Santa Cruz

Laziness, a sense of finally being back home, and a touch of travel fatigue are the best explanations for why it's been so long since I added a new post to this blog.

As I mentioned before, there were no reservations available in RV parks around here for the days surrounding Thanksgiving.  Our friends Jen and Sammy found a very generous neighbor of theirs in Scotts Valley with a large graveled area just behind his home, and we parked the motorhome there and moved into the home of Linda Lord, who is on a scuba diving vacation in Mexico and offered to let us plop down there with Sophia and Tammy Faye while she's gone.

We drove down to the Santa Cruz Garden Mall and walked along what we've decided is one of the coolest shopping neighborhoods in the country.  It was kind of exciting to walk into the Santa Cruz bookstore, which was there before we came to town lo those many years ago.

If you look closely you'll see a street musician next to that iconic sculpture of a famous saw player outside the bookshop.  That guy wasn't great but a couple of other street performers that day were first class.

It still saddens us to observe that the Cooper House, a lovely, massive, and distinctive brick building, is no longer there.  Damaged in the 1989 earthquake, it was torn down - unnecessarily, I suspect - and replaced with a conventional commercial building.  Progress, you know.  Before that, a very good jazz band - called "Warm", I believe - played almost daily in the front patio of the Cooper House surrounded by an outdoor lunch crowd and the street passersby.  Santa Cruz was even more magical in those days.

I took this back-home opportunity to make various dental and medical visits among providers I know.  Those important maintenance checkups are not so easy when you're traveling in unfamiliar lands, which has been our situation for the past year.

I had a nasty episode of high fevers, chills, and body aches which necessitated a bit of medical workup but seems to have been one of those many unnamed viral illnesses - not the flu - lurking about.

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with Mark and Nancy Wainer, bought a car, and have a number of dinners and get-togethers with friends scheduled for the coming weeks.  We'll be moving back to Smithwoods RV Park in Felton in a couple of days, and then on December 9 will drive to one of our favorite campgrounds, in one of our favorite areas - Napa Valley - for a wild week of wine and food.

Return to the motherland

Driving west from Las Vegas, we stayed one night in Barstow, and one night in Bakersfield.  It occurred to me that a first-time traveler heading to California on this route through the desert must have been saying, "This is the magical land of opportunity?  Where are the surfer babes?"

At least Barstow had a nice sunset.

Finally the terrain began looking familiar as we moved between rolling hills and beside vineyards and approached Paso Robles.  We stayed there for three nights in a nice campground we'd used before.  We enjoyed a casual dinner at Pappy McGregor's and especially were impressed with a glass of Tolosa No-oak Chardonnay.

The next day we drove to the Tolosa Winery on the other side of San Luis Obispo, and sitting outside on their patio adjacent to the fields of grape vines, we did a tasting of Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs.  Suddenly we felt that we were back in the California of our dreams.  The Chardonnays were very good and one of the Pinot Noirs was in the running for the best example of that wine we'd ever tasted.  Sixty-five dollars for the bottle, but we laugh at expense.  We'll save it for a special occasion, such as the next time we eat dinner.

We took the opportunity to explore the town of San Luis Obispo a bit further.  It has a charming downtown with many interesting restaurants.  SLO was named the happiest town in America a few years ago (Santa Cruz, I believe, also held the title for a year.)  The wonderful Cal Poly University is there, and most of the throngs on the streets of downtown were young college students.  We could see ourselves choosing worse places to live.

And so finally, after very nearly a year on the road, we returned to Santa Cruz.  Our campground is Smithwood's RV Park in Felton, which is under beautiful redwood trees but has the disadvantage of no Verizon service and no in-camp WiFi, so we have no internet service.  How did anyone survive before Al Gore invented the internet?  One consequence of that is that I've been unable to post blog entries for several days.  I'm writing this now in the clinic's Scotts Valley parking lot after my pulmonary emboli followup appointment with my primary care physician, Dr. Jim Telfer.

Incidentally, Tammy Faye, our little dog with the splenic hemangiosarcoma, seems to be doing okay, except that she has spells of loud coughing during the night that last up to an hour straight, making it difficult for human sleep.  Last evening Nancy gave her some drops that supposedly are derived from the marijuana plant, and she slept right through, more or less.

Our current problem is that our campground reservations extend only through Thursday, and all the campgrounds are full through Thanksgiving weekend.  Our friend Linda Lord has generously offered to let us stay at her home, but we have to find a place to store the motorhome for several days or a week.  I suppose we could park it near Costco with the other motorhomes there, if that's still allowed, but somehow that doesn't seem to be the smartest idea I've ever come up with.

Halloween in Sin City

Downtown Las Vegas is historic Las Vegas, the site of two of the oldest casinos in the city - El Cortez and the Golden Nugget, both of which are still operating - and the first Las Vegas hotel.  It's several blocks of amazing excess, bright as day in the middle of the night.  The Fremont Street Experience is a four-block-long pedestrian mall there of restaurants, stores, and music stages, all covered by a barrel vault LED canopy of absolutely enormous size, billed as the largest video screen in the world, on which spectacular light shows are played nightly.

A Halloween celebration was scheduled there, and party animals that Nancy and I are, we couldn't miss it.  It was crowded, with lots of street performers competing for the partygoers' generosity.

Many of our fellow attendees were in costume.  We came as a couple of hicks from California.

Some of the women were scantily clad.  I spied the first pasties I'd seen since my misspent youth as a medical student in New Orleans.  Three live bands played, with the sound level cranked up to painful.  As the evening wore on the crowds became like Mardi Gras in New Orleans, meaning that moving through them was a painstakingly slow process.  An assault on the senses, but fun.

Downtown Las Vegas is also the site of the Mob Museum, a very well done exhibit about gangs and famous criminals and organized crime in America, with emphasis on its Las Vegas manifestation.  Here I am in a model of the electric chair in Sing Sing.

It's surprising and a bit embarrassing how many famous criminals we are familiar with - from John Dillinger to Lucky Luciano to the late great Whitey Bulger and many many more.  Certainly we remember more crooks than political figures from those times.  We probably have Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola and other great filmmakers to thank for our obsession with history's bad boys.

The first luxury hotel on the Las Vegas Strip was the Flamingo, built by the gangster Bugsy Siegel, who fell into financial difficulty and began skimming off the top, which led to Meyer Lansky and his fellow investors (allegedly) having him whacked.  Many of the hotel/casinos were mob-connected through most of the city's history but the gambling industry is better regulated today.

The slide motor parts for our motorhome arrived today, and Jeff the mobile RV mechanic made our slide functional, so starting on Sunday we're on our way back toward Santa Cruz.  Hooray!  We stayed in Las Vegas ten days, much longer than originally planned.  It's an interesting place, to say the least, but we're ready to move on.

Broken down in Vegas

To summarize, our year-long circuit of the country took us across the lower US states through Texas and Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle and down into the Florida Keys, then back up along the East Coast through the Carolinas and the New England states into Canada all the way to Prince Edward Island, then back down to Maine and across upstate New York and Vermont to Michigan's Upper Peninsula and down through Wisconsin and across Iowa and Nebraska to the mountains of Colorado and the parks of Utah.

And finally it's time to head back to Santa Cruz.  Our first stop on the way home (Am I allowed to call Santa Cruz home, when we no longer own a house there?) is at the Las Vegas RV Resort.

Our motorhome has three slideouts.  Slideouts are extensions which at the touch of a switch slide outward to create more interior space or inward when it's time to hit the road.  The biggest slideout on our coach has been balky for some time, so I took the opportunity to call in a repair technician to see if it could be fixed.  Unfortunately, that guy wasn't too knowledgeable, and by the time he left, the motor that moves that slide had stopped working entirely.

This isn't good.  It's unsafe to drive a motorhome with any slide extended, as this one is, not only because of the increased width but because the rear-view mirror on that side of the coach will be blocked.  And believe me, driving a big rig without being able to see what's on your right and left would be suicidal.

So we're stuck here until we get the slide back in.  Luckily I found a mobile mechanic with slideout expertise.  He was able to determine that the slide motor's gearbox had seized up and had to be replaced.  He ordered parts from the manufacturer but it will be several days before they arrive.

And so we're stuck here in Las Vegas, Nevada.  Will there be enough going on in this town to entertain us until we are roadworthy?

The internet and brochures from the campground office tell us that there are casinos and restaurants in Las Vegas!  Who knew?  So maybe we won't be bored by our forced time here.

The Las Vegas strip was about twenty minutes away from our campground.  We drove there one afternoon and found space in the parking garage of the Venetian Hotel and Casino.  We spent several hours exploring the shops and restaurants of that one hotel/casino and were struck with the absolutely incredible amount of money that had been invested in building and developing it.  One could take an indoor gondola ride if so inclined.  (Nancy and I passed.)

The interior architecture radiating from the casino area was impressive.

There were five or six restaurants in the Venetian catacombs that looked awfully enticing, including some headed by celebrity chefs.  Nancy is not a professional shopper, but if she were, high-end stores lined the walkways for what seemed like miles.

And when we stepped outside, there were many other casinos visible along the street as far as the eye could see.

On the following evening we returned to the strip, and this time we used Uber.  We've always found Uber to be dependable and reasonably priced, and the Vegas version was no exception.  On this visit we chose Caesar's Palace as our focus.  Google tells me that it isn't the largest casino/hotel on the strip, but it looks truly enormous from the outside, and the interior goes on and on.  But as fancy as Caesar's was, we were less impressed there than we had been by the Venetian.

We walked along the crowded streets past casinos and stores of all kinds and restaurants both fancy and modest.  Teams of bosomy "models" in skimpy and spectacular dress asked men to pose with them (and who knows what else).  Vans drove by advertising girls who would be sent to your rooms.  One difference we noticed from our previous visits to Las Vegas was the absence this time of hawkers handing out brochures of lovely young ladies available for massage and other services at your hotel.  I suppose the city fathers had decided to outlaw such activity as beneath the dignity and morality of that great city.  (Not the service, just the sidewalk advertising of it.)  We dropped into several other casinos, including Paris Las Vegas (which seemed a bit faded), but ended up back at the Venetian for dinner.

After extensive study, we selected Bouchon, whose executive chef is Thomas Keller, the owner and chef of Napa Valley's French Laundry and the legendary Per Se in New York City.  It's a beautiful venue on an upper level of the Venetian.  This is the opulent hallway leading to the restaurant.

And this is Bouchon itself.

Our table was outside, looking up into the sky .. although no stars were bright enough to be visible in competition with the Las Vegas lights.  Bouchon, unlike Keller's flagship restaurants, is meant to represent simpler French bistro fare.  I'm sorry to say that the food, wine, and service were more good than great.  Still, it was a lovely and enjoyable evening.

Our Uber ride back to the campground was memorable in that our driver, Huntington, talked honest-to-God non-stop during the half-hour drive to the campground and regaled us with the story of an intoxicated lady who as he described it "went number one" on her seat, which was disgusting to the passenger who followed her.  Ah, Las Vegas.

Zion National Park

Zion National Park is different from the other Utah national parks (and Grand Canyon National Park) in that most of its tourist areas are on the floor of a great canyon, with majestic sandstone walls and peaks rising above them.  Maybe that's why it remains our favorite national park.  In fact, our campground, the Zion Canyon RV Park, just outside the national park, has probably the most awesome setting of any campground we've ever stayed in.

Even at this time of year - after school was in but before winter weather got established - the park was very crowded, and wait times for shuttle buses - which were the only way to explore the park - were long (partly because the yearly highway maintenance was underway).  This photo is taken from the area of the Court of the Patriarchs and shows the kind of scenery that lines the roads.

At the last shuttle stop we got out and hiked the Riverside Trail, which took us alongside the Virgin River.  At the start of the trail was a sign giving an estimate of the danger that day of flash flooding, which can potentially pose a danger to hikers.  I found it interesting that the danger indicator had a padlock on the bottom, to prevent jokers from moving it.

On the day we hiked, the pretty Virgin River was modest in size. but - as we learned from the voiceover during our shuttle ride - had in fact carved the canyon over millions of years, and even today periodically swells to flash flood volume and is capable of reshaping the landscape.

The trail took us to the Narrows, so named because it's the narrowest section of the canyon.  It leads eventually to some of the most spectacular and beautiful sights in the park, shown on many of the tourist brochures, where the colorful walls are only feet apart.  It's a popular hike for folks who rent boots and are prepared to ford the stream in places.  That wasn't us on this day.  Flash floods can appear almost instantaneously and have supposedly even killed hikers in the past, but that wasn't why we didn't go in.

A hike we took on another day was along a lovely trail that took us to the Lower Emerald Pool.  This is a little waterfall that feeds that pool.

We continue to love Zion Canyon.  I'd kind of forgotten how magnificent it is.

Capitol Reef National Park

Six years ago we went on a motorhome trip to Utah and Colorado and toured three of Utah's five national parks - Zion, Bryce Canyon, and Arches.  That trip was chronicled on this blog, but you'd have to scroll WAY back to read about it.  This time we completed the set.  Last week we traveled to Canyonlands, and we planned to visit Capitol Reef National Park before going back to our favorite from last time, Zion.

On the road from Moab, just before turning off onto the road that would take us to Capitol Reef, there was a sign: "No services for 100 miles".  That gives you an idea of how sparsely populated the area is compared with most of the nation.

This was high desert country.  And when our GPS told us we were still about 30 miles from the national park, we began seeing fascinating and majestic rock formations of various colors lining the road.  What was remarkable was the variety that random chance, through the actions of water and wind erosion and land upheavals, had yielded.  All the way to the park's entrance we were saying to each other over and over, "Look at that!"  While the landscape around our previous stop, Moab, looked like what we saw in old western movies - and in fact many were filmed there - this area made us think of a science fiction dreamscape.

We stayed in a very nicely run campground a few miles from the national park.  One drive from there took us to Gooseneck Canyon, where we looked down on a trail where at one point we saw some intrepid hikers far, far below.

Here is Nancy looking up at petroglyphs - carvings made by prehistoric Native Americans into a rock face.

Capitol Reef's "scenic drive" was a ten-mile road featuring one magnificent formation after another.

The road surface was pockmarked, with lots of exposed rocks, and the ride - at least in our pickup truck - was bone-jarring, but the scenery was amazing.

At the end of that road was a hiking trail that Nancy and I took to the end - a mile each way - along a dry river bed.

At one point there was a sheer face with six individuals' names and a 1911 date carved into it thirty feet or so from the canyon floor.  I guess as long as it's early enough - and this was long before the area because a national park - it is designated a historical feature rather than graffiti.

When, tired but happy, we returned to the trailhead Nancy made a pit stop at a little toilet building, and when she came out she said, "That's the nastiest bathroom I've ever used.  There wasn't even any toilet paper!"

And so we began our uncomfortable drive back along that primitive road.  About a mile into it, Nancy cried out, "I left my phone in that stinky toilet!"  Afraid of having her phone fall out of her back pants pocket while using the facilities, she had put it on the top of the empty metal toilet paper dispenser and forgot to retrieve it.  We turned our pickup around, made our way back, and Nancy was relieved to find her phone still there, visibly, at least, no worse for the experience.

Before this trip I hadn't heard much about Capitol Reef, and I don't think it's visited as much as the other four - partly because it's relatively isolated, partly because its charms are not as easily displayed photographically on tourist brochures.  But it turned out to be one of our favorite national parks.

Canyonlands National Park

Wounded but not broken, we pulled our motorhome into a campground in Moab, Utah.  This is high desert country, not our favorite kind of landscape scenery, but the snow-covered tops of the La Sal Mountains in the near distance were quite beautiful.  Their sharply-pointed peaks suggest that those mountains are quite young, geologically speaking.

We had visited Moab six years ago, and it's grown a great deal since then.  This may be the offseason, but traffic is heavy, and the locals will probably be relieved when the tourists leave in a few weeks.

My watch - a cheapie - stopped, and I looked for a shop that could put a new battery in.  But there were no jewelers in town - shocking for such a tourist mecca.  Then we realized that the visitors here were young and fit, many of them wearing backpacks, ready for hiking and climbing adventures.  Few old moneyed folk who would toss away big bucks on a bauble.  Finally a gentleman from the Netherlands at a tourist center told us that the local drug store performed that service.  A lady at Walker Drug and General Store opened up my watch, found that that particular battery size was on order, and asked that I call on Wednesday to see if it had come in.  When she replaced the back, the watch started working again, so I'm in business, temporarily.

Moab is the jumping-off place for two national parks - Arches and Canyonlands.  On our 2012 visit there, we went deep into Arches National Park, the one that is closest and has the more spectacular individual formations.  This time we traveled to Canyonlands National Park, which is about an hour's drive away.  Six years ago we were in Moab in late spring and the weather was uncomfortably hot, but this time there was a chill in the air - it got down to below freezing last night - and it was much more pleasant for exploring the scene.

From the road we hiked to Mesa Arch.  The other national park in the area, Arches National Park, has many arches that are much more spectacular.  (Maybe that's how it got its name.)  But the distant views from Mesa Arch were great.

At the end of the paved road was Grand View Overlook, with spectacular views of what nature has wrought.  The huge canyons below were formed by the Colorado and Green Rivers over millions of years.   (Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona was also created by the actions of the Colorado River as it flowed south to the Gulf of California.)

I read that most of the rocks here were carried from elsewhere and that there are twenty or so distinct layers that the rivers cut through - sandstone and shale, mostly.  Plus there were earthquake upheavals along the way, and both wind and water erosion.  In other words, the geology is incredibly complicated.  The Grand Canyon in Arizona has steep walls and is therefore more picturesque, but the vastness of Canyonlands is jaw-dropping as well.

Here's a little senior beefcake at the canyon rim.

On Wednesday the watch battery had arrived at Walker Drug and General Store, and it was inserted into my watch.  Now I'll be able to maintain precise timing on our tight vacation schedule.