On what might be our last long-haul holiday we finally got round to visiting some of the USA's most iconic places, such as Monument Valley.

We flew to Denver, and after a couple of days in the city we picked up a hire car and started a 2,500 mile drive. We did a large loop to south and west through Colorado Springs and Moab, and then north to Salt Lake City before returning to Denver.

The agent at Alamo told us that the Hyundai Santa Fe that we'd booked wouldn't be adequate for driving over all the mountain passes etc and talked us into a hugely expensive upgrade. When we got home we wrote to Alamo and complained that this had been completely unnecessary and they immediately apologised and refunded the money.

We took about 1600 photos, a fraction of which are here. As usual the descriptions on these pages are mostly taken straight from the diary that we type up each night as we go along.