THE LAST DITCH
During my recent trip to Vegas I took the opportunity to visit the Grand Canyon for the third time. I flew there by helicopter, landing in the bottom for "champagne" and a photo-opportunity.
On returning to Vegas I rejoined my friends to take in the spectacular, very funny show "Absinthe" at Caesar's Palace.
Interesting. I did a tour of the US by delivering cars back in the 70’s. The helicopter trip around Grand Canyon was my most expensive purchase at $30. It was a tour and didn’t land. It was so awesome I went mad with my OM2 and took two reels, none of which looked as good as your effort.
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A tour delivering cars sounds like a great gig. What kind of machinery were you driving?
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These weren’t new cars. I don’t know if they still have them, but two friends and I hooked up with what were called ‘auto drive away agencies’. So, someone is moving house across the States. They fly and you drive their car for them. Our first job was to deliver a Camero for an airline pilot to Boca Raton – he was spending the winter in Florida. Our second to deliver a car for someone moving from Florida to Orange County, California …. and so on.
The cost to us was a refundable $100 deposit (if car undamaged) and fuel (and speeding fines, 3 of them). Everything else was taken care of like insurance by the agency.
It was fun and cheap. But you weren’t supposed to drive at night, although we did do a few full nights to get us to sights like Grand Canyon. We stayed in cheap motels, but no such luck in Grand Canyon because they were all full. So we slept in the car.
In the 70’s I guess it was adventurous for 20-somethings to go off with no real plan. I put a scrapbook together of our month-long adventure. Now, four kids and a mortgage later, I must find the scrapbook.
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If you want to digitise that scrapbook in a series of photographic posts, I would happily give you guest author rights. It would fit the new format well.
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Tom is a retired international lawyer. He was a partner in a City of London law firm and spent almost twenty years abroad serving clients from all over the world.
Returning to London on retirement in 2011, he was dismayed to discover how much liberty had been lost in the UK while he was away.
He’s a classical liberal (libertarian, if you must) who, like his illustrious namesake, considers that
“…government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.”
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The Last Ditch by Tom Paine 
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