I think that the combined area of them all is pretty much the same as the surface area of Great Britain. I'm not motivated enough to check right now though!

Challenge accepted!

Well played! So, we'd all drown with capacity to spare.

So we'd all drown with little to spare. Same ending!

Not a lot in it though Chris . Between the 3000 / 3011 miles travelled by car on your last trip and this do you have that kind of mind . Or just 2 very lucky guesses

Las Vegas to San Francisco

This is the trip we did 14 or 15 years ago, our first visit to Sequoia, Kings Canyon and Bryce Canyon National Parks and lots more besides.





We flew to Las Vegas and stayed a couple of nights there before heading out to the desert. Tips for tight gits like me when visiting in Las Vegas: go in the middle of the week because the room rate is lower in all the hotels. Make extensive use of the vouchers the hotels offer for food! You can stay and eat for very little.
Very proudly, I can say that I never gambled a penny in Vegas!

We headed to Bryce Canyon from there, then on to Zion Canyon, which is great. You're down at the bottom of a sheer and narrow canyon, lush with big green Cottonwood trees. There are some great hikes to be had and the road in is spectacular.

From there, we went to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.  This side is much less commonly visited than the south side, so a little quieter.  Of course the canyon is awesome in the true sense of the word.  Nothing can prepare you for the sight of it, you just have to go there and see it for yourself.  Amazing.

We spent a while pootling around on our way to Monument Valley, then on south to the Painted Desert.  Sunset Crater, our next stop was interesting - it's at the centre of a cluster of cinder-cone volcanoes. 

Then on to Flagstaff and a trip to the south rim of the Canyon.  

We drove the next leg on a remaining stretch of Route 66, poking around in some of the little old towns that had been by-passed when the parallel interstate highway was built.  They really feel like time has stopped still and you are almost stepping back into the 1950s. 

Back past Vegas and then on to Death Valley.  We had to stop at Zabriskie Point - Pink Floyd connection there.  In the Valley, we went for a hike up into a slot canyon, which is a very narrow winding passage that has been carved through the rock by thousands of years of flash floods.  Brilliant fun and fascinating but you're always looking out for signs of rain!  Another hike in the early evening when it was meant to be cooler saw temperatures of over 40 degrees centigrade - yoiks!  Take water to Death Valley - lots of it!   
At the lowest point in the valley - the lowest point in North America - you look up to a sign on the cliff 282 feet above you and you see a sign which says "Sea Level"!  All around you is a salt pan and everything is blindingly bright and white.  I was amazed to see right where nothing should survive, growing out of what seems like pure salt was a small shrubby bush.  Weird!
The other odd thing is that this low point is almost in the shadow of Mount Whitney in the Sierra Nevada mountains, which is the highest peak in the US (apart from Alaska).

Whitney is in Kings Canyon National Park but you can't get to it by car from this side of the Sierras, so it was a long drive around the south of them and up into the central valley of California.  Here, our route coincided with our most recent trip and we went into Sequoia and Kings Canyon parks.  Staying in one of their cabins, we had a thick layer of snow dumped upon us overnight, making it difficult to do anything very safely.  This was disappointing because I had arranged to meet someone from the University of Berkeley in order to see what they were doing in their research forest in the neighbouring area and the area had become completely inaccessible.

So, we decided to head for the Pacific Ocean!  Down the hill and through Fresno, across the valley and over the Coastal Ranges, we dropped down into Santa Cruz for the night.  The next day, it was a drive up Highway 1, that famous coast road, which is of course stunning.  We took it up to San Francisco and over the bridge and into Marin County.  A visit to Muir Woods was next on the agenda.  This is a forest of Coast Redwood trees, which are a different species from the Giant Sequoias up in the Sierras.  They are still big.  Massive, in fact.  They're not quite as massive as the inland variety but they do grow taller.  Another high point for a forestry person!

Back onto Highway 1 for some more cliff driving and we stumbled into a little town called Bolinas, home of an arty community, including several survivors of the 60s west coast psych music scene.  I had read about this place where the residents don't like visitors, so they habitually remove all of the road signs that tell drivers where it is.  Later, the town council voted to respect the wishes of the residents not to have any signs.  The first thing we knew about it was just inside the town there was a big arrow pointing back the way we came with some writing saying "Way Out" in the middle of the road!  Friendly eh?  It's OK though, because Emily, our daughter was feeling car-sick at that point, so I pulled over, she vomited on the pavement and off we drove, out of Bolinas!

Back onto Highway 1 for a bit more cliff and surf scenery and the then about turn for a night in Petaluma which claims to be the 'egg capital of the world' because the egg incubator was invented there.  I had eggs for breakfast and they tasted like any other eggs.  Back on the road and over the bridge the next day for a poke around San Francisco.  We stayed our final night in Silicon Valley, location of the most expensive bunch of motels we've come across before or since.  

I know what you mean, but I find the desert fascinating and am always surprised at how varied it can be.

A few years after this trip, we were thinking about destinations for another one and Mischa announced "I want to go back to Arizona because I haven't seen a 'proper' cactus like the ones in the cowboy films yet!"
So that's what we did.

I saw a cactus in the Namib so poisonous they wouldn't let us get within 10 metres of it. Must look up what it was called.