Wednesday we got up early to watch the sun rise. Then we drove out of the Grand Canyon to the east, crossed the Colorado River somewhere around Antelope Canyon, and swung north into the legendary realm of Utah, a place I’d never been before. The maps app said the trip was about five hours, but for us it was more like eight, because we kept stopping for scenic overlooks along the way and doing short hikes to the local vista. It was amazing to see the way the landscape changed over the miles. The Grand Staircase with its layers of all different colored rocks was particularly amazing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We got to Bryce in the late afternoon and had time for a hike around the rim to a place called Sunset Point. We dipped into the upper part of the canyon, then back up to the top to watch the sun go down.\u00a0 (Fun fact: the sun doesn’t actually go up or down, or around the Earth at all. It’s the Earth spinning that creates the illusion of the sun traveling across the sky!)\u00a0 We were staying at the lodge in the national park here to, and had drinks dinner at the restaurant there.\u00a0 Very yummy.\u00a0 There was no TV or wifi in the room.\u00a0 Next morning we hiked into the canyon.\u00a0 Bryce is much smaller than the Grand Canyon and you can reach the bottom in an hour or so.\u00a0 But the rock formations are the most amazing to behold that I’ve ever seen!\u00a0 So we spent at a few hours hiking around the canyon floor and eventually up the other side at Sunrise Point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We had lunch there before we took off, then it was another drive across the mountains and desert to Zion. This one was only two hours or so long. Coming into Zion from the east, we had had to drive thru a long tunnel and down an intense series of switchbacks to get the main canyon. We weren’t able to get a room in the park lodge here, so we stayed in a hotel a little ways outside the park gate. We had dinner at a really good Mexican restaurant that from the outside had a vibe like From Dusk ‘Til Dawn before things turned weird.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Friday we hiked around inside Zion, which was really beautiful like everything else, and had looked alot like Sedona actually. Walked along the river at the bottom then up a side canyon to a series of pools and waterfalls. All of these hikes were pretty big – over five miles and 1,000 feet vertical. We ended up at a saloon in the village right outside the park gate having a couple drinks and a late lunch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Saturday we drove from Zion to Las Vegas, Nevada. This was a short ride by this vacation’s standards, only a couple hours. On the way we stopped at a dinosaur discovery in St. George, Utah. The main attraction there was a giant slab of natural rock which had been cleaned up and had a roof put over it. The rock reveal thousands of dinosaur footprints and told the story of how it was once a sandy beach and shore of a shallow lake. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Vegas the weather was hot for the first time since we’d arrived out west.\u00a0 And unlike everywhere else we’d been, everything was very crowded and noisy.\u00a0 Last time I was in Vegas was in the 1990’s, so it was interesting to see what has changed.\u00a0 In the afternoon we walked along the strip and got as far as Caesar’s Palace, about halfway up.\u00a0 In the evening we went out to dinner with Jeannie’s cousin Lynda and her husband Carl, who moved to Vegas some years back.\u00a0 It was an Italian restaurant in the part of town off the strip where people actually live.\u00a0 That gave a different perspective on the city.\u00a0 Afterwards we went back to the strip, and starting at the Luxor worked our way back to our hotel at the other end, stopping occasionally to rest and have a drink and take in the sights.\u00a0 The highlight was at the Parisian, where a Moulin Rouge style burlesque show appeared right at the bar where we happened to be lounging.\u00a0 A troupe of cute dancing girls in corsets and fishnets shaking their thang, and a self-aware singer who broke the fourth wall to tell us all she thought the lyrics to Roxanne were really repetitive.\u00a0 We looked for opportunities to play some blackjack or roulette, but the tables had all been replaced by machines that made it feel like self-checkout at the supermarket and didn’t look like very much fun.\u00a0 Jeannie found an arcade of vintage slot machines and spent some money there but didn’t win anything.\u00a0 At least people don’t smoke indoors anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The last day was the drive back to Phoenix to catch our flight home.\u00a0 We did this trip in the opposite direction thirty years ago.\u00a0 Back then it was mostly a two-lane country road across the dessert.\u00a0 I remember a sign in a small town in the middle of nowhere, Arizona saying “No gas next 150 miles.”\u00a0 You couldn’t even tune in a radio station.\u00a0 Well now that middle part of the trip is mostly a divided four-lane highway heavy with traffic, and the no-gas zone is more like 100 miles, and by the time you pass thru you’re in the sprawling exurbs of Phoenix.\u00a0 Compared to the other drives on the trip, it was pretty flat, mainly desert with groves of Joshua trees and Saguaro cactuses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our rental car, a Nissan Rogue, kinda sucked BTW. The flight home was uneventful, except that getting in an out of Kennedy Airport is a nightmare these days because of all the construction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Wednesday we got up early to watch the sun rise. Then we drove out of the Grand Canyon to the east, crossed the Colorado River somewhere around Antelope Canyon, and swung north into the legendary realm of Utah, a place I’d never been before. The maps app said the trip was about five hours, but … Continue reading “Way Out West, Part II”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fitness","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6336"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6348,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6336\/revisions\/6348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}