The West awaits: San Francisco, Las Vegas & Grand Canyon
From Stuttgart, we flew via Copenhagen to San Francisco – the longest leg of the trip right at the start, but with the California west coast waiting at the end.
Our first stop wasn’t the city itself, but the coast just north of it: Dillon Beach, a small, almost untouched stretch of sand where you briefly forget you just flew in from Europe. From there, we continued to the Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve – and that’s one of those moments where you take photos and immediately know: it won’t work. The giant redwoods here are so enormous that no image captures their actual scale. You stand among trunks that you couldn’t wrap your arms around even with eight people.
Only after that did we drive into San Francisco itself. The city has two unmistakable landmarks, and we visited both: the Golden Gate Bridge, with its unmistakable rust-red paint that half-disappears in the fog – which is exactly what makes it so photogenic. And Alcatraz, the former maximum-security prison on the island in the middle of the bay. Take the ferry across, walk through the empty cells, listen to the stories of the escape attempts – a haunting morning.
From the smaller Santa Rosa airport, we flew on to Las Vegas. Desert instead of Pacific, neon instead of fog. By rental car, we headed toward the Grand Canyon South Rim, with stops along the way that everyone should make at least once: at the Hoover Dam, which sits like a concrete wall wedged between two canyons, and along the legendary Route 66 in Kingman and Seligman – places that have kept the same diners, the same gas stations, the same advertising signs for decades, because that’s exactly their signature.
At the Grand Canyon, we caught the sunset. And it’s one of those moments where every description falls short of the actual sight. The layers of the canyon change color minute by minute – orange, red, violet – and in the end you sit at the edge, stop talking, and simply look. The Grand Canyon is one of the few places where you genuinely understand what “overwhelming” means.
We didn’t skip Halloween either – spending it with family in the US lets you experience it in its authentic form: pumpkins outside every door, kids in costumes, the entire neighborhood out on the streets. For someone from Germany, this is a completely different dimension of Halloween.
We wrapped up the trip at Lake Tahoe, the enormous mountain lake on the border between California and Nevada, followed by Santa Cruz on the coast. Mountain lake, forest, Pacific – a fitting arc for a journey that took us straight across the American West.
