This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 8:20 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
La Luna de Miel Larga
Chris and Aviva's travels through South America and beyond
About
Chris and Aviva got married in September of 2007 and immediately abandoned everything they know to move to Cuzco, Peru for a little over a year. Aviva is conducting her fieldwork towards her PhD in anthropology and Chris is bumming around shooting some short films and trying to look busy.
March adventures
March 30th, 2009 by AvivaSorry to those of you who we left hanging after Peru! The last few months have indeed been hectic, what with wrapping up there, moving back to California, and getting back into the swing of school and work. Yet, we don’t intend to let this website fade into oblivion! When we travel, which we are bound to do, this will be the place we post photos and stories.
So here begins a new chapter: adventures in the U.S.! We don’t often travel around the U.S. for reasons other than visiting family or friends, or attending special events. But our year in Peru, and all the time we spent outdoors there, has left its mark and we have vowed to get “outside” more often: camping, hiking, and road-tripping. This past week we did just that: a 9 day trip to Bryce Canyon National Park (Utah), Zion National Park (Utah), Las Vegas (the big city stop), and Grand Canyon National Park (Arizona). [It doesn’t hurt that we have now invested in a National Parks Annual Pass, so we have the extra motivation to make this the big year of the outdoors.]
We left on Saturday, March 21st, around 6:30am, which believe me was an effort. But we made great time, driving through the Central Valley, past Mojave, and through Las Vegas up into Utah, arriving at Bryce before the sun set, around 7pm. We bought lots of firewood on the way into the park, as the lady at the general store looked at me incredulously and recommended an extra bundle when I said we were camping. It was supposed to snow, and snow it did, although luckily it let us settle in a night first. To reward ourselves for our early arrival time, we decided to cook dinner that night instead of finding a restaurant. We snuggled into our first night of sleep, which wasn’t all that bad, if a bit chilly. We awoke to beautiful sun, and set out on a combination loop hike from Queen’s Garden Trail to Peekaboo Loop to Navajo Loop, what they call the “Figure 8”. We descended 1800 feet into the canyon, and wound our way around the beautiful “hoodoos” (the rock formations left behind after freeze-wedge erosion…from canyon walls to “fins” to “windows” to “hoodoos” after the top of the window has collapsed; basically the hoodoos are the funny shaped spires you can see in all our photos below). You can also see in our photos how the weather turned on us: our sunny day got cloudy and then snowy and then snowier (and windy). We finished the 7 mile hike in about 4.5 hours without stopping for lunch and scampered back to our tent to change and eat sandwiches there. By this time it was about 4pm and as we warmed up, we drifted off on an unplanned and much-resisted nap, awaking at 7:15pm! Oops…we decided to brave the weather and cook dinner anyway, and had quite the cold night as our wet clothes frooze outside. In the morning, we drove along the park’s main road, stopping at viewpoints for hurried admirations, as the wind and cold quickly drove us back into our car. We got some nice expansive views though (see photos). Around 11am, we gave up on enjoying any more of Bryce, and headed south for warmer weather.
So Monday mid-day saw us driving through the East entrance to Zion National Park, the next step down on the “Grand Staircase”–geologically speaking–of this region (Grand Canyon is the third step down, if I learned it right). The East entrance drive was very impressive, but we took more video than photos. [We’ll all have to remind Chris to put together the video of our trip: we took 3 hours of film!] We passed through the longest tunnel I have ever been in, and came out into the main part of the park. We set up camp, and visited the Visitors Center to get the lay of the land. Despite Zion’s Winter “Park Planner” being much more somber in tone than Bryce’s (basically: all paths are dangerous and frozen, seek extra information before hiking), the weather was turning to spring already and the crowdedness of the park could attest to that. We took in a small, easy Riverside walk for an hour and drove along the canyon for a while. We were warmer that night, but it was still cold! In the morning, we decided to head up Angel’s Landing, a steep 1500 foot ascent. See photos–there were lots of families up there with young children, and quite a few people turning back after trying out the narrow traverses, but we didn’t find it that challenging. We made it up in a little over an hour, and ate lunch on the top. We realized that the sole of Chris’s hiking boot was coming off–so we improvised with some cord from our compass. Luckily he made it back down, but by the time we reached the car, the other sole was coming off! We spent some down time reading by the river and wandered around a bit before starting dinner early. The next morning, we decided to fit a few more hikes in: Weeping Rock (a short, steep ascent to a rock that seems to have a stream coming out of it), and Emerald Pools (a three part hike, between Lower, Middle, and Upper Emerald Pools, which actually didn’t seem to all feed into each other). We reheated pizza at a campsite grill, before heading down to Las Vegas.
Wednesday evening, we arrived in Vegas around 4pm and checked into our hotel, the Paris. We were badly in need of showers, but the dry climate got the better of us: even after we should have felt “clean” we continued to feel dry and crusty and a bit gross. It didn’t help that the hotel shampoo wasn’t strong enough to get the camp fire smell out. No matter, we set out for a walk of the strip, which felt a lot longer than it looked, and then had dinner at our hotel, on a patio outside in front of the Bellagio, watching the fountain shows every 20 or so minutes. Early to bed, early to rise: I had a conference to be at and my panel started at 8 a.m. This was the original impetus for the trip, and my paper went well. Chris picked me up at lunch time and we went to the Bellagio buffet–quite impressive range of food and we gorged. We finished eating around 2:45pm…just in time for a quick lie-down in the hotel before going out to dinner with Andrea and Joel at 5pm! We had tickets to see Cirque de Soleil’s “Ka” at the MGM Grand at 7pm. We had a great Italian dinner, complete with all you can drink/eat house wine, pasta, and bread, and made it to our show just as the lights were dimming. Ka was fantastic–not Cirque’s normal “physicality” but the ever-impressive in costume, art direction, music, and the coolest was the rotating stage that had artists performing at all angles. I loved this shadow puppet part and a battle scene on its side (us looking “down” at the heads of the soldiers, since the stage was hanging in mid air and the artists were fighting on it at a horizontal angle…okay, hard to explain: go see it). It was a very “in-air” show, and had a complete story-line too, another non-traditional element for Cirque.
Friday morning, we were done with Vegas after some crepes and shopping. We headed on the longish drive over to the Grand Canyon. We arrived in time to set up camp and see the sun set, but our real exploring came the next day, as we hiked down into the Canyon on Bright Angel trail (we are doing a lot of hikes with “angel” in the name). We headed to the 3-mile refuge, but arrived too early for lunch. So we headed back up the Canyon to the 1.5 mile point to eat our spaghetti and hot dogs. The total hiking time for the 6 miles was 3 hours–not so bad at all considering how steep it was. Hiking up mountains and canyons doesn’t seem quite as hard after Peru, even when doing it at 7,000 feet. Even Chris thinks I am keeping a better pace, and not quite as many people “lap” me. The rest of the day was spent checking out viewpoints and museums, which I found quite impressive: on geology, indigenous peoples of the area, art. We watched the sun set from the recommended spot–Hopi Point–and had a yummy dinner of stew and garlic bread.
Sunday morning was an early start to break camp and see the sun rise. After a quick meal of oatmeal and changing out of our warm clothes, we set out for home. The drive home was a little longer than we had hoped…some traffic and concern about one of our tires. We stopped for dinner in Modesto and then got home shortly after 9:30pm (so 14.5 hours later, including lots of gas stops and dinner). I am doing three loads of fire-smelling laundry, and getting ready for school to start again tomorrow. Chris is already back at work.
Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoy the photos!
[simpleviewer gallery_id=”5″]
Comments are closed.
La Luna de Miel Larga WordPress2 is proudly powered by WordPress
La Luna de Miel Larga WordPress Theme by Template Monster
La Luna de Miel Larga WordPress Theme by Template Monster