Road Trip, Week Two

It has been a few days since my last update... I actually managed to spill water on my laptop last week, so that is good. My keyboard doesn't really work right now, but I'll manage. On with the summary!

After leaving Yosemite we had one of our longest driving days, and so we left early in the morning from our beautiful camp site. Our goal was to get to Las Vegas for the evening, so we planned to just miss Death Valley on our way down, since our car didn't have air conditioning. It is not generally a good idea to drive in Death Valley without air conditioning. That being said, however, we made a slight adjustment to our itinerary and drove through the North end of the valley after seeing Scotty's Castle, which was built in the 1920s as a vacation home for a wealthy stock broker. But now it is just a bit of a tourist trap for the National Park:

We got to Vegas in the evening and found our room in the Plaza, which is where Sinatra and the Rat Pack used to hang out. We were across the street from something called the Fremont Street Experience, which is just a big street with cool movie-type stuff on the ceilings. Then on the next day we walked the Strip for five or six hours after swimming and seeing the new Batman movie at the Palms. Vegas is pretty fake and lived up to its reputation as 'Sin City:' we all agreed that we probably don't need to ever go back. But it was cool to see some of the famous buildings and people... in fact, I met Jessica Simpson, but she was in a hurry so the photo turned out blurry.

After Vegas we drove up to a National Park called Zion (yup... lots of Mormon stuff) for a couple of nights. This was the first of many "Southern Utah" parks -- there are several really cool parks in Utah, most of which have truly amazing rock formations and natural scenery. Zion, for example, sports tons of unique and awe-inspiring views of things like the Checkerboard Mesa. There is also a huge arch in the park, which we were only able to see from a distance, but which I will say more about in my next post anyway.

Our only full day there was spent on a hike up the 'Narrows,' which is, oddly enough, a narrow canyon with a river running through it, and which you can generally hike if there are no flash flood warnings. We walked through a canyon with (sometimes) 1,000 foot vertical cliffs on either side, making sure to look for flash-flood hiding spots along the way.

Our next stop was to the south of Zion -- the Grand Canyon, which is in Northern Arizona. But we decided to take a quick detour to the North first, to see Bryce Canyon. Bryce is another amazing place, but we only had a couple of hours to kill there, so we just went out to some lookouts. Here is a picture of Kyle on the rim of Bryce Amphitheater, which is beautiful:

When we got to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, we set up camp and had dinner, but we also had our first big argument as a group of four men. Two weeks isn't bad when you think about it. :) We did go see the sun setting over the rim, however, which was a great experience and well worth a four mile hike in new flip-flops. Ouch. On the next day, then, we walked down the North Rim of the canyon along the North Kaibab Trail to Roaring Springs, which is a cool little spring where we were able to refresh and eat jerkey, carrots, and wheat thins. Quality meals always.

Again, we were on the edge of some hard-core cliffs, and were able to get some amazing views. And I probably shouldn't have put my legs over another ledge... oh well.