What Happens in Vegas can Stay in Vegas

We left Cedar City, UT on Monday the 21st. The drive through southern Utah is really pretty, very scenic, it’s hard not to just keep shooting and not really watch the road at all. I wasn’t driving, but I’m still the second set of eyes for things like deer and elk. Being that it’s fall and the rut is in full swing, watching out for animals as big as your truck is a good thing. The original plan was to drive from Cedar City to Vegas, stay an overnight in Vegas and do some touristy crap, then head into Arizona. Here is a picture of Bill and I in the truck, doing what we do. I of course had to include the Hula Girl, she's been neglected lately.

The drive to Vegas was harder than we thought it would be as they had Hwy93 closed to anything larger than a car over the Hoover Dam for construction. Bummer, Bill thought maybe we could fake it and claim ignorance until we passed the big sign with a picture of a truck pulling a travel trailer and big red circle and bar through it. That pretty sums it up. Not only was the drive hard and hard on the truck, with steep upgrades for 20miles at a time, once we arrived in Vegas it became clear this wasn’t a place for us.

We had to gas up at a truck stop before trying to continue. What madness! Getting into the truck stop was hard enough, but getting out was practically impossible. They shuffle the car and RV traffic to a different entrance than the trucks, and you have to try to get out the same way across 4 lanes of traffic with no suicide lane at a major intersection with freeway ramps…AWESOME! Who ever thought up that slice of heaven shouldn’t be allowed to breed, we don’t need more stupid people in this world.

After gassing up and having to drive down the road several miles before finding somewhere safe to turn around with 45 combined feet worth of vehicle, we started heading back to the highway. I’m hoping that by the pictures of Vegas that I’m posting most people who know us understand why we decided to skip this place. This is to say nothing about the RV park (I'll leave it unnamed) that wanted to charge us $60 a night to stay there. Oh, that includes the $8 charge per night for not having a reservation. If we ever decide to 'do' Vegas, it will be cheaper for us to get on board with a travel deal. Cheap air-fare, hotel, etc. I understand that The Strip is probably pretty cool, the Bellagio Fountain is beautiful, and it would be fun to say I played the slots in Vegas. However, my sanity and quality of life are far more important to me than the novelty that is Vegas. Nope, what happens in Vegas can stay in Vegas, I have no desire to be a part of it. We don’t drink, we don’t smoke, we don’t party, we don’t gamble, that pretty much makes Vegas nothing more than a novelty for us, and we don’t need it.

We pushed through Vegas and headed for Arizona. We arrived in Kingman, AZ that same day (the 21st) and set down for a couple of days. I’ll post about that later.

Cheers~
;-)K

Catching up on Blogs, Zion and Kolob

Catching up on my blogs. We’ve been out of Utah for several days now, but I still need to post about Zion National Park .

For my money and drive time I really enjoyed Bryce Canyon and the surrounding area better than I did Zion. If you go to Zion National Park you really need to heed the advice of getting there extremely early. If you don’t get there early you have to park in the town just south of the entrance and take a shuttle bus in. Not that it really matters since even if you park at the visitor’s center you still have to hop the shuttle busses around the park.

I understand why they have the shuttle bus system, it cuts down a ton of traffic and carbon emissions and all that, but I’m terrible ok with sitting in a shuttle bus why people sneeze and cough and don’t cover their mouths when they do it. And the body odor, my god, why isn’t hygiene a priority? On top of it all, our last shuttle driver looked like he had enough, I think it was nothing short of a miracle that he didn’t drive the bus into one of the cliffs. Can’t say that I blame him, I got hip-checked a couple of times and tourists were rushing to the next thing to see. Why are people in a hurry to have fun, doesn’t that kind of take the fun out of it? ‘By god I’m going to have fun and I’m going to do RIGHT NOW!!’ Seriously, where’s the fire? I would have loved to have taken the time to walk some of the more extensive trails and paths, but the people just ruin it. I have no interest in hiking a path, no matter how beautiful, with someone on my heels, or someone who doesn’t understand personal space, or the people who walk 2-3 abreast and look at you like you kicked their dog when you say excuse me to pass them. How dare I interrupt their walk, don’t I know the sun rises and set’s on them?

All that aside, the one place in Zion I did actually find very interesting was the Weeping Wall. This is were two different kinds of stone come together and one lets the water through while the other doesn’t so it get’s squeezed out of the wall and makes it look like the wall is a waterfall, but the water doesn’t poor over the wall, it leaks out of it. Scientists have studied the water coming out of the weeping wall and have determined that is was originally rainwater that fell on the top of the cliffs and has taken 1200 years to work it’s way through the stone and come out of the wall. When you walk the path you get ‘rained’ on, it’s really like being blessed, kind of a cool feeling, no pun intended.

We got fed up with the shuttle system and the rude tourists pretty quickly, so we decided to be done with Zion and started heading back to Cedar City. On our way back we passed the entrance to Kolob Canyons, Zion National Park. We took a spin through there and found it to be pretty and peaceful. The rock formations were interesting with the striped uplift areas and the forming arches. All in all not a bad experience, but if we ever return to the area we’ll likely stick with Bryce Canyon and Cedar Breaks. Or maybe head out and see Arches and Canyon Lands. Who knows where the wind might blow us.

That’s it for now, I have to go through the next set of pictures before I can post more.

Cheers~
;-)K