Hoodoo Voodoo

Panguitch (sounds like penguin + sandwich) UT to Springdale UT via Bryce Canyon and Zion (11/29):

"It's a helluva place to lose a cow." So are the immortal words of Ebeneezer Bryce, a Mormon farmer/pioneer for whom Bryce Canyon is named. Last night's snow made for a nice contrast to the red walls of the canyon (technically speaking, it's actually an amphitheater, though the geological distinction escapes me). The roads to the park were a bit snowy and icy, and part of the main park road was closed, but not the interesting part. I'll go ahead and declare that this is the most incredible scenery I've ever seen. Sticking up everywhere are these red rocky towers called hoodoos that are just bizarre and gorgeous. We stopped at a couple overlook points and took a hike down to the amphitheater floor and back up to the rim.





Our trip to Bryce, despite its brilliance, took less time than expected, so we headed onto Zion National Park a couple of hours away. It looks a lot like Yosemite Valley, except the rocks are red. It's the most-visited national park in Utah, though I have to think that's because of location or something like that. While anywhere else in the US it would be the most spectacular thing going, of the Utah parks, I preferred Bryce, Arches and the Canyonlands. We took a couple hikes before settling in for the evening, carefully heeding the hotel owner's warning to eat before 8 since everything would close.



At this point, it is worth noting that in the past five days, Brad and I have visited 8 national parks and hiked 12 trails (including a couple excruciating ones). I'd be pretty happy not to move my lower body ever again. For such a short time, we've done an extensive survey of Colorado and Utah to add onto our earlier forays to these states. (Note about Utah hikers: they are ridiculously friendly and are almost all wearing Camelback water backpacks with straws sticking out of them, so they look really dorky). We have a bit of nature sensory overload, which we are hoping to counteract with neon sensory overload, starting tomorrow in Las Vegas.
-M

Mormons and Birthers

Moab to Panguitch, UT (11/28):

We left Moab early for Capitol Reef National Park, which would be a remarkable enough park if located on the east coast but in Utah, probably wouldn't even crack the top four. Still, we hiked through some desert up to a natural bridge, past a stream and some black boulders and through some mountains with a vague resemblance to the capitol dome. Then, we drove west through central Utah, which Sarah Palin can safely put in her column should things get that far:



The sign was oddly enough guarded by a sheriff car driven by a monster, demonstrating Utah's tough on crime ethos:



(You can't really see it in the picture, but the dummy inside the car is a cross between an evil seaman and a grizzled Confederate general.)

We then got to Panguitch, which is right outside tomorrow's agenda of Bryce Canyon. It started snowing around 5pm, and there's not an amazing amount to do at night here anyway, so we're in the hotel for the night. Which is fortunate though, as we still have half a growler from last night, and I need time to memorize blackjack tables for our upcoming trip to Vegas.
-B

Canyons and Arches

Grand Junction CO to Moab UT via Canyonlands NP and Arches NP (11/27):

Grand Junction was quiet this morning when we left around 7:30. We drove through gorgeous red rock scenery to Canyonlands National Park in southeastern Utah, near the town of Moab. We spent the morning hiking up and down rocks and looking at canyons. If the Grand Canyon is bigger and more spectacular than the canyons that are here, I don't think I'll be able to comprehend it.



After Canyonlands, we drove to nearby Arches National Park, which was packed with families enjoying the sandstone arches and red rocks. We started out hiking to Delicate Arch, probably the most famous site in the park and also the arch that is on Utah license plates. It's a really popular hike, and even though it's really steep and pretty strenuous, there were lots of kids and parents carrying toddlers on their back. We showed them all up by hiking extra fast.


We spent the rest of the afternoon taking short hikes to other famous arches and sites, such as Landscape Arch, the Windows, and Balancing Rock.






Between the two parks, it was probably the most efficient use of time ever recorded in southeastern Utah, as we drove two hours from Colorado, saw the major highlights of both parks, hiked 4 trails for a total of over 8 miles. Our efficiency was curtailed back in Moab, where we contended with silly Utah liquor laws in trying to buy beers at the local microbrewery before contending with the terrible laundry facilities at the hotel. We're both exhausted.
-M

Into Thin Air

Cortez, CO to Grand Junction, CO (11/26):

Thanksgiving morning began very early for us, as we aimed to make it to two national parks that are separated by several hundred miles. We started at Mesa Verde, the only national park whose primary purpose is to protect cultural heritage rather than nature. The park includes the ruins of the Pueblo and Anasazi Native Americans. Archeologists have excavated pit houses from about 500 A.D. that were basically mounds of earth built up over fire pits. By about 1000 A.D., the Native Americans were building one and two-story abode homes, and by 1300 A.D. they built housing and structures into the caves, though the entire gig was abandoned at about this point. The cliff dwellings are still well-preserved in the middle of a canyon, so we were able to see a bit of those.




The road to the next park, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, passes through some crazy high mountains at the highest elevations we’ve been at yet. I sang along with the iPod for one song and spent the next 10 minutes catching my breath. At the second pass (10,910 ft above sea level), I had to pass the driving over the Brad after I got too dizzy to keep driving (no guardrails on most of these roads, by the way). We went up to 11,008 feet before blessedly heading back to more reasonable elevations.

Next up was a trip to Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, a canyon (surprise!) in western Colorado. We wandered around a nature trail and took some pictures before heading to the IHOP in Grand Junction.



And yes, we even managed to have turkey for Thanksgiving ;)
-M

We're Here (Wherever that May Be)

Alamosa CO to Cortez CO (11/25):

As of now, we declare ourselves "here", and the road trip adventures can begin in earnest.

We spent the night in Alamosa, Colorado, a really lovely town in southwest Colorado with great restaurants and a really cute downtown. Alamosa sits between 14,000 foot mountains on a huge plain that is flat because it is a rift valley (a valley created by plates pulling apart rather than dug out by water). At the foot of some of these mountains are sand dunes, which don’t look entirely impressive from a bit of a distance because they are overshadowed by a huge mountain. Once you get closer, though, they are really big, gorgeous, and seem to come from out of nowhere (they have formed over millions of years because wind blows the sand and sediment around the valley until it hits the mountain and settles at its base).


While these sand dunes are one of the more awesome sights I’ve seen, they also damn near killed me. The bottom is at about 8,600 feet, and we decided to climb 600 feet to the top of High Dune, where we would have a view of the entire dune field. Six hundred feet isn’t huge, but it’s not nothing, plus walking through sand is much more difficult than earth, and then there’s my utter inability to function above 7,000 feet. I made it halfway up before things got really bad, though at this point I was falling to my knees every few hundred feet wheezing and gasping for breath. (Brad, meanwhile, was unaffected and just looked down at me collapsed in a heap in the sand with a puzzled look on his face.) I almost gave up a couple times (which is really not something I like to do), but after a lot of gentle coaxing from Brad and rest breaks, we made it to the top, where we got a really spectacular view before heading back down (which was much, much more fun). It was really crazy to walk through, in some places you’d sink almost to your knees in sand. It was also probably physically the most difficult thing I’ve ever done (though, again, no one else on the dunes seemed to find it particularly difficult, and it was listed as “an easy to moderate hike” in the park literature). Despite that, it’s one of my favorite parks because it’s so bizarre to see those beautiful dunes in the middle of nowhere.




Post-death march, we stopped back in Alamosa for Mexican food before heading to Cortez, another beautiful Colorado mountain town with microbreweries, for the night.

Sand angels, post-ascent:

The Roads are Dark and Long, and All those Country Songs

Little Rock, AR to Ozark National Forest AR via Hot Springs NP (11/22)
Ozark National Forest AR to Amarillo TX (11/23)
Amarillo TX to Alamosa CO (11/24):

Lots of driving with little to divert us for a couple days. Starting in western Arkansas past the Ozarks, the scenery started to change from what we are used to on the East Coast. The Oklahoma and Texas plains were even more Willa Cather-esque than those of Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota, though we saw those earlier states a couple months ago before the harvest when everything was still fertile-looking.
We did manage to keep with a couple of our road trip sub-themes in these days:

National parks: Calling Hot Springs a national park is a bit like cheating. It’s in the Ozarks, so it’s scenic, but so is a lot of the country. The hot springs themselves (from what we could tell) can only be accessed by going through private spas. I guess it was a big deal back in the day when people took to the hot springs to cure various physical ailments, but it doesn’t really feel quite on the same level as the other national parks in the U.S. The town of Hot Springs is the hometown of Bill Clinton, but the park was designated back in the 1920s, so that doesn’t explain it. Ah well, check it off the list.




Civil rights historical sites: In 1957, after the Little Rock School Board decided to comply with Brown v. Board by gradually integrating the schools a few students at a time, the governor of the state overruled the school board to prevent integration from happening at all. To enforce the order, he sent the Arkansas National Guard to Central High School to prevent 10 African-American teenagers from entering the school. A large mob formed outside and journalists formed a buffer between the students and the mob to prevent them from injury. Nine of the teenagers continued to try to enroll over the coming weeks, and at the Little Rock mayor’s request, President Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne to enforce the Supreme Court’s ruling and allow the students to enter school. This was the first time since Reconstruction that federal troops had been used to enforce civil rights. Although the students gained entry, their school year was filled with verbal and physical threats and assaults, and the following year the entire school district shut down to avoid integrating further. The schools later reopened, but white flight was already well underway. Today, there is a sleek new national historic site across the street from Central High School (which is still functioning as a school) that tells the story with multimedia and eyewitness accounts.

Camping: In what will probably be our only camping for awhile because it’s FREEZING!!!, we found a nice campsite (though much farther from the interstate than expected) near the Arkansas-Oklahoma border.

Cars stuck in the ground: Outside of Amarillo TX along I-40 is Cadillac Ranch, where a number of spray-painted Cadillacs stick out of the ground at the same angle at Cheops Pyramid in Egypt. Not much more to say about that.



-M

Tomato, Tomahto, Sonata

Knoxville TN to Little Rock Ak (11/21)

Our trip is off to an auspicious start. Fresh out of compact cars at the car rental place, Hertz instead gave us a Hyundai Sonata, which is at least a class or two up from the Chevy Cobalts and Ford Focuses (Focii?) that we have been sporting. The gas mileage will probably be worse, but it has cruise control, great handling, and more room for all our stuff. If we end up having to buy a car in the spring after we find out where we are posted, a Hyundai is on our short list. Sightseeing-wise, we had lunch at an international Farmer's Market in downtown Nashville (a bit better in theory than execution) and saw Memphis and Little Rock from the interstate.

-M

A Brief Interlude

Because of our light travel schedule over the past couple weeks, we haven't updated much. This should change after we leave tomorrow for our last loop, this time to the Southwest. Despite being a bit more sedentary recently, we have managed to keep busy.

Among the exciting developments and adventures:

1) My niece, Delphine Guidry, was born on November 12 (8 lbs, 9 oz), and she is just as cute as can be!
2) We traveled through Alabama and Mississippi to Louisiana to visit my family, including my grandma and aunt in southwest Louisiana. On the way back, we spent a couple hours in New Orleans, where our perfect record of no car trouble was broken by malfunctioning child safety locks that kept us from being able to close the door for 45 minutes. After crawling around the car for a while, we prevailed and managed to get in some quick sightseeing in the French Quarter and some biegnets and cafe au lait at Cafe du Monde before confronting a menacing-looking teenager in a minivan at a campground in Meridian, MS and deciding we'd be safer in a hotel.

3) We visited the Smokies and did a short hike before driving around the Cades Cove loop, which is probably the most boneheaded move we've made all trip. It takes a good hour to go just 11 miles because everyone is intent on driving 5 miles an hour to look at the (un-notable) surrounding grass. Very frustrating.

4) I accepted an offer to join the Foreign Service and will be starting diplomat school on Jan 4.
5) We signed a lease on a DC apartment in Logan Circle and are making plans to move in late December.
6) We both have started work as consultants for a few nonprofits that will last for me through the end of December and Brad into the new year.
7) Brad has a new MacBook Pro, and unlike all the PCs we've owned, it doesn't suck! Alas, it will not be traveling to the Southwest with us for fear of dropping it into the Grand Canyon.

Bon Voyage....

Northeast Loop: The Stats

Mileage: 9,693 miles
Number of states: 20
Number of national parks: 8

A little light on the national parks this go round, though still heavy on the states, thanks to the little ones along the east coast. The final loop should be the reverse, as parks tend to be pretty clustered in the southwest. We're at 21,034 miles total, including the pre-loop truck drive from NYC to Knoxville and the first two loops, then we've got the mini loop coming up next to mississippi and louisiana, then finally the southwest after that - should be about 30k miles, 48 states and 40+ parks when all is said and done.
-B

King Cotton

Florida to Georgia, Alabama, and Knoxville (11/9 - 11/10):

We finished up our second loop with a tour of rural Georgia and Alabama. Based on the book Confederates in the Attic, the Civil War travelogue I bought a few days ago in North Carolina, we headed for Andersonville, GA. Andersonville was the site of the most notorious and deadly Confederate prison. Between 20 and 30% of the Union prisoners who entered the camp died from starvation or crazy disease. After the war, the prison's director Henry Wirz became the only person to have ever been convicted of war crimes in the US, and he was hanged. But...he has been turned into a martyr by pro-Confederate groups, who have celebrations for him every year. The establishment of Andersonville as a national historic site was so contentious that it had to be established as a general museum honoring American POWs to distract from the Civil War aspect. (Pro-Confederates say that Wirz was a scapegoat and Northern prisons were just as bad.)

The POW museum was pretty well-done if kind of disorganized. There were a lot of personal stories, plus exhibits about how POWs are actually defined. I would have liked the museum better though if it was somewhere else, as honoring POWs should kind of stand alone, and it distracted from all the terrible things that happened at Andersonville itself. (Also, if you really want to honor POWs, it seems like you could put the museum somewhere more accessible that rural southwest Georgia).

Post-Andersonville, we headed over windy, out-of-the-way highways to Enterprise, Alabama, which our atlas told us was home to a Boll Weevil Monument. We were pretty disappointed to get there and find out it was really just a small kind of generic fountain (you go to the trouble to put up a monument to the Boll Weevil and then make it normal-looking??). The story behind it is at least somewhat interesting, but the Wikipedia article itself would have sufficed.

The destinations of the last day of the road trip made up for the disappointment of the Boll Weevil. We saw a crazy amount of memorabilia at the Hank Williams Sr boyhood home in Georgiana, AL. In Montgomery we stopped off at the Rosa Parks museum (with the Outkast song as our driving soundtrack), which has this cool bus with videoscreens in the windows where you can watch a reenactment of the arrest and then look at exhibits about the following boycott of the bus system. Our final stop was the space center in Huntsville, where we paid our respects to Miss Baker, the first space monkey to return from orbit alive, by laying a banana on her grave.
-M

A Farewell to Taste

Edisto to Florida, all points (11/3 - 11/8):

Brad and I have spent some lovely times in Florida in the past, relaxing and enjoying the sun and warmth while New York is being battered by blizzards and winter-ness. The Florida of the road trip, however, was mostly garishness. We spent a couple of nights camping in the Everglades (free because it was the off-season!), where the mosquitoes had their way with me in the evening. I've never had worse mosquito bites in my life (easily 30-50 of them), and I spent most of our time in Florida in an itchy hell.

We visited Key West with the intention of taking a 4-hour road trip boat trip to Dry Tortugas, the most inaccessible national park in the continental US. You can tell that Key West was charming back in its time. Now it’s more Gatlinburg-esque and is crammed with cheesy bars and lewd t-shirt stores. It was a 3 hour drive just to get to this unpleasant town, and when we got there we found our that our Dry Tortugas trip had been canceled because of high winds (and after I'd already bought the Dramamine!). Rather than spend more time surrounded by ass shorts with Key West splayed across the butt, we turned around and headed back to to Florida City on the mainland where we were instead surrounded by strip malls.

It wasn't all terrible, though. Namely:
1) We saw some alligators/crocodiles, cranes, and silly birds in the Everglades
2) It was quite the novelty to use the air conditioner instead of the heater, and we welcomed the warmness after all the snow from the first part of this loop.
3) Ernest Hemingway's house in Key West is pretty awesome AND it's filled with six-toed cats! Ernest Hemingway collected six-toed cats because they are supposed to be good luck, and now there are a number of their descendants among the 40-50 cats who currently live at the house. The extra digit is an opposable thumb, which they can use to pick things up off the ground (creepy!). In other animal news, the old town also has a number of roosters running around as a result of a ban on cock fighting several decades ago that required owners to set the birds loose.
4) We went canoe-ing in the Everglades, where we got lost off the trail, but had fun paddling around for a couple hours.
5) On our way out of Florida, we got to have lunch with Brad's mom and stepdad and visit for at least a little bit before heading north.

-M

Key West is terrible.
-B

Magnolias and Moonlight

Winston-Salem to Edisto State Park, SC (11/2):

We bid good-bye to Aaron and Erin and headed for Congaree, South Carolina, a national park established only a few years ago. We did a walking tour of the swamp before heading to Charleston on the coast. We arrived at dusk and unfortunately had only a couple hours anyway, but it’s a peculiar little place. The historic district is genteel and very pretty but seems stuck in a time a couple centuries ago, and you sort of expect to turn the corner and meet women in hoop skirts heading to the harbor to watch the shelling of Fort Sumter. It’s a place we’d like to spend more time in the future, so we’ve added it to the list of future vacation spots. We then camped in a state park down the coast. Like Virginia, we paid $30 for the night, which really is not that much less than a cheap motel, but at least the campsite was nice.

On the advice of Aaron and Erin, on the way out of NC I bought a book called Confederates in the Attic. This Pulitzer Prize winning author travels around the south, visiting Civil War battlefields and interviewing Civil War re-enactors and crazy pro-Confederates. The book is great so far, but I was a bit put off by the fact that it was on the shelf of a major bookstore (though luckily not one of the national chains) beside a book entitled "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War" which espouses such views as the fact that slavery wasn't actually so bad and that the South actually held the moral high ground over the North. So yeah, welcome back to the south.

- M

Go Deacs

Pocahontas to Winston-Salem, NC (11/1):

The last in a string of free lodging tonight courtesy of Aaron Bachmann et al, formerly of Birnam Woods, Brandermill, USA. First we had to stop in Raleigh and ensure a Browns loss, and they did not disappoint. Then on to Wake, where we found the one restaurant open Sunday night and played a touch of wii.
-B

Heading Back Down South

Shenandoah to Pocahontas State Park (10/31):

Living it up down Brandermill way today, though first we swung through Charlottesville for lunch at Bodos (and dessert at the new giant Arch's by Barracks Road!! -M). Midlothian has seen fit to build a number of terrible new subdivisions, reasonably enough. It does have a wonderful Arbys, which may be new, and Chesterfield Towne Center has inexplicably replaced its movie theatre with a bookstore, though otherwise things remain as you would expect. Word is that Clover Hill is being torn down, making me glad we kept that debate trophy instead of giving it to the school. Zombieland in the evening (surprisingly awesome movie! -M) and then a $31 stay at Pocahontas State Park, which I don't think I'd ever been to despite living 10 minutes away from for most of my life.
-B

I can't believe I forgot the lyrics to one song about Shenandoah

Winchester to Shenandoah National Park (10/30):

After a break from our hiking itineraries, we were back at it again in Shenandoah. Skyline Drive is probably lovely, though 90% of it was enveloped in fog when we drove through. The parts we saw, however, were beautiful. We set out on a 6.8 mile hike late in the afternoon. At the beginning of the trail, we were greeted by an angry deer that kept trying to charge us, though that made sense once we saw the baby deer hiding that it was trying to protect. After a bit of diplomatic negotiations, the deer let us go on our way. A couple miles later, we met an angry snake on the path that starting hissing and doing that stand-up-y snake thing, so we climbed through the bushes and trees on the side of the path to detour around it. We hadn’t checked the elevation before heading out and were quite surprised to find ourselves climbing a giant mountain halfway through the hike. Even more ominously, it started to get dark and it was looking like we might end up spending the night on the trail, but we prevailed and made it off the trail before nightfall (meeting the same deer again at the head of the trail, who were considerably less upset to see us this time). We went back to camp and were even able to do laundry that evening. Success!

-M