Five Favorite National Parks
1. Rocky Mountain
2. Yosemite
3. Badlands
4. Olympic
5. Grand Canyon

Grand Canyon last because I’ve been there before. Yellowstone off the list because it was cold and we weren’t there long. The top two would probably be switched if we’d started in California.

Five Favorite Cities
1. Seattle
2. Estes Park
3. San Francisco
4. Portland
5. Denver

Ok, Estes Park isn’t really a city, but it deserves to be on this list. San Francisco makes it despite my not liking it at all while I was there. Best city ever to just drive around.

Ten Favorite Stops
1. Pikes Peak
2. Rocky Mountain National Park
3. Space Needle
4. Golden Gate Bridge
5. Yosemite National Park
6. Badlands
7. Oklahoma City Memorial
8. Rainforest
9. Mt. Rushmore
10. Yellowstone

Five Best Hotels
1. Estes Park, CO
2. De Soto, KS
3. Portland
4. Las Vegas
5. El Paso

Estes Park for the location, De Soto for the homliness (that’s not a good adjective, is it?), Portland for the value, Las Vegas for the history, and El Paso for the price.

Five Worst Hotels
1. Tucson
2. San Francisco
3. Colorado Springs
4. Grants Park, OR
5. Williams, AZ

Tucson and San Francisco for the memories, Colorado Springs and Grants Park were cheap for a reason, and Williams was overpriced.

Five Places I’d Go Back to Today
1. Yosemite National Park
2. Rocky Mountain National Park
3. Seattle
4. San Francisco
5. Portland

In no particular order. Two mountain parks and three Pacific cities.

Ten Favorite Pictures:

10. The Oregon Wizard

9. Rain Forest Moss

8. Yosemite Falls from Glacier Point

7. Grand Canyon Sunset

6. View from Pikes Peak

5. Seattle

4. Golden Gate Bridge in the Fog

3. Pacific Ocean at Dusk

2. Space Needle and Museum

1. Estes Lake

You have no idea how happy looking at these pictures makes me.

After I had dropped Aaron off, I stopped by Culver’s to try to get an ice cream cake. They didn’t have either kind that I wanted, so I headed back to my car disappointed…without my keys. I hadn’t planned to lock my car, so I just set my keys down inside the car before going inside. At the last minute though I decided to lock my car. It was no big deal because I had a spare key underneath the car that we’d already used once on the trip. I reached under to grab it, but it was gone. I don’t know how long it had been gone, but I’m guessing it fell off on our backcountry trip toward Yellowstone two weeks earlier. That was actually the day I locked the keys in the car the first time. If it had happened at any other time, we would have been in trouble.

I didn’t have a cell phone anymore, so I had to find a phone to have my mom bring me a key. What a way to end the trip. Nine thousand miles ends in my mom bringing me a key.

We couldn’t stay for too long though because we still had to go to the Oklahoma City memorial and get to Kansas City before it got too late.

Oklahoma City immediately became my favorite city when I stopped to get gas for $2.94. That’s the cheapest I got the entire trip and 95 cents cheaper than the most expensive gas I’ve ever gotten.

The Oklahoma City bombing museum was very well done, I thought. It starts in a small museum of terrorism and of the buildings in the area before the bombing. From there you go into a room where you hear a recording taken from the building right across the street in the minutes right before the bomb went off. After that you go through several rooms with things taken from the rubble, survivor stories, exhibits about the investigation, videos of newsconferences and newspapers from around the world, and a lot more. Pictures were not allowed inside the museum, but here are a few from the memorial outside (in the rain):

We stopped at a Sonic after the memorial to get some full throttle slushes and in general to thank them for their commercials. Their food is pretty good, but it’s their drinks and deserts that they advertise the most. I can personally recommend the full throttle slush (if you’re prepared for it) and the cherry limeaid.

We made it to my relatives’ house near Kansas City before midnight, which was better than it could have been with the stops we made, the distance we travelled, and the storms we had to drive through. There were a few downpours that I wouldn’t have been able to see through if not for the trucks right in front of me. How did people survive before tail lights? We left them a gift of half a bag of stale doritos. It must have been Aaron’s idea because he had the bag last. I think there was even an empty bottle of cherry pepsi in there too.

The two-lane highways in western Texas have speed limits of 75 MPH, and why not? There is not much out there to slow down for. We were cruising down one of these roads, probably going near 80, when suddenly there’s a stop sign. I hit the brakes and barely managed to stop in time, although everything in the back seat ended up in the floor. As I pulled away, I guy came and whistled at us, so I backed up to the side of the road. Apparently, all the border control can afford there is a five-foot stop sign to get people to stop.

Apparently blowing through a border patrol stop is a bad thing. They brought the dog out to search our car. While that was happening, this officer was asking us the dumbest questions. “So you don’t come through here very often?” This after I’ve said we’re from Illinois and have never been here before. It’s no wonder he’s working at a small border patrol stop in rural Texas instead of somewhere useful.

Our scheduled stop was Carlsbad Caverns. I wish I could have stayed to see the bat flight, but we just walked through all the paths in the caverns. Supposedly it would take three or four hours to walk everywhere that we went, but I looked at all the distances and saw no way it would take us that long. We made it through in at most two hours. It was tough to get good pictures in the dark, but here are some of the better ones. Carlsbad is famous for having the largest open chamber in North America and for having some of the biggest columns. The first is pretty much impossible to get a picture of, so you’ll have to be satisfied with the columns.

For at least a couple hours on the way to Wichita Falls, there was an electrical storm all around us. Very little rain, but a lot of lightning that lit up the sky. That was our first experience with a storm in “tornado alley.” We ended up driving through at least five storms (and having another blow through while at our hotel in Wichita Falls) in the two days that we were in Texas/Oklahoma/Kansas. This after we spent a few days without seeing a cloud.

We only drove through the park. If we stopped at all, we didn’t get out of the car. It’s just too hot down there. The park is part cactus garden and part cactus forest. There are some places where there are several different types of cacti in a small area and other places where there are dozens of saguaro over a large area.

Out in the dusty fields of New Mexico, we saw several dust devils (and many signs saying how dangerous dust storms can be).  The best one was this double dust devil:

El Paso is a much bigger city than I thought it was.  I think it was actually the third largest city on the trip, after Phoenix and San Francisco.  Our hotel had just about every channel imaginable…except ESPN.  We had to go to Pizza Hut to watch the game.  Fortunately (and unfortunately) it was a blow out by halftime, so we didn’t have to loiter around for too long.

Fortunately this is what it looked like this time:

There is not a cloud in that sky. In fact, other than a few wispy clouds at the Grand Canyon, we did not see any clouds from Saturday evening until Wednesday afternoon.

The ski lift wasn’t nearly as interesting as it could have been. This is probably mostly because instead of the tallest mountain I’d ever been on, it was now maybe not even in the top five. I suppose it still was, but it just didn’t seem like it.  It was a pretty long view, but there just didn’t seem to be as much to see as there was in other places.  Here is some of what we could see:

We drove from there to Tucson.  We wanted to stop somewhere in Phoenix to buy some Phoenix Suns stuff.  We were originally going to stop at their arena’s gift shop but couldn’t find a place to park and figured we could get stuff cheaper at a mall anyway.  Well, we then wandered around looking for a mall; the GPS was somewhat less than useful again.  We eventually gave up and just went to a mall in Tucson.  I actually never got anything, but Aaron got a couple Suns jerseys.

The drive to Tucson was uneventful except that I hit the maximum speed on the trip outside of Phoenix (keeping up with traffic, downhill, in a 75 MPH zone; I’ll let you use your imagination).  We didn’t have hotel reservations, so I ended up paying too much for a hotel just because we saw it had a computer in the lobby, which ended up not working or something.

In Tucson I had my cell phone stolen. Mom, if you’re wondering why I didn’t tell you this entire story at the time, it’s because you would have needlessly worried the rest of the trip.

I was out getting some fresh air around the hotel parking lot about 2:00. I heard some voices, so I kind of stayed away because I’m not big on meeting people I don’t know at 2:00 AM, you know? Eventually a guy comes around the corner, followed by another guy. He asked me what I was doing, and I said, “just walking around.” “Do you want to walk over here?” I stopped and asked what he wanted; he came right up, punched me on the left side of my face, and demanded his money which he apparently thought I had stolen from him. I just got hit by this guy, and there was another guy with him (who in hindsight probably thought his friend was an idiot), so I had no idea what was about to happen. The last thing I wanted to do was lead them to our room where Aaron was out cold, so I ran to the lobby, which was of course locked. He was still threatening me and it was too dark to see if either he or his friend had a weapon, so I backed up to the road. All I had in my hand was my hotel key and cell phone. He thought I was holding his money, so I tossed them toward him. He kept coming toward me, so I just ran until he was out of sight. (In the morning the key was there, but the phone was gone.) I was just looking for an office or something that was open so I could call the police and get a safe trip back to my room. Fifteen-twenty minutes later, I saw flashing lights and went to get the cop myself. I gave him all the details about the guy, and it somehow became a robbery investigation even though that was far less important to me than getting suckerpunched and needing to get back to my room (especially given that he wasn’t trying to rob me). I’m completely fine now though; the whole thing never was that big a deal. For those of you that have heard Aaron’s version of the story, keep in mind that he left out and embelleshed on details in order to make the story funny and about him. The real story isn’t either of those.

I’ve been to the Grand Canyon before, so there’s not a whole lot for me to say, especially after only being there an hour or so. We were there for the sunset, which is really hard to get a picture of when you’re standing on the top of the canyon. I did the best I could though.

I had thought all along that there was no way we’d spend the night in Northern Arizona. We would see the Grand Canyon and then go south to Phoenix or Tucson. It wouldn’t matter that my relatives were out of town since we wouldn’t be anywhere near Williams. But because we got to the canyon so late, our plans changed. Where did we end up staying? Williams, Arizona. Oh, well.

There are two basic areas in the park–the valley and the highlands. Most of the key buildings are in the valley, which is what the park is most famous for. Yosemite Falls can be seen and heard from just about any point in the valley.

Yosemite National Park is famous for its waterfalls. In fact, four of the thirty tallest waterfalls in the world are inside the park. None are taller than Yosemite Falls at 2,425 feet. The waterfall is fed almost exclusively by melting snow, so the most water flows over it at the end of May, when we were there. There are two main drops in the falls, as you can see in the first picture; the path we took led us to a good spot for viewing the lower part of the falls (though you couldn’t see the upper part). There was also an “unofficial path” that led right up to the base of the falls.

After that we just followed the signs in the park and drove to some of the main attractions.

We drove from there to Death Valley. About half of that drive was with the Sierra Nevada to our right. The western ridge of the Sierra Nevada is a solid line of mountains that is consistantly over 10,000 feet tall. The Rocky Mountains were taller overall, but they had a lot more valleys and individual tall mountains mixed with shorter peaks. There are a lot of roads running through the Rocky Mountains but only one highway runs through the Sierra Nevada south of Sacramento (where they really get tall).

When we turned away from the mountains, the landscape almost immediately became desert. As we drove toward Death Valley, we could feel the air getting steadily hotter around us even though we were sitting in the air conditioning. Ah yes, the air conditioning. To get to Death Valley you must first get over the mountains. These aren’t the nice, cool mountains like the Sierra Nevada; they are nice, 90+ degrees mountains. The car was having trouble with overheating on steep hills before this, but that was always in cool weather; opening the windows and turning the heater up was no problem. These hills weren’t that steep, but they were very hot. Even though we tried rolling the windows down and turning up the heat, the engine just kept getting hotter. I finally just had to pull over and let it cool down because nothing was working. Even after we stopped, the engine temperature kept going up until the gauge was as hot as it could go.

Since we knew we’d be waiting for awhile in an area without cell phone service, we did the only thing that made sense–we threw rocks around. We had a cliff to our right that had a lot of loose rock on the hill to our left. We played games, trying to see who could hit big rocks down at the bottom of the hill most often and how many times we had to hit a big rock on the side of the hill to get it to slide down; we threw big rocks down and we rolled big rocks down. I’m not sure how much of that was actually legal since we were inside a national park, but the most damage we did was a few smashed plants…heh, and I guess the loose pieces of rock that we pulled straight off the cliff and threw at the guardrail might count as damage too. This is about what it looked like where we got stopped:

As I said, the actual valley was hot. Again, you could feel it getting hotter as we drove down into the valley. Because the car was still trying to overheat, we had to go back and forth between air conditioning and heater. We guessed that it was about 110 degrees. When we got to the visitor’s center (which closed about five minutes before we got there), their thermometer said 112 degrees.

Death Valley was an interesting place. I can say that I’m glad we went there, but I can also say that I am never going back–at least, not in the summer.

From there we drove to Las Vegas, the city that is a microcosm of just about all that’s wrong in America today. Here’s a city sitting in the hot desert that uses far more water and electricity than it needs to. They play on everyone’s greed and lusts in order to get money from them–and that’s exactly why people visit. People want to spend their money on their greed and lusts. But at least they have cheap food! *thumbs up* I could use a horrible pun right now, but I’ll spare you. I guess there’s probably a reason why Las Vegas’s depression and suicide rates are so high.

We walked around at night for awhile. I took some pictures, but these are the only two that came out. The contrast from darkness to bright lights was too much for the camera, I guess.

Oh, and as a sidenote, while waiting to get our table at the restaurant, I was standing behind three slot machines and saw all but one person who sat down at them walk away with more than they started with.

But we did take the time to see the city first. I had a 49-mile driving tour that I got from the San Francisco travel guide (about the only thing any of those were useful for–that and HotLips Pizza) that we more or less followed.

First though we went and walked across the Golden Gate Bridge. Because we had driven over it at night the previous day, we hadn’t gotten much of a view of it or of the city from it. Besides, the driving tour started from there and there was free parking in the golden gate park, so why not? There were a lot more people walking or riding bikes across than I expected, especially on a day as chilly and foggy as it was. I guess it was just because it was Saturday. The fog was really intense at first–you couldn’t see the top of the bridge even when standing on it, let alone seeing any of the city.

The fog did clear up somewhat as the day went on. Eventually we could actually see the city from the bridge although not well.

I should point out that it was in the parking lot at the golden gate park that we realized that my front driver’s-side door wasn’t actually locking. I’d noticed it being weird for awhile, so it had probably not beeing working for a few days. When we figured out that it wasn’t working, we protected two things: We hid the GPS and I kept the memory sticks with all our pictures on them with me at all times. Everything else was free to take for anyone who realized the car was unlocked. Unfortunately no one took my computer…

From there we drove around and saw some of the things on the driving tour, without actually following the tour’s route (49 miles through the city would have taken all day!). Strangely the tour did not include the stretch of Lombard Street called the “crookedest street in America.” Our tour did include that stretch:

The street twists because it is far too steep to drive straight up or down (27 degree grade). Based on some of the hills they did build roads straight up and down, this one must really have been bad. Of course the little stretch is a big tourist attraction, and of course the speed limit going down is only 5 mph, add to that the fact that the intersection at the top is probably the only one in the city that is not a four-way stop, and you get a long wait going up a steep hill before you get to the twisted part.

Like the fog, any stories you’ve heard about the hills in San Francisco are unexaggerated. On one hill there was no traffic around, so I decided to see how fast I could go up it. I pushed the pedal to the metal and made it all the way up to 15 mph. Here are some more pictures of our driving tour of the city:

Now that I think about it, there were very few buildings in San Francisco that look like Illinois buildings. Even with all the diverse neighborhoods, there was no Illinoistown.

To continue relaxing my nerves (even though I felt a lot better by this point), we went to see Pirates of the Caribbean 3 at an Imax theater east of San Francisco. We wanted to see it on the Imax screen, but they were only showing Spiderman at that time. In the second Pirates movie, they decided that they didn’t need actual characters or a sensible story and instead relied on bad jokes from the first movie to carry it because they knew they would make millions of dollars from the name regardless of what they put in the movie. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the third movie wasn’t like that. I still didn’t like it as well as the first one though–it just wasn’t as pirate-y. Instead of lying and stealing ships to get back their ship and/or girl from the person who stole them and then dueling to the death with swords, they spent their time fighting large battles and lying to government officials in order to rescue people from mythological deities and demigods. That sounds like Homer, not Pirates.

We were going to stay in a hotel about an hour away from Yosemite National Park. Unfortunately, because this was late at night on Memorial Day weekend and we didn’t have reservations, we couldn’t find anywhere to stay. We eventually decided to drive right to the edge of the park and slept in the car in the parking lot of a hotel. It wasn’t the most comfortable or restful night of the trip, but you can’t beat the price.

But that’s not how the day started. With extra space in our trunk now that our dirty clothes were back in their original bags, we headed south. Our first stop was at the Redwoods National Park. Actually, our first stop was at the Redwoods NP visitor center, which was right on the ocean and not within sight of any redwoods. We were able to go touch the ocean though and discover that it is very cold. Based on a chart I just looked up, I’m guessing it was about 54 degrees. That’s about the temperature of the water off the coast of Anchorage, Alaska.

We had to backtrack to get to the forest. We had driven through part of it on the way and thought we had seen some big trees. They were nothing compared to the trees in the Lady Bird Johnson Grove a couple miles inside the park. Those trees are huge. The trees in the rain forest were 200 feet tall, but the redwoods put those to shame. The average redwood grows at least 275 feet, and the tallest ever measured was over 375 feet. Unfortunately we didn’t have a chance to see the tallest trees in the world because those were a fairly long hike into the woods, and we still had a long way to get to San Francisco.

When we got near San Francisco though, I realized we were earlier than I expected to be. Instead of trying to cross the Golden Gate Bridge and drive through the city in heavy traffic only to lay around the hotel for the rest of the evening, I decided to go to Point Reyes National Seashore until dark and cross at night. Point Reyes took longer to get to than I expected, so the sun had actually set when we got there, but I still got some pictures of the sun setting over the ocean (into the fog), and walking around was still pretty cool after dark. It wasn’t a beach at the spot we went to–it was more of a rocky shore with a lighthouse and stuff. During the day you could visit the lighthouse, but it was closed to actually do its duty at night.

We hoped that crossing at night would give a good view of the city lights, but the fog blocked all of that out. At first, driving in the city was pretty easy and cool to drive up and down the hills, but when it came down to finding a place to park to check into the hotel, things got difficult. We spent at least half an hour driving around, accomplishing nothing. I eventually got so stressed out by it (and at least six other things) that I made Aaron drive and just tried to forget about what was going on. We parked somewhere that I’m still not completely sure we were allowed to be, and I just went straight to bed hoping tomorrow would be better.

I didn’t feel any better the next day, although I’m pretty sure my car was illegally parked overnight without getting a ticket or anything. Best thing that happened until I checked out of the hotel.