I first visited the USA in 1993 on a tour of the so-called ``Golden West'', visiting, among other places, Los Angeles, the Arizona deserts, the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Yosemite National Park and San Francisco. Of the places I had seen, only Los Angeles had not appealed as a place to return to.
In August 1999, my thesis supervisor, Mark Lacy, had moved to California to take up a position at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, near San Francisco. Meanwhile two other friends from the Oxford astrophysics department were in the USA. Reba Bandyopadhyay was now working at the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC, giving me a contact in a different part of the country, while Susan Ridgway had taken up a post at Johns Hopkins University in nearby Baltimore.
Having not had a substantial holiday since September 1998 and now being employed, I decided upon the idea of a long holiday in 2000, taking in visits to my contacts in San Francisco and Washington and spending some time travelling on my own in between around some of the natural wonders of the Arizona/Utah area. September proved to be the most convenient time to visit, not least because it was outside the peak holiday season in the USA, while another advantage would be (slightly!) cooler weather, a distinct advantage in the desert.
I arranged flights with United Airlines via STA Travel in Oxford, flying out to San Francisco (getting the longest flight out of the way as soon as possible), staying three nights and then flying out to Las Vegas. I had found Las Vegas a surprisingly interesting place to visit before, and the rapid pace of change meant that many new super-hotels had been erected since my last visit. Additionally it is one of the few places in the region sufficiently large to support a major airport and car hire base (the only real alternatives being Phoenix and Salt Lake City, both rather further from the places I wanted to visit and less interesting in their own right).
Car hire from Alamo was arranged via Trailfinders, recommended by my parents after their trips to the USA, giving me freedom to spend ten days exploring as I wished. I would then spend a little more time in Las Vegas before taking a flight across the continent to Washington, staying four nights at Reba's apartment in Alexandria and seeing something of the eastern USA before flying home just under three weeks after my departure.
By the end of August, all I had to do was to leave things at work in a state where things wouldn't break if I went away for three weeks, and do a little packing...