Moab, Utah and Arches National Park

The drive from Bryce Canyon National Park took us through the edges of Capitol Reef National Park. The views of the high sandstone cliffs we passed were jaw-dropping. Squint your eyes hard and you could see a long row of beautiful cathedrals at the top, mile after mile. But don't do that while you're driving a motorhome.

Our campground for the next three nights was in the town of Moab, Utah, which is an interesting place.  This is sandstone country, and two major national parks are nearby - Arches and Canyonlands.  The town itself is surrounded by high sandstone cliffs. 

We drove into Arches National Park, so named because it supposedly contains over 2000 sandstone arches.  Near the entrance are monumental cliffs and beautiful rock formations, like the following: 

Some miles later we reached the Devil's Garden, trailhead for a hike to Landscape Arch, perhaps the park's most spectacular.  The trail was sandy and biblical, and at the end we saw Landscape Arch, but not up close, for the safety of the park's visitors.  A Visitors Center movie told us that erosion of the park's features continues, and back in 1991 some large pieces fell from it, captured, amazingly, by a movie camera, at a time when not everybody owned one.  (A different arch collapsed completely in 2008.)  The evolution of Arches' geology continues.

Later Nancy and I went on a self-guided tour in search of Native American wall paintings.  With difficulty we found walls with interesting images carved into them, but disappointingly, graffiti was present, too.  But a couple told us about beautiful wall paintings free of graffiti a few miles away, so off we went.  The road became terrible as we descended into an amazing canyon, but we finally found a huge rock with amazing Native American artwork.

Moab has quite a history.  The area is one of the richest sources in the world of dinosaur bones and footprints.  Butch Cassidy and the hole-in-the-wall gang hid out nearby.  In the 1950's, a rich vein of uranium was discovered here, and during the nuclear years uranium mining dominated the town's economy. In 1949 John Ford filmed Stagecoach, perhaps the first important western movie, in the area, and the motion picture industry has used the natural scenery there for many films since - The Greatest Story Ever Told, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, City Slickers II, Mission Impossible II, Star Trek, and a number of others that we all have seen.  Johnny Depp is currently filming The Lone Ranger there and is rumored to be staying in the outskirts of Moab.

The high-end Red Cliff Lodge is fifteen miles outside Moab, and the drive to it is within another beautiful canyon, with scenery that I'm sure has been the backdrop for many movies over the years.  Downstairs at the lodge is the Museum of Film and Western Heritage, which was interesting, and we also did a tasting at the Castle Creek tasting room on the grounds. The grapes are grown in Utah and the wines were fairly good, considering.  On the way back we saw a sign that let us know that we weren't in California any more:

Bryce Canyon National Park

Our campground near Bryce Canyon National Park was at 7777 feet in elevation, half again the altitude in mile-high Denver.  In one day we had moved from a climate requiring the air conditioner all day long to one in which we ran the electric fireplace-heater all through the night.  But aside from low grade headaches, dry mouths, stuffy sinuses, and shortness of breath on exertion, we felt fine.

Bryce Canyon and Zion both have impressive sandstone formations.  But at Zion we were on the canyon floor looking up, and at Bryce we walked the rim, looking down on fantastical stone sculptural elements.  It's another of those situations where it's hard to imagine how random natural forces had resulted in such variety and beauty.  The first day there we hiked with our dogs along the edge, and made plans to descend tomorrow, just the two of us, into the depths.

The next morning Nancy wasn't feeling too well.  But she insisted that we hike down into the bowels of Bryce as planned, like the superhero she is.  And it wasn't so bad descending.  The columns and arches and weird formations were beautiful, especially standing beside them and looking up.  By the time we retraced our steps, the sun was bearing down, and it was a strenuous climb back to the top.  Overall a very cool experience.

The Visitors Center is isolated and at high altitude, and those are perfect conditions for minimal light pollution after dark.  They conduct Night Sky programs several times a week, and Nancy and I attended one.  It began with an hour's lecture about astronomy, including a description of the major constellations, the types of galaxies, and the distances involved, including a show-and-tell using volunteer children to represent the zodiac constellations.  Nancy was enthralled.

Then as darkness fell, the audience, numbering nearly one hundred, moved outside, to an area behind the Visitors Center.  Aside from a few dim red lights, there was about as much illumination as in a coffin.  The sky was truly spectacular, with more stars than I'd ever seen before.  Several park rangers and volunteer astronomers had set up powerful telescopes in that field to look at Saturn and other heavenly bodies.  So we tried to assemble into groups, one at each telescope, and form lines, but we could barely see each other.

The astronomer for the group Nancy and I joined told us that the mechanism that ordinarily tracks stars automatically on his telescope was broken, so he'd have to readjust it after each viewing, because of the Earth's motion.  He also felt that it was important to look at some of the more obscure objects, not just the important and interesting ones, so we'd be viewing a distant galaxy, if he could find one.  After a few minutes he located a sombrero galaxy, said it looked like a smudge, and hoped we would be able to identify it as we looked, one by one, through the viewfinder.

By this time Nancy and I knew that we had made a mistake and would prefer changing to a group with a working telescope and a sexier celestial object, but in the dark we weren't sure we could locate another group, and if we got separated, we might never find each other again, so we stayed where we were.  Those ahead of us took turns looking into the viewfinder, saying that they thought they saw the galaxy, after which the astronomer slowly readjusted the telescope to bring the galaxy back into view.  Nancy and I took our turns, thought we saw the smudge, and decided enough was enough.  We stumbled blindly back toward what we thought was the parking lot, found our truck, and returned safely to the campground.

We loved both parks.  Bryce Canyon had one fabulous site, a fairyland of sandstone shapes, and Zion was larger and more varied and grand.  Different strokes. 

Zion National Park

Southern Utah is an almost featureless desert, except for a number of spectacular national parks and monuments.  Zion National Park, on the western side, is one of the biggest and best.  We stayed several days at Zion Canyon Campground, which is just a few minutes from the entrance to the park, in the nice little town of Springdale.  The temperature was pleasant in the mornings and evenings but quite hot during mid-day.

Many of the main attractions of Zion are available only by shuttle.  We left the dogs in our air-conditioned motorhome, drove our pickup truck to the Visitors' Center, and climbed aboard a bus.  As we rode along, a recorded voice told us how the landscape we were seeing along Zion Canyon was formed.  Over many millions of years in the distant past, seas and lakes deposited vast quantities of sand there.  Pressure from the layers above, along with minerals from various sources of water, compressed the sand into sandstone, whose color varied according to how much iron oxide it contained.  At one point what is now called the Virgin River began flowing through the area, eroding the sandstone and creating the incredible walls and rock formations we were seeing.  We were on the canyon floor, and beautiful limestone cliffs rose to the sky, with awe-inspiring sheer walls and peaks all around us.

Nancy and I were determinded to give a better account of ourselves on this trip with respect to hiking and exercise than we did in our initial motorhome tour of the country last fall.  Our first hike was on the Emerald Pool and Grotto trails.  They were relatively easy, except for some strenuous climbing at the top, where Nancy uttered a few words of complaint.  That was embarrassing, since there were many plus size hikers and some with obvious knee and hip disabilities and one fellow with an artificial leg, and I heard nary a peep from any of them.  Maybe they were out of breath.

Back in town, we located a state liquor store (the only kind allowed in Utah) inside a gift shop.  There were a few Utah wines but they weren't highly recommended by the salesman.  He did tell us that a polygamist Morman compound is only twenty miles or so from Springdale, and that he used to visit it when he was a nurse certifying the children for the WIC program.  A little local color that you won't find outside Utah.

The next day Nancy and I hiked the lovely Riverside Walk trail, which follows the Virgin River to the point where the canyon narrows and can be accessed only by wading through the river.  We didn't do that part.  Squirrels along the trail were so accustomed to humans that they sometimes sat in the middle of the trail as people walked by, or darted in and out among the hikers.

We also explored other sections of the park, including the magnificent Kolob Canyon, on our way to Bryce Canyon National Park.

The Wilsons thoroughly enjoyed Zion and heartily recommend it.

Spring 2012 Trip to Utah and Colorado

After wintering at our hovel in Ben Lomond, Nancy and I and our two dogs prepared to begin our second major Thor Challenger motorhome trip.  We planned to visit the magnificent national parks in southern Utah and explore the beautiful scenery of Colorado.  This would be a more modest circuit than our tour of the entire country last year, and we felt that we were both more prepared than before and more capable of slowing down and smelling the roses.  Naturally, the projects we had put off to the last minute took longer than expected, and our onboard preparations didn't go as quickly as they might, so we departed on Saturday, May 5, about a week later than originally planned.

Motorhome travel allows you to commune with nature, to be as one with your environment, to channel your inner John Muir or Henry David Thoreau.  So our first important stop was Las Vegas, Nevada.

Ah, Vegas.  Where what happens, stays.  Where a giant billboard promises to deliver hot babes to you, phone 696-9696.  Where a storefront advertises "half-price lawyers".  Where real estate prices have fallen so precipitously that we drove by apartments showing pictures of rotweilers and advertising "big dogs welcome." 

When we first visited Las Vegas around forty years ago, the business of the town was almost entirely casino-based games of chance.  It was cheap to stay and eat and be entertained there, and those low prices were intended to lure gamblers.  I remember seeing Jerry Lee Lewis and Count Basie in casino lounges for the price of a couple of drinks.  There were almost no gourmet restaurants back then, but plenty of inexpensive buffets.

Times have changed.  Every celebrity chef has multiple restaurants in town, and you can eat very well in Las Vegas, but the prices are as expensive as anywhere in the country.  (We had our one dinner out at Firefly, a great small plates restaurant.)  With some exceptions, hotel accommodations aren't cheap.  Every casino has a lineup of shows, but nobody was playing during our visit who would have been a headliner during the early years - no Sinatras or Streisands or even Wayne Newtons - in fact, no high-priced star power.  There were multiple Cirque du Soleil shows and nudie reviews, and a number of second-tier musical programs, and I'm sure that many of them were entertaining, but I didn't see any shows that would draw me to travel to the strip.  So obviously the Las Vegas power players decided along the way that there was a lot of money to be made in the tourism industry, and they began charging accordingly.

The architecture is, of course, astounding.  Some is chintzy, but much is beautiful.  We walked up and down through the new Aria hotel-casino and it looked state of the art, inside and out.  Next door the even newer Cosmopolitan was extremely pedestrian in appearance, and it's difficult to understand how the investors could spend such massive capital without hiring a brilliant architect.

One thing that didn't change was that one or two days in Vegas was enough for us to be ready to move on.

Leaving Las Vegas, pulling off the freeway to fill up our motorhome with gas, a couple of liquor bottles mid-coach fell out of a cabinet, spilling a little of their precious product.  Not only that, but as we were getting ready to pull into a service station, the smoke alarm went off.  Nancy removed the batteries, but it continued screeching.  The dogs were frantic.  We searched for a second smoke alarm but couldn't find one.  Finally we noticed a blinking red light in the little carbon monoxide alarm panel near the floor.  Pressing the button gave relief for only a few seconds, then the beeping began again.  Nancy had the brilliant insight that it might be the fumes from the spilled alcohol that were triggering the alarm, and that turned out to be the case, most likely, even though the unit was supposedly designed to sound off only for the presence of carbon monoxide or propane.  Those maddening beeps went on for the twenty minutes it took to fill the gas tanks, and for some time after, with Nancy sitting on the floor by the alarm, pressing a button every time it began again.  Eventually it stopped, and since you're reading this blog, we didn't die as a result of carbon monoxide or propane poisoning.

We've concluded that a good motorhome trip doesn't really start until your first onboard disaster.  So we've gotten that out of the way.  Next stop, Zion National Park, in Utah.

Home at last

On December 23, 2011 we ended our three and a half month circuit of the country. 

We didn't know what to expect as we made the wide turn onto our driveway.  But the gate worked.  The gutters beside the driveway were not clogged with leaves.  No fallen trees blocked our passage.  The lawn was in decent shape.  The big house and our garage apartment looked like it did when we left.  No squatters had occupied the property.  Our neighbors Alex and Delores had done a great job of maintaining the premises.

Our 840 square foot apartment felt palatial to us after those months in the motorhome.  At first our dogs didn't appear to be excited, but they settled into their old routines pretty quickly.  For Nancy and me it was weird being home, and it took a little time to realize that we didn't have to hook up the water and sewer hoses and electrical cable every day - that the handle for flushing the toilet was above the bowl, not below - that we didn't have to carry plastic poop bags whenever we took the dogs for a walk - that we didn't have to level our home every few days - that the stairs we use to exit the apartment don't retract and extend when we open and close the door - that we didn't have to strap down our dinette chairs so they wouldn't slide across the floor.  Like that.

It was wonderful seeing friends and celebrating the holidays.  The contrast with the scenery of the southwest we had driven through made us appreciate the beauty of California more than ever.  It's fun being home.  But we're still afflicted with wanderlust.

I'll take this opportunity to talk about some of the high and low points of our trip.

Our favorite city was Asheville, North Carolina.  It's a beautiful place, the people are young, attractive, and friendly, and the climate is relatively mild, because it's around 2000 feet in elevation.  Asheville is a college town, so there's a lot of music and culture.

We also liked Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, Walla Walla, Washington, and Missoula, Montana.  Everywhere we went, people were friendly and interested in what we were doing.  I think that the folks in southwest Louisiana were the nicest we came across.  Now if we had talked politics or other controversial subjects, we might have a different opinion, but in general southerners were our favorites, for their kindness and gentle manners.

Our favorite driving experiences were Skyline Drive in the Shenandoah National Park, the Blue Ridge Parkway, and the Natchez Trace.  Just sublime, all of them, and Shenandoah was especially beautiful because of the recent snowfall. 

For me, the loveliest sights were Glacier Park up in Montana and the Teton ranges in Wyoming.  Of course the fall colors in New England were spectacular.  The prettiest campgrounds were Poche's Fishing Camp in Breaux Bridge, La, Mama Gertie's RV Park in Asheville, NC, and the Elks Lodge in Waynesboro, Pa.

Our favorite museums were the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Thomas Jefferson's Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson, and the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas.

We didn't eat out a lot, and many of our favorite meals were home grown, some cooked outside on our propane grill.  The restaurant dishes we'll remember best are the Fried Shrimp Po-Boys in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the taco lunch at the Trailer Park in Austin, the pork belly pizza and deep fried wild boar meatballs at the Driskill Hotel in Austin, and the bison cheese fondue in Missoula.

On the other side of the ledger, our worst driving experience was the poorly maintained toll roads in the suburbs of Chicago at rush hour.  Frightening.  The traffic we experienced in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee was the heaviest and slowest I'd ever seen anywhere, and we lived in the greater Los Angeles area some years back.

As I said earlier, the scenery on the drive home through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and eastern California was just plain ugly and by far the worst of our trip.  I apologize if I've hurt anybody's feelings.  Things hit rock bottom when our dogs were covered by stickers in what we consider to be the armpit of the nation, somewhere near Alpine, Texas.

Another low point of our adventure was about a month into it when something on the motorhome seemed to be breaking every few days.  Miraculously, at some point the glitches stopped, and we had no mechanical problems at all the last month and a half of the trip.

By the time we finally pulled into Ben Lomond, we felt like veterans of the RV lifestyle.  We had discovered that we can live happily in what some would consider cramped spaces, that we enjoy sharing new experiences together every day, and that our dogs make us happy. 

We are already talking about where we want to go next.  Up north to Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia?  A swing through Colorado and Utah?  Yosemite?  Tahoe?  We'll let you know.

Paso Robles

Crossing the California border and heading toward home, it occurred to us that ever since the Mississippi River delta in Louisiana, we had seen very few trees.  From Texas, through New Mexico and Arizona and even eastern California, the terrain had been flat and mostly ugly, to our eyes at least, with bare dirt and dormant grasses and scrub brush and not much else, except for occasional hills and small mountains in the distance. 
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We stayed one night at a campground in Bakersfield.  The driver of the motorhome parked next to us was a middle-aged black man.  Nancy, having recently spent a lot of time in the South, walked over and said to him, "I don't think we've seen a single colored person in an RV before, our whole trip!"

 Our 41st wedding anniversary was December 22, and we wanted to celebrate it in an area that we consider special - Paso Robles, which has a charming downtown, lots of fine restaurants, and is the fastest growing wine region in the country, I'm told.  We had great crabcakes for lunch at Cass Winery, did wine tastings at a couple of the 150 wineries in Paso Robles, and our anniversary dinner was at Robert's, a wonderful restaurant in the downtown area.  Nancy is a treasure in my eyes, and I consider myself damned lucky to have found her all those years ago.  Spending three and a half months in an RV will test a marriage, and ours made the honor roll.

The next morning, as we prepared to leave on the last leg of our journey, back to our home in Ben Lomond, I found the water hose which runs from the spigot to our motorhome's water supply inlet frozen solid.  I'd forgotten that California does get cold sometimes. 

After the flat mostly desert landscape of the south central US, the rolling hills and vineyards around Paso Robles were very attractive, and when we approached and then turned onto Hwy 1 at Moss Landing, with its lush trees and views of the ocean and nearby mountains, we were reminded of just how beautiful California is.  Our state may be destitute, but at least it looks good.  And that's what's important, right?

Lake Havasu City

With the weather worsening in Flagstaff and Albuquerque, we stayed to the south, and parked one night at BlueWater Resort, an Indian casino in Parker, Arizona.  Casinos, like Walmarts, are a source of free overnight camping.  Of course there is no electricity or water, but most RV's are self-contained to one extent or other.  Our GPS description of this casino said that anybody can stay in one parking space for three days, then they have to move to a different space, but can continue to park there.  We learned that that three day rule had never been enforced.  There were a lot of RV's, most of them pretty delapidated-looking.  We talked with one fellow who had been there for a month, and he said that a camper just down the row had been there for two years.  They have to drive about ten miles away to get free water fillups.  Tough life, especially in the summer heat.

The next day we drove to a nice campground in Lake Havasu City, Arizona.  That's the town where you can drive across the London Bridge.  Back in 1967 London deemed its London Bridge unsafe for the high volume of vehicular traffic and dismantled it.  The external masonry was bought by an American, Robert McCulloch, transported to Arizona, and used to build a replica of the bridge as a tourist attraction.  Nancy and I happened to visit Lake Havasu City within a year or two of its reconstruction, in the small and primitive motorhome we owned at the time.  At that point there wasn't much there except for the bridge and a sleepy little village.

What a change!  Lake Havasu City is now a good sized city on a pretty lake, surrounded by mountains.  The whole area is a mecca for RV's.  This is one of the prime sites for "snowbirds" - the folks from cold climates in Canada and the northern US who head south for the winter.  There may be just as many or more in Florida and the Gulf Coast, but you'd think half the RV's and half the mobile homes in America are there, packed in parks along the various lakes in the area, and up in the hills.  Generally this isn't the kind of scenery that Nancy and I like, but the town has the feel of a beach resort, and it's rather attractive.

We had our first In-And-Out burgers since we left California, and we took a ferry across the lake to Havasu Landing, which features a casino and resort on the California side.  We had a cheese plate and Lemon Drop cocktails at a picnic table at our campground while we watched the sunset.  Other than interfacing with our fellow RVers at the campground, there wasn't much to do in Lake Havasu City, except for the excitement of the 49er-Steelers game on TV.

It's beginning to hit us that we're going to be back home, back to the real world, in less than a week.  Bittersweet.  Of course we look forward to seeing friends for the holidays, but we've learned that we really, really like motohome living.  Every day was an adventure.  Some of those adventures were small, some were big, many were wonderful, a few were frightening, but we were never bored.  We find ourselves daydreaming about another - shorter - trip, in the spring of 2012.