East bound and down

Greetings from Hot Springs, Arkansas! The eastward push has begun. Then end is near. Fortunately it is has been an amazing trip. Since the last post Alicia and I shopped in Vegas, paid too much for a mediocre buffet and just all around spent way too much in Las Vegas. It was all really fun though, just really, really expensive. Wednesday morning we got up and drove down the strip to see all of the casinos before heading northeast into Utah. Southern Utah is very beautiful. We escaped the barren wasteland and 115 degree scorching heat of Nevada for trees (we hadn't seen those since Sunday) and temperatures under 90 degrees (ditto). We first drove through Zion National Park, which had beautiful reddish rock formations. We were through the park in less than two hours but like practically every other park, was incredibly gorgeous. After another two hour drive we reached our nightly destination of Bryce Canyon. Unfortunately we arrived about 30 minutes too late as we couldn't find a campsite. Fortunately there was a RV park/campground just outside the park. It was more spacious and less cramped than the National Park was anyway. Just a few Europeans were camping nearby. The RV park on the other hand was filled. With Americans, mostly. One thing we've noticed on this trip is that most of the National Parks are filled with Europeans. There really hasn't been a whole lot of Americans out there, espeically any our age. All of the Americans have been old or with kids.

The next morning we woke got up and went back to Bryce Canyon. The canyon area was truly breathtaking. The canyon is made up of hoodoos which are stone spires and formations. It looked like a red castle city made out of rocks. Also very hard to describe. After Bryce we headed south to Flagstaff, Arizona for two nights with my Aunt Nancy and Uncle Larry. After four weeks on the road it was nice to see some familiar faces. After eating lunch and catching up for a bit we took a walk on the urban trail to a pond and then around the neighborhood. To celebrate our engagement, Nancy and Larry took us out to Buster's for seafood and steak. The next morning we walked downtown and saw Nancy's vintage clothing store, Incahoots. We were also on a quest for a southwestern nativity scene for my mother. We were told to find one we wanted to inherit. We had no luck in Flagstaff, but I did have a delicious burrito at the Lumberyard. That afternoon Alicia and I went down to Sedona. No luck finding a nativity scene down there either. The one we did find cost $525. That evening we came back for some presumably organic pizza before presenting a 2 hour, 2500 picutre slideshow of our trip. And that was from only one of three cameras.

The whole time we were in Flagstaff all we heard about was the impending monsoons. It apparently hadn't rained there in three months. After two days of lightning, drizzle and hope, the monsoon finally arrived just as we were leaving on Friday. I'm sure there was much rejoicing.

Unfortunately Flagstaff meant that we had to head east for real. We drove through the monsoon, but did not stand on a corner in Winslow, Arizona (I hate the Eagles). We stopped at an indian store and found a southwestern nativity scenes for $800. I saw another scene that was intricately beaded by the Hopi tribe. I didn't see a price tag on that one, but I could only assume it was even more expensive. The beaded one was absolutely beautiful. We stopped for lunch in Gallup, New Mexico at a Mexican Restaurant. The food was good, but about every three minutes a Native American came in carrying some kind of art or craft and went from table to table. No less than twelve came in while we were there. After lunch we continued east before arriving in Alburquerque, NM. We went to the old town to continue the search for the southwestern nativity scene for my mom. We actually found some in the $30 range, but they were made by Peruvians. Peruvians are indians, technically, but Peru is more midwest South America than southwest South America so we passed. I will not be inheriting a southwestern nativity scene. We drove on for two more hours to Tucumcari, NM.

Sunday morning we got up headed east with a destination of Corinth, Texas to stay with Alicia's friends, the Uridales. After visiting the Cadillac Ranch near Amarillo, Alicia was pulled over for going 75 in a 70. She was given a warning. The highway cop made it seem like he was doing us a favor by stopping us because the city cops don't give out warnings, but all it did was waste 10 minutes of our day. Around 6 we finally made it to Corinth, the land of French Bulldogs. One dog was about to pop. This morning she had 7 puppies by C-section. Not at the house. They were really cute, though. Smaller than a Guinea Pig. We left around 3 and made it Hot Springs, AR by 8. We're staying in the Romance Literature room at the B Inn a bed & breakfastesque motel. We have about 500 or so romance novels in our room. I also took a shower in the smallest shower ever. It as literally 2.5 by 3 feet and the shower head came to about my chest. I think I got all the soap off.

Tomorrow we take a bath in the hot springs and then drive as far east as we can with the hope of making it past Knoxville.

Greetings from Las Vegas! This is definitely the easiest city we've been to. The last few days were incredibly fun. High Sierra was totally different than anything else we've done on this trip. I heard someone say that 17,000 people were there this year. We camped in an area called Hillside, which as you can guess, was on the side of a hill. We camped on a small patch of land that was probably on a 25-30 degree slope. We would have slid out at night if it wasn't for the zipper. We did slide down as far as possible thought. Besides the slope it was a good spot. It was shaded so we didn't need the canopy (there wouldn't have been space for it anyway) and it was close to the main stage, so because we didn't know many of the musicians, we could hang out at the tent and just listen instead of standing in the heat at the shows. We did actually go to shows, but usually just for a song or two. The festival was at a county fairgrounds and there was plenty of camping set-ups and other crazy things to look at, so Alicia and I spent a lot of time just walking around and stumbling upon music. We had to park the car about a mile away from the campsite so we were limited to what we could bring in, so we ate from the venders. The food was pretty healthy and had remarkably portions. I was expecting to get raped by the food venders but it was more like being molested. The headliner Friday night was a band called STS9. They were described as Jam-tronica. They were awful in a way that gets people together and totally took over anything else going on to the point we were surprised that anything else was going on anywhere else...and that anyone else could have been doing anything else except being consumed by this loud, repetitive music. Ben Harper was much more enjoyable the next night. We also saw some firedancers with batons and hula hoops and whips, etc that were on fire. That was awesome! High Sierra was a lot like DragonCon, except in the woods.

After leaving the festival we stopped for a few hours at Lake Tahoe and relaxed on the beach for a few hours. It was a little hot but the water from still pretty cold. It was a nice break after the festival. We planned to camp at Walker Lake in Nevada but when we got there we weren't even sure if the campgrounds were open. There was no information on the information sign and no one else was camping. It was also right on the highway and there were no trees. We drove on to Hawthorne and stayed at the El Capitan and lost $6 on the slots.

The next morning we got up and drove to Vegas. We're staying at the MGM Grand. The hotel/casino is much like being at a festival. Everywhere you walk there's music and there's plenty of things to amuse you without leaving the hotel. Being here feels like a real vacation. I'm kind of sad to leave here tomorrow but everything except for the room is really expensive, so it's probably not a bad thing we'll be back at a National Park tomorrow.

No pictures this time.

California Everywhere.

Greetings from near Bass Lake, California! Alicia and I are on the road, headed to High Sierra Music Festival near Quincy, CA. It’s been an exciting and awe-inspiring few days.  Sunday morning we got up and went to the Willow Creek Bigfoot Museum – the reason we stayed in Willow Creek. There wasn’t much to the museum; just a lot of maps, plaster feet, and a video that analyzed supposed bigfoot sightings that were caught on camera. The score of the museum for Alicia was the bigfoot Cinderella story. The 1^st grade at Alicia’s school teaches Cinderella stories from around the world so she now has a new story to add to the unit. From Willow Creek we headed south down the 101 – stopping for brunch at Amy’s Delight, a small restaurant in Eureka. Amy cooked us a delicious breakfast. Driving further south we made it to the Avenue of Giants – a stretch of highway where the largest Redwoods reside. They were even bigger than the ones in the National Park. We climbed ten foot stumps, went through fallen trees, and climbed on fallen trees. There was even a fallen redwood that was split in half because another redwood fell down on top of it. We saw the immortal tree which as survived fires, floods, and lumberjacks, and further down the road we paid $6 to drive through a redwood. It was tight but my car made it through. You really do feel tiny standing next to these trees. Even the ferns with massive. If you outstretched the branch of the fern, some came to be over six feet tall. Alicia kept expecting us to stumble upon dinosaurs but I was more on the lookout for Ewoks. Like most places we’ve seen I would highly recommend driving through the Avenue of Giants.

In Leggett, CA we turned on to California 1 – the most winding road I’ve ever had the pleasure of driving on. We wound our way up a mountain, down a mountain, up another mountain, down the backside of that mountain and then wound our way down the beautiful California coast. We stopped near Fort Bragg, CA  at Glass Beach. The story is that people used to dump their trash in the ocean and because of the rocks and swirling waters, the trash didn’t wash out to sea. The glass in the trash broke down and washed ashore creating a beautiful green, brown, and white pebbly beach. We were expecting the class to be covered in large chunks of smooth, colorful glass, but that was not really the case. Maybe at one point it was closer to the description, but there were just small chunks of glass mixed in with the sand. Years of scavengers, I’d assume. The bright green glass was still beautiful shimmering in the sun. We were also able to climb on the jagged rocks jutting out the ocean. I prefer the NC beaches because of the warm temps and large expanses of sandy, swimmable beaches, but the California coast is breathtakingly gorgeous. We continued down the coast towards Salt Point State Park, our campsite for the night, looking for something to eat. There aren’t too many people living on the coast in Northern California, so our food options were limited, but we eventually came to a Mexican restaurant. I had El Campequena or beef, bacon, and shrimp on tortillas. Ron Swanson would be jealous. Right as it was getting dark we made it to our campsite, happy that it wasn’t going to rain.

Monday morning we got up and continued down California 1 to San Francisco. We stopped at the Marin Headlands to view the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a frigid 58 degrees up top, but we got a pretty good view of the slightly foggy bridge. We then paid $6 to cross the bridge before checking into our hotel, which was somewhere between a hotel and a hostel. We had a more hotelesque room that was decorated in a Victorian style. Definitely the coolest hotel so far. We took a street car down to Fisherman’s Wharf for some delicious yet overpriced seafood. We then took the bus to the Castro District so we could walk over to Haight Ashbury. The Castro district was probably the one place on the trip where Alicia wasn’t the one getting checked out. We arrived too late in Haight Ashbury to go into many of the vintage clothing shops, so we settled on pizza. The next morning we did a quick drive though Chinatown. San Francisco is definitely a place we want to go back to. We just need more than an afternoon to do it justice.

From San Francisco we were supposed to go to our campsite at Bass Lake, just south of Yosemite, but instead we decided we would squeeze in Sequoia National Park and take in General Sherman – the world’s largest tree by volume. It was quite big, but the redwoods were more impressive. Sequoias don’t grow as tall as redwoods, but sequoias do get thicker.

On the 4^th we got up and drove to Yosemite National Park. As expected it was full of people but the views, like most of the other great National Parks, were breathtaking. We drove to Glacier Point first, which gives you a straight ahead, eye level, view of Half-Dome. We also had a clear view of the Yosemite Valley down below. While in California we’ve seen nothing but California license plates but have heard very little English. At an information sign for Glacier Point we heard a French couple practicing saying glacier in English: Glass-ee-air. We then drove down to the valley and saw the huge rock monoliths and walls from the ground level. I haven’t spent much time contemplating glaciers, but because of this trip I now have a new respect for them. They’re the world’s greatest artists. It was nice spending the 4^th of July in one of America’s most beautiful parks. It was relaxing and wasn’t nearly as crowded as I had anticipated. It was also neat spending the day with the Germans, Japanese, and French. Flamboyant patriotism isn’t my idea of fun…though I might have gotten used it if we had stayed at Bass Lake for the day.

Bass Lake was one crazy place on the 4^th. Every conceivable spot on the side of road was jam packed with cars. Some spots were forced and those cars were still there this morning. Hispanics and whites alike took to the shore for a day of boating, swimming, and picnicking with families. The weather was perfect: in the upper 80’s and sunny. I’m very glad we went to Yosemite but spending the day at Bass Lake wouldn’t have been an awful alternative. We cooked our seafood fettuccini alfredo – probably the only people eating that – and then went down about 20 feet to the lake to watch the fireworks. Unfortunately our campsite was about 4 miles from where they shot of the fireworks and the fireworks didn’t crest the tree line. We did see the sky turn red and blue behind the trees and were lucky enough to see the grand finale barely make it over the trees. I was able to get one picture. Alicia and I then took a night time dip before going to bed.

High Sierra here we come!