that after 30 years still nobody knows, who the four members of the band are, and if the crew have changed (in the 1970’s there was a rumor their name were George, Ringo, Paul & John). They always perform masked (usually with huge eyeballs). They have eg. recorded pseudo-eskimo music and "The King & Eye" is a cover album that I would not recommend to devoted Elvis fans.

After Shreveport we pass Natchitoches. I wonder if the locals usually manage to spell it right. The town is pronounced "Nackotish". In LA it is a rule that places are not pronounced as they should. Lafayette is in fact Lafitt. This is because everybody in LA – the French, Black, Mexican and other groups – talk their own version of English (or American). So, please forgive me if my English is not proper – I am possibly cajunized.

Near Natzitosh or whatever, we visit former plantation (nowadays owned by a birdwatcher lady), in Alexandria we eat and near Ville Platte we visit Louisiana State Arboretum. In fact it is a free natural park area with luscious deciduous forests. Now, as it is fall, many trees have shed their leaves, and due to drought (that is going on here for third year), ground is covered by dry leaves. We can well hear animals moving near us. Plenty of squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis).

K

Back in Lafayette! As I mentioned, not much birds in this tour. Perhaps the most impressive was Parus gambeli, a neat SW USA version of European willow tit (Parus montanus). This bird group is easy to recognize: they all have similar voice, and when you hear it, just pick up a bird guide (National Geographic’s Field guide to the birds of North America is still the best – though brand new Sibley’s book has better & more pictures, it is unpractically big, not a field guide) and check, which Parus occurs in your location. In AZ & NM it is gambeli, in LA it is carolinensis. In Great Lakes area it’s atricapillus.

Eating: for fast food (cheap eating) try Hardee’s, Burger King or Taco Bell. Hamburgers in Arby’s, Wendy’s & Dairy Queen suck and no-one with some self-respect eats with a clown.

About car: if You consider purchasing a used car, do not buy

1. a Dodge. I’ve had massive repairs to two of this kind.
2. from Northside Auto (Lafayette, LA). Refer to above.
3. Wynn’s warranty for the car. It covers none of the problems used cars experience.

Our Intrepid behaved quite well this time, but before that it had cost almost as much as brand new car. As a rule, do not buy a used car from a dealer but from a private person from eg. newspaper ad. Dealers are very used to tell you sweet lies. Perkele.

We all have/been in flu (due to the wet coldness of the beginning). So it is nice to rest for a few days, before Aila & Harri fly back to Finland. Except that there’s so much to be seen even in flat swamplands of S LA: alligators, egrets, Mississippi River...