The Encore (Part III)

So we got snowed out at the Grand Canyon. It sucked. It snowed, it was cold, you couldn't see the f'ing canyon that was supposed to be there, and it was a general disappointment. Well... sorta. I doubt many people can say they were at the Grand Canyon when it snowed, so I consider myself fortunate. Plus, I'm sure I'll be back to the Canyon at some point.


Sedona - much of the same. Bad weather, wasn't nearly as cool as it should have been.


Phoenix - eh. We stayed in Scottsdale and went out for some beers at ASU. Ridiculous.


After Phoenix, we hit the road on our way to Las Cruces, NM, where we had two hiking destinations in mind: Carlsbad Caverns and White Sand Dunes National Monument.

The caverns were pretty cool - huge underground caves that were formed when underground limestone formations were dissolved by water. Really, really cool, really far underground. As you walk along the narrow path set out by the National Park Service, the only hope you have is that one of the huge rock formations on the roof doesn't decide to fall down when you're in the middle of a nice tour. That would seriously ruin the day...

White Sand Dunes - awesome. Located in the middle of a huge missile range in the middle of New Mexico, the sand dunes are an expansive desert, basically, that stretch out over several hundred square miles. I have a few issues with the government putting a national park in the middle of a giant firing range... but I made it out alive at least. Pictures are the only thing that will do this place justice, just amazing. They had several hikes you could go out on, with marked trails, so thats what NinAmini an I did - a 4-mile hike over sand dunes wearing nothing but bathing suits (no shoes), a cowboy hat, and a Camelback full of water. After that... OFF TO COLORADOOO

The Encore (Part II)

So the trip from San Diego to St George was not without its issues... namely an amateur lack of planning on our part. Needless to say, it is not possible to go from San Diego to Los Angeles then to Joshua Tree National Park, then to St. George, UT within the context of daylight. It just can't happen - after leaving SanDi and heading north to LA to say WHATUPPPP to a few people in LA, we headed straight WEST in rush hour traffic to JTNP, which is about a half hour from Palm Springs if I remember correctly. Now, this wouldn't have been a problem except we didn't hit JTNP til just after dusk (around 10ish?)... and then realized we had another 6 hours until we hit St George for the start of our hiking expedition. We cranked up the Pink Floyd for a midnight, full-moon drive through the park and, after almost running out of gas, hit a capitalist-loving gas station (think $5/gal) in the middle of nowhere right by the freeway to take us up through Vegas, baby, Vegas... up to St. George where we arrived at 4am for a 6am hiking wake up call..


Now, usually there is no redeeming purpose for waking up at 6am when you're on a road trip. In fact, unless you're getting PAID to be up that early, it's never really justifiable. Unfortunately, my less than stellar planning skills left us 150 miles from the hiking destinations in southern Utah and northern Arizona, and it was too late to change our minds.

The hiking destinations we would try and cover over the next 4-5 days were as follows:

The Wave (failed - see below)
Antelope Canyon - awesome, and so well documented on the internet that the only pictures we took that do it justice are the "rising-on-the-third-day" pictures where the sunlight lit up our faces
Bryce Canyon - home of the hoodoos. Really cool, phallic-shaped formations in a set of canyons that were formed over the years as water ran off the mountains and dissolved the sediments in the rock... google that isht, it's really cool.
Zion National Park - really cool and scenic
Coral Pink Sand Dunes - also really cool and a random find that we found on a whim. Home of the infamous "sandboarding" pictures on fbook.

As you can see, these places all have really intriguing names and I now understand why people think the west is so much cooler than the east. I wouldn't mind living there, except for that whole running-out-of-water problem.

NEXT - Grand Canyon, Sedona, Phoenix, Tucson, and then New Mexico


Most

The Encore (Part 1)

"So what happened?", you ask. Now I'm living in New York, but somehow another blog post showed up - I could've let the blog end at LA with a recap of the details, but I feel the need to finish what I started. After all, what fun is it to drive 22,000 across the country if you can't finish up the details?


So, after LA. After staying with a former college roommate in LA for two weeks, visiting beer gardens, seeing some old high school and college friends, and spending the waking hours running and sunning on the beach, I had to make my way down to San Diego for a few MORE days in the sun. Cyrus and Nina were flying in to San Diego to drive back out east with me, and we had made some plans to do some hiking and see some sweet Southwest on the way back. It's a good thing we hadn't planned the remainder of the trip to a T, because it certainly changed more than a few times on the return back...

After picking them up on a sunny Monday in San Diego after staying with another college friend and her family in Orange County for the weekend, we did what anyone flying into Cali would do: InNOut burger, of course. After hitting the famed burger joint, we gathered ourselves up for a few days of beach trips and decided to head out on Thursday to our next destination: St. George, Utah. After a disappointing early morning beach trip in Ocean Beach, we hit up Hodad's burgers, a local burger joint that may rival any of those I've ever had previously...

This is the Enddd

As most of you know, the road trip concluded about a month ago... after looking back on some of the features, I was probably a bit optimistic in my original assumptions. If you remember my original post:
-------------------------------------------------
I've decided to take a big swig out of my AMERICA mug.


Here's the deal:

10,000 miles
25 stops
15 ski destinations


I'm probably a little bit off my rocker assuming I'll actually be able to make it to all these places.
At a rough average of 1,250 miles per week, that's a lotttt of driving, even for me. The benefit is that I know people in almost 95% of the places I'll be staying, which should make the drives more palatable. In some cases, I'll be staying longer than a week - hopefully that will keep my sanity in check.

I could spend those two months looking for a job... but then that just wouldn't be any fun, now would it?

Destinations:

Google Map, Roughly


Oklahoma
Austin
Dallas
Taos, NM
Colorado Springs, CO
Vail
Breck
MARDI GRAS - New Orleans, LA
Beaver Creek
Winter Park
Steamboat
Copper Mtn
Jackson Hole
Big Sky
Sun Valley
Alta
Snowbird
Tahoe
Mt Bachelor
Portland, OR
Seattle, WA
San Francisco, CA
Los Angeles
THE OC
Las Vegas
Phoenix/Scottsdale
-----------------------------------------

As you can see by the map above... I took more than a swig out of the America mug. I finished it, and called the bartender over a few more times for a refill.

10,000 miles turned into 23,000
25 "stops" turned into more more than 26 major cities. Skipped only Salt Lake City, Hotlanta, and Miami. Based on my America journey, however, the only things I skipped were Mormons, fried chicken, and "sunny weather and shady people". Therefore, I don't feel nearly as bad.

Below is a reprint of a finalized trip email I sent out several weeks ago to almost everyone I knew, detailing the final trip stats:



===========

325,000 Marriott points
21, 670 miles (87% of the distance around the equator)
8,700 pictures
$2,881 in fuel (est.)
150 rounds of target practice
116 days
36 states
26 major cities - (I pretty much skipped Salt Lake City and Miami)
22 pint glasses collected
4 growlers
18 days on the beach - LA/San Diego/Charleston, SC
15 days of skiing/9 resorts

• Vail
• Taos
• Winter Park
• Steamboat
  
• Beaver Creek
• Breckenridge
• Copper Mountain
• Jackson Hole
• Big Sky
  

9 national parks
16 lbs of bbq
5 oil changes
18 bags of sunflower seeds
10 microbreweries
2 rodeos: Ft Worth, TX and San Antonio, TX
6 deer burgers
3 different sand dunes:

• Coral Pink Sand Dunes, UT - home of the infamous "sandboarding" pics
  
• White Sands Missile Range, NM
• Great Sand Dunes Nat'l Park, CO
  

3 nights spent sleeping in the car - Norman, OK - Missoula, MT - Pocatello, ID
2 brewery tours - Coors & Budweiser
2 unpaid traffic tickets - Beverly Hills, CA and Charleston, SC
1/2 case of Firefly sweet tea vodka - Charleston
1 traffic stop - outside of Zion National Park
1 order of fried alligator - New Orleans
RIDICULOUS meal in Denver:

• 1 Elk steak
• 1 yak steak
• 1 quail
• 1 ostrich steak
• 1 order of "Rocky Mountain Oysters"

1 lost pair of Timberlands
1 cracked windshield - Somewhere in CO

... and 2 trips to New Orleans, neither of which I drove to.


Favorite breakfast: Southwest Eggs Benedict, The Diner - Norman, OK
Favorite Lunch: Hodad's Burgers, San Diego, CA / Nick's Crispy Tacos - San Francisco, CA / Yo Mama's, New Orleans, LA
Favorite Dinner: Buckhorn Exchange, Denver, CO/ ANY bbq
Best dessert: Concrete from Ted Drewe's Custard - St Louis, MO

Favorite ski resort: Jackson Hole, WY
Best ski day: 18' at Big Sky, Montana
Favorite city: San Francisco, CA / Charleston, SC/ Austin/TX
Favorite Drive: Rte 1 from San Francisco to Los Angeles (Big Sur mostly) & Western Montana
Worst drive: (tie) Dallas, TX to Albuquerque, NM and Kansas.
Best tour: Ft Carson tour & Budweiser Brewery (St Louis)
Weirdest night spent: sleeping in my car after 13 hours of driving - the Great Northern Brewing Co in Whitefish, MT
Best Festival: Mardi Gras
Favorite live music: Austin, TX and Nashville, TN
Favorite bar: The Tractor Room, San Diego, CA
Best Hike: Fairyland trail, Bryce Canyon, UT
Best photo opp: Antelope Canyon, UT
Best bumper sticker: "Vegetarian is an old Indian word for 'lousy hunter'" Charleston, SC
Weirdest meal, other than Rocky Mountain Oysters: "Horseshoe Sandwich" - Central Illinois
Best pizza: Lou Malnati's - Chicago
Best college stadium experience: getting trapped in the press box at 10 pm - Beaver Stadium - Corvallis, OR
Worst college football stadium experience: running stadiums at Aggieland - College Station, TX

Best BBQ:
Brisket: Kreuz Market - Lockhart, TX
Best pulled pork: Arthur Bryant's - Kansas City, KC
Best ribs: Rendezvous - Memphis, TN
Best sausage: Kreuz Market - Lockhart, TX / The Old German Restaurant - Choctaw, OK
Best Chicken: The Lady and Sons - Savannah, GA


There are countless more useless cocktail party stats, but again, thank you to everyone who had a couch/bed/floor/air mattress I could stay on. I sincerely appreciate it - 115 days living the dream would clearly have been impossible had I needed to sleep in my car every night. Unfortunately, I ran out of places to drive to...

==================

San Fran to LA

By far, the best drive has been the trip from San Fran to LA via Coastal Route 1, aka the Pacific Coast Highway. After starting my journey on March 13 to meet up with a friend in LA before he left, I made it to Beverly Hills roughly around 8pm.




Now, this isn't exactly the fastest way to Los Angeles. It's much quicker to take the freeway straight down and be there in 5 hours... but that just wouldn't have been any fun. Instead, I took a 10 hour dive down the coast, for what was a pretty amazing drive - in terms of scenery. The road itself winds its way along a cliff for a good chunk through Big Sur, and then turns into the 101 somewhere around San Luis Obispo. To be honest you could stop and take pictures almost anywhere along the way and it would be awesome, but I probably didn't end up taking nearly as many as I would have wanted but the ones I did take turned out awesome.

Long story short, I made it to "Smell - A" (as some San Franciscans liked to call it) to meet up with a friend from high school at the Saddle Ranch on Sunset, a welcome change for a much-needed beer. We ended up making it to the finals of a 20 team beirut tourney, and my back is still hurting from carrying us the whole way....

Windows down, sunroof up, swine on my seat, 22's(ok 18s) on my feet...

The drive from Eugene down to San Fran was pretty cool - originally I wasn't planning on getting all the way to SF on Tuesday night... but then realized there's not much to see in NorCal when the sun goes down anyway - the 101 just turns into another freeway.


The south Oregon coast is a lot like the Northern California coast, really scenic with some good shots of the ocean and the forests. Other than that, there's not really a whole hell of a lot up there. I got into San Fran fairly late - posted up at a Marriott about 20 miles N of the city called Novato.

Wednesday, I headed over to Berkeley for the day to check it out. It's a fairly cool city, much like Ann Arbor except nicer weather and more sunshine. No Big House, though. Took some cool pictures of the Bay area from Indian Rock, which is this huge rock formation up on the hill behind the school. I suck about adding pictures on this blog, just because its such a pain in the a ass. I'll get to it soon, though... hopefully.


After Berkeley and Cal, I headed back to San Fran to meet up with some Penn friends (shoutout to APSmith) for some quizzo at a bar called Tonic. We were supposed to meet up at Nick's Crispy (or is it Crunchy) Tacos for some dinner, but someone decided that Quizzo, Blarney style, was a much better idea. I agreed, so I had some Nick's beforehand - it was amazing, to say the least. We got smoked, of course in Quizzo, due mostly to a lack of focus and an apparent disownership of any daily newspaper service on any of our parts. The beer was cold though - that was pretty important.

Seattle - Eugene

Woke up in Whitefish - drove to Missoula then to Seattle. Not a whole hell of a lot to explain, except that eastern Washington is a whole lot of nothing... it may as well have been dark out when I drove.


Got to Seattle Sunday night & stayed in Kirkland. I got in pretty late, I just basically just commandeered the hot tub for a half hour and went to bed. Woke up pretty early and went to check out the REI store and Pikes Place (there's so much to do in a big city, no point in trying to do it all in a day...) then left to head down the Oregon coast to Eugene.

I decided I couldn't go through Portland without having a microbrew, so one of my compadres in arms did a quick Google and came upon The Lucky Labrador... pretty good choice, beer was as expected. Tried two of them then hopped back on the train down to Eugene, home of the University of Oregon Ducks, via the coast (which was actually a terrible idea, because by the time I got to the coast it was almost sundown, which eliminated the purpose of driving along the coast...)


However, one of the more entertaining things happened to me on the way. En route back to Eugene from the coast, I took this random two-lane state road that the Nav on my Grand Cherokee suggest would be the shortest route. This particular road went right through Corvallis, which some of you may know is home to the Oregon State Beavers. The stadium, which was lit up like a Christmas tree against the night sky, was pretty visible from the road, so I decided to stop by and find a few more decent pics to add to my touristy facebook albums.

As it turns out, the field was being used for some sort of women's conditioning practice (either lacrosse or field hockey, I tried not to make eye contact) and practice for either a frisbee team or a disc-golf team... either one of which would probably have been laughed off the field by Jim Steele or Wags.

Now, the stadium was open - one gate near the main entrance was swung open for the "teams" to apparently leave when finished. This was more or less a ramp down to the field, probably not used as an entrance on game-days. I decided to hop a small fence and go up onto the second level to snap some quick pictures, and then went back down to the field level to do the same. I decided, in my infinite wisdom, that 9:45pm at night would be a good time to walk across the end zone and into the opposing bleachers to get some good shots of the field. I walked up what seemed lik 89719875981251 rows of stairs before I got to the announcers booth on the lower level. I set up my camera with the Gorillapod I bought in Albuquerque for this specific purpose. Got some good shots, started playing around with the settings, and then...


NOTHING. The bastardos turned the lights promptly at 10pm. My car, which was essentially parked behind me, was only accessible by walking down those same 89719875981251 of bleachers (in the rain, f###ing Oregon) in the pitch black dark. while these semi-athletes in Under Armor and "Beaver Disc" tshirts walked across the field wondering how ishtty it was for that guy in the pressbox. Oh well, makes for a good story...