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


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