Blog posts from our first extended cross-country road trip – June 2013
Link to Las Vegas Facebook Pictures So Molly and I were able to check in to our hotel around 2:30pm yesterday. We got there after packing up the tent and car, and decided to go inside to check it out. We were booked for 3 nights at a place called Circus Circus, at the end of the Las Vegas strip. The main building is a huge dome building, with a dome-shaped amusement park-type place called the Adventure Dome. Inside the…
I thought it might be a cool idea to make a separate post about our morning routine, and some helpful things we have learned along the way. Molly and I have both gotten in the habit of setting up the tent FAST. We know where the tent is in the car, know how it goes together, and all-in-all it takes about 3 minutes from start-to-finish. Inside the tent, we have created a little “home” each night. We start by setting…
We woke up today to chanting – but from this odd “Temple of the [something]” that we encountered last night. Once again, we couldn’t make out what they were chanting, but we did hear applause. We just started out about our normal routine, took a shower, and headed towards town. We decided to head to Lake Mead and spend part of the day there. I knew it was a pretty large area, but I didn’t have any idea of how…
We spent Saturday and Sunday hanging out around Las Vegas. We figured it would be too much work to try and go to a different park (like Zion in Utah), only to have to come back after two days. I didn’t think that would give us enough time to experience it, so we are going to put that off until later in the trip. Molly and I slept in a group campground at Mount Charleston – about 20 miles outside…
Link to Hoover Dam Facebook Pictures Today we woke up early and went to the Grand Canyon Park to get our park passports stamped, and also to send some postcards. We didn’t fill up our solar shower because we figured we were going to be staying in a hotel. We got about a half hour into the drive to Las Vegas, when I decided to check my phone. I had an email from my mom saying that the hotels in…
Link to Grand Canyon Facebook Pictures Today we woke up and went into the Grand Canyon National Park. Entrance fee is normally $25, but since I have the $80 annual National Park Pass, it was free. That puts my savings somewhere like $58 for buying that pass – I need to get at least $100 of use out of it to justify it. Upon entering the park, we found the first overlook that we came across – Pipe Creek Vista. …
Link to Winslow / Meteor Crater Facebook Pictures Today we woke up and decided to explore Flagstaff a tad. We drove to the local university – Northern Arizona University, and walked around for a little over an hour. It was nice to get up and be active in the morning, and the cool breeze was a nice change from the heat. The campus seemed very “green”, because they use reclaimed water for their irrigation systems, had their own energy-efficient power…
Link to Devil’s Bridge Facebook Pictures Today, we woke up and did the usual routine: pack up tent, etc. We are getting really good at it. I think we said “Good morning” to each other, and then didn’t say another word until everything was packed away. I’d estimate 10 minutes from start to finish. Anyway, after that I decided I was looking a little scruffy, and needed a haircut. So we figured out the most white trash way to get…
Link to Sedona Facebook Pictures We spent today in and around the Sedona area. We definitely squeezed a LOT into a day, and got a pretty good workout doing so. We started with the usual routine: wake up, break down the tent, pack up the car with the sleeping bags / pads / blankets, brush our teeth, hit the road. The usual. Today we were going to cross off some of those hikes that the forest ranger from yesterday was…
Link to Tuzigoot and Jerome Facebook Pictures It was actually COLD last night! We had the windows zipped up and rainfly on to contain our heat. When we woke up in the morning, the sun was shining strong and warming up the tent. We started off the day by taking a much-needed solar shower and rearranging the things inside the car. Tons of people that had been camping the night before were driving down the FS-515 road, kicking up tons…