Guest blog by Steve - Cars, part one (6 April)

For my guest editor spot it will come as no surprise that we turn our attention away from the rocks and to the cars, in particular the classic ones we spot on our journey. We are, after all on a road trip.

So on the first day in Scottsdale we do the typical American pastime and wander down to the mall and find this casually parked in the car park.

For the uninitiated, me included - I had never seen one before - it's an Arnolt Aston Martin DB2 Special. Now I knew who Arnolt was, and I managed to bore Jane and Tom very quickly with other cars that he had had a hand in. For the rest of you though, Stanley H "Wacky" Arnolt imported a number of British cars in the 50's that he had rebodied by Bertone, an Italian coachbuilder. He only ever made a handful, this Aston Martin being 1 of just 5.

This particular car is notable for coming first place at Pebble Beach, which is a very prestigious concourse event.

Moving onto Grand Canyon, we come across a number of classics including this.

Obviously there's not much to go on here. It is, in fact, a Shelby Mustang GT 350 (the performance version of the Ford Mustang), which is pretty special in itself, but what makes this particularly interesting is the "H".

In the 60's, Hertz decided to buy 1,000 of these Mustangs and offered them out to customers on their "rent a racer" program. Suffice to say with such great performance on tap, people hired them for the weekend, went racing and returned then on Monday morning all battle scarred, which gained the car a certain amount of notoriety (and value today).

Not much to say about this car pictured just up the road from Antelope Canyon other than it typifies the American fixation with hot rods.

Everywhere we've gone so far there have been vehicles left in fields / driveways that are seemingly never going to move again. Clearly this is the case for these rusting hulks in a field just outside our hotel in Bryce Canyon.

Whereas these cars look slightly more salvageable. They are part of an amazing collection of the best part of 100 cars parked on a property at the side of the main road in Glendale, Utah.

Among all these cars were some notable versions which, with a bit of spit and polish, could be worth a few pennies (or cents).

The car on the left is a Chevrolet Bel-Air, just look at those fins! On the right is a Ford Galaxie 500 which would be familiar to anyone who has been to Goodwood recently as they are raced with a fair bit of success.

Introduced in the late 50's, the Ford Edsel was designed as the car every American would want and came with great fanfare. Unsurprisingly, given it's looks amongst other things, it was an unmitigated disaster and became synonymous with examples of corporate failure.