Blog Posts from the Park City Trip

To read the posts from this trip in order, click on this link, then click "newer post" when you get to the end.

To see the pictures from the trip, click on this link.

And by the way, I got the last two counties in Utah on this trip. That makes 34 states completed.

Oh, and in case you're curious: no, I didn't make it home on Saturday. Had a flat tire outside Lordsburg, had to drive to El Paso at 50 mph on the spare tire to get a pair of rear tires. Front tires will be replaced next year. (And, some good news: turns out my deductible for the slashed roof is only $100. Having that car insurance is finally going to pay off.)

...And the Rest: Park City Trip

To read the posts from this trip in order, click on this link, then click "newer post" when you get to the end.

To see the pictures from the trip, click on this link.

After another breakfast at our now-favourite bagel place, we both started off on Wednesday feeling the need for some exercise, so I checked my All-Trails app and found what looked like a trail suitable for a fat ol' guy with mobility issues, at a place called Willow Creek. It turned out to be a nice easy mostly-paved two-mile-long path around a small city park out in the northern reaches of Park City. We followed that up with a stop at the Kimball Art Center, which is listed as a museum but isn't; it's a bunch of small studios where Suburban Housewives (if such exist) learn to make the kind of ceramic and painted projects that were once the special province of eight-year-olds at summer camp.

We took the radical step, then, of driving into downtown Park City, the congested five or six blocks of Main Street that, heretofore, we had experienced only on foot. During the day, parking is free, which was a nice surprise, so we found a place on Swede Alley and walked over to the Park City Museum, an unexpectedly large building containing three floors dealing with the city's history, from its founding in the 1880s as a silver-mining center, through the customary Tragic Fire That Destroyed Most of the City, to its rebirth in the 1950s as a ski destination. Notably, Park City was the home of the first and last skier's subway, as a mining company tried to repurpose its existing tunnels and shafts for access to its new ski runs on the mountains above its defunct mine. The experiment lasted but a single season, as the mine was so leaky that soaked passengers on its 16-passenger train would step out into the freezing atmosphere of a Utah winter and "immediately freeze like a popsicle." And of course, the Sundance Film Festival figured prominently in the most recent parts of the town's history.

After a couple of hours at the museum, we walked up the hill to our preferred people-watching spot. Unfortunately, there was a gigantic SUV parked in front of that spot, so we retreated across the street to a bar that offered seats right by a window looking out onto the sidewalk, and there we indulged ourselves with beer and diet coke (and a $5 hamburger special that turned out to be one of the best burgers I've had in a long time). The best thing about people-watching isn't the people -- they are ordinary in every way -- but in the conversation and memories they provoke. How else could two people sit for an hour or two, watching tourists and dog-walkers traipse up the steep slope of Main Street, Park City, and back down? It's not like these were celebrities promoting their films; that happens in late January, when I, for one, am unlikely to ever be in a snow-prone area.

After a spell back at our condo, watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and doing laundry (just because), I made Curtis pick a place for dinner. He stoutly resisted making a decision until it became clear to him that if he didn't pick a place, we weren't going anywhere. He finally made the painful choice, a place called The Boneyard up on Kearns Avenue, which is The Other Major Street in town. Turned out to be a pretty good choice. I had a chicken pot pie that was too much food, and got to watch the Netherlands:Mexico friendly on delayed broadcast from across the room.

Our plans for the final day in Park City involved a trip down to Jurassic National Monument, which is two and a half hours south of our condo. We decided, for that reason, that rather than come all the way back up to Park City just to check out on Friday, we'd check out on Thursday and then stay that night in Panguitch, which is a lot closer to Las Vegas. And a room in Panguitch isn't much more than the money we would save by not having to drive that distance. (The Sacramento Jag uses premium gas. One of the odd things I've noticed is that, while regular gas here costs way more than what it costs back home, premium is about the same price in both places. Go figure.)

So we packed up the car, turned on the dishwasher, and headed off to see the fossils. Grabbed coffee at a 7-11 (best coffee I've had in PC) and picked up some bagels at a place in Heber City (French Toast -- not good -- and Asiago) to eat in the car. We stopped to see Bridal Veil Falls just outside Provo

and then let Google Maps take us to the country's newest national monument.

Instead, it took us to the Bureau of Land Management Field Office in Price, Utah, where the one guy working there wasn't surprised to see us. He showed us where the monument is on the map, and explained the route in excruciating detail, of which my mind focussed on the thirteen miles of "well-maintainged dirt roads".

The monument is a working dig site at a place called the Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry. Like Dinosaur National Monument, but on a much smaller scale, it has two small metal buildings covering the active dig sites, where hundreds of bones are being excavated in the painstaking way of modern paleontology. There are a number of hiking trails that take you around the monument, some quite long, but that might be a project for another trip, when I'm not wearing a brace on my ankle. And when I'm driving the Subaru, which I don't mind taking on dirt roads (aka gravel roads), well-maintained or not.

The most interesting facts about the place, to me, are these: (1) the proportion of preserved carnivores is much higher than the proportion of preserved herbivores, and there's almost no preserved plant matter; and (2) no one has yet come up with an explanation for why so many fossils would be preserved in this particular spot. It wasn't a marsh or watering hole, it wasn't a bend in a river where carcasses might wash up, and it wasn't the site of a disaster -- in other words, the fossils were laid down over a long, long time, not in a single cataclysm. There's no discernible reason for this particular fossil field to exist.

The only other stop we made was at Butch Cassidy's boyhood home, right next to the highway in Centerville, Utah, a few miles from Panguitch. A local somebody has contributed to the preservation of this part of the famous criminal's history, which is a one-room log cabin and a small outbuilding. Interesting factoid: the real Butch Cassidy was better-looking than Paul Newman, while the real Sundance Kid was no Robert Redford.

Leaving Panguitch this morning (Friday) I took Curtis through Cedar Breaks, which I had seen eight years ago and thought as beautiful as Bryce Canyon. Curtis agreed.

I then dropped him at his house in North Las Vegas and headed east towards home. Thanks to a number of slowdowns on the highways for construction and accidents, I've only made it as far as Tucson, which is now my Least Favourite Place In The Whole World: dusty, somewhat sleazy, and thirteen hours' drive from home, so I may not make it back tomorrow.

And here's a link to all the pictures from this trip.

Another Day or Two: Park City Trip

This is the second post covering the trip to Park City. You should read them in order. Here's a link to the first post of the trip; when you get to the end, click on "Newer Post" at the bottom left.

The confusion about the car museums in western Colorado has left a sizeable hole in our plans for this trip to Park City. We had just enough things planned to all but fill the days here, and the fact that the museum in Gateway is apparently not open this season, despite the info on the web, means we have a day to fill in a place that, let's face it, isn't really filled with things of great interest to two fat ol' retired lawyers. 

Tomorrow is that day, so we're going to be kind of grasping at straws to find something to do. But that's tomorrow; meanwhile, yesterday and today have been pretty good.

 First of all, we found a breakfast place that we like, one with light meals available, and drinkable coffee. We went there yesterday morning, & liked it well enough to go back this morning.

Yesterday we drove into Lehi, which is a suburb south of Salt Lake City. It features a number of interesting museums (and a well-regarded botanical garden, but we didn't see that). We started at the Museum of Natural Curiosity. It's a children's museum, but we went anyway, and to be honest, we really enjoyed it. Mainly because, that early, there weren't any kids there and we could play with all the stuff ourselves. Usually, there are kids swarming all over the exhibits, and it just seems too rude to elbow the little bas... uh, brats aside so we can see, for example, how an Archimedes screw works, or how air blows brightly coloured plastic balls through clear plastic tubes, or how a tornado feels. We spent at least a couple of hours there and had fun, although by the time we got to the last part of the museum, there were enough kids there to be In The Way. All in all, though, we timed it pretty close to perfectly.

After lunch at a fru-fru cafe in a building dedicated to new age stuff -- think expensive yoga classes and spa treatments -- we went to the Museum of Ancient Life. That is, dinosaurs. Oh, they had all kinds of stuff about Carboniferous forests and pre-Cambrian shellfish and stuff -- the boring stuff -- and there were, you know, things about ancient man hunting mastodons and all. But it was about dinosaurs. Four big exhibit halls, two about dinosaurs. Dinosaurs, dinosaurs, dinosaurs. A full Supersaurus skeleton (not actual fossilized bones, of course, but every bit as impressive), so big that it was impossible to get a photo of the whole thing. (It's actually hard to see one end from the other.) A brachiosaur skeleton looking down on you. A pair of T-Rex fighting over a dead Edmontosaur. Stegosaurs and allosaurs and ankylosaurs and mosasaurs and pleisiosaurs and all kinds of other 'saurs that I never heard of. I loved it.

shoe for scale

We took the scenic route home over Guardsman Pass to cap off a really nice day; and we kind of stumbled on a pretty good place for dinner, after our first choice turned out not to be open. (bad Google Maps!) 

This morning we were back at our preferred breakfast place, and after a stop at Walgreen's for some supplies, we sat out in the parking lot discussing what to do. See, today was going to be a day with a hole in the schedule, too, so I had thought about driving up to Flaming Gorge, just because it's pretty there and it would take all day. But when we got right down to it, I didn't want to do that. It would have felt kind of pathetic, driving all that way through counties I'd already been to just to pass the time. We might as well have stayed home and watched TV.

Then Curtis found a listing for a car museum in Salt Lake. (It's not listed on the web site I have bookmarked.) It seemed to have a pretty good collection, about a hundred cars (the only other car museums in Utah are the Toyota Land Cruiser Museum -- thanks, but no -- and a little thing up in Ogden with eleven, count 'em, eleven cars). We decided to go. 

As I was finishing my cigarette I said to Curtis, Call and make sure they're open. We are trying to get used to having to do that. He called and left a message. I found a different number for the museum, and called it: not in service. So we were just about to be back to the Flaming Gorge plan when the guy returned Curtis's call. 

It's not actually a museum anymore. It was, but the guy has shut it down & now it's just his private collection of cars, spread through three buildings near downtown Salt Lake City, and yes, he'd be happy to open it up for us. He was on his way back from Breckenridge but would be there in about an hour. We got there in about a half-hour, and waited out front until he arrived. He opened up the buildings and went about his business while Curtis and I wandered through his collection of cars. (There used to be about twice as many, but there was a will contest and ... hmmm. What we saw was what he had left after the contest.) 

1960 Coupe deVille

Olds Toronado

Packard with guidelamps

The cars weren't pristine restorations set behind velvet ropes. They were cars in every condition, crammed into the available space. It was OK with him if I opened hoods and doors now and then, and I couldn't resist playing with the fuel-filler cover on the old Cadillac Fleetwood -- you know, the kind hidden in the taillight. There were lots of Cadillacs and Lincolns, including less-often-seen models from the '50s; there was a '64 T-Bird convertible hardtop (my mother's dream car); a '28 Rolls, and '37 Cord, a '29 Auburn, a couple of Packards, some Nashes, big Chryslers, a '64 Imperial convertible and the gigantic GM cars from the '70s.

I don't know how long we spent prowling through this guy's collection, but even considering the unpolished state of the display, this was a real treat. Goes a long way toward making up for the disappointment of Rangely and Gateway. 

This was a great day. We have nothing planned for tomorrow.

Waste Not ... uh ... something something

 So we had a "bonus week" available, a not-quite-free stay in a condo provided by the company that we book through sometimes for our annual Condo Week trips. There are some restrictions, mainly that we can only book a month and a half in advance. We've had this bonus week for almost 2 years, and have sat on it thinking that, eventually, we'd want to use it. Then Coronavirus showed up, and suddenly it's not something my wife is interested in.

We were going to let it go by the way -- it expires near the end of this month. Were we going to the Lake this October, like we usually do around the time of the Huntsman Games? Would I get to make another trip in the Sacramento Jag? Did I even want to? What about the dog? Things seemed to conspire against it, so we reconciled ourselves to the thought that it would go unused. The Huntsman Games were cancelled; Nancy, who usually meets us out at the Lake, had her schedule all disarranged by the virus; I injured my foot in Jackson this summer and my mobility is limited. All kinds of things were keeping the planning in flux, so finally I just decided: I was going to see what was available, and just go somewhere. 

Park City, Utah, is the choice I made. I contacted my old friend Curtis, who lives in Las Vegas; he and I have gone hiking every October for a few years, in conjunction with the Huntsman Games. I could collect him, we could go up to Park City, and spend a week in a condo doing whatever it is people do around Park City in October. I could be back in time for the rescheduled trip to the Lake in the second half of the month. I would get to take the convertible, I would get to visit the two remaining counties in Utah, I would get to go to the two car museums I wanted to see in remote parts of western Colorado, and we could have our traditional hike-and-kvetch trip. Hiking would be limited this year, because of my injury, but kvetching is undiminished by the pandemic. It'd be great.

Well, so far, it's only good. The drive out, on the freeway, was of course as boring as three days on the freeway can be (athough it was better on the third day, after I collected Curtis, who can make conversation). I spent the first night, Wednesday, in a dreary little mom-and-pop motel in Lordsburg, New Mexico. It seemed okay until I decided to take a shower, and found that there was no cold water available. And the hot water was really, really hot. Thursday night I was at the Strat, in Las Vegas. This is the hotel with the 1200' tower with an amusement park on the top. The room was reasonably priced, even with the "resort" fee, and I had a nice view toward the east from 20-something floors up.

sunrise from the hotel

I didn't see the amusement park, but I did go up to the bar for a look around. Vegas is a sleazy-looking place in the daytime, but at night it looks as exciting as everybody seems to think it is. Vibrant, colourful, flashy, as long as you don't look too close. Downstairs in the hotel there's the usual over-the-top casino, designed to disorient. I walked through it a few times on one quest or another, and managed to get lost almost every time.

In the morning, I loaded up the car in the parking garage (one of the reasons I picked this hotel is that they offer free parking in their garage) and headed out to get Curtis. When I got to his place and got out, I found two slashes, about 5 inches long, in my convertible top. I'm just guessing the work of the passenger in the white Toyota that parked next to me in the garage. So that free parking will turn out to be the most expensive parking I've ever had. 

The drive from Curtis's house to Park City is, according to Google Maps. a little less than six and a half hours. We managed to do it in about ten. I mention this because I don't know where all that extra time came from. I mean, I always manage to exceed Google Maps' estimates, because I don't quite go the speed limit usually, and I make a lot of stops along the way. But three and a half extra hours ... well, that may be some kind of record. 

I was really only concerned about it because I knew we'd have to check into the condo. But around 4:30 that afternoon, the condo office called my landline to give instructions on how to check in. Ain't it lucky, there was someone to hear the message. (Actually, there is a sign on the office window with a phone number to call for late check-in.) 

It being late and already dark, all we did Friday night was walk up the road to "downtown", about 8 blocks away. Lots of cars but not many people out; but all the restaurants were full and each had a few groups waiting for seating. We first located a place that would be showing the Aston Villa:Liverpool match on Sunday -- first things first -- and then turned our attention to somewhere for dinner. 

In the relentlessly trendy heart of Park City, we were unable to find any truly satisfyingly ordinary place to grab a light supper. We ended up at some overblown fusion place that may actually have a name, but the only thing that attracted us was the fact that there was nobody ahead of us in line for a table. The restaurant's virus protections were over the top (a good thing): the server who took our order was not allowed to touch anything on the table; they had designated employees going around collecting menus. When it was time to pay, they gave us a sanitizing towel for the credit card. Impressive. The food was good, and only moderately overpriced. The ambience was nice -- we sat outside, with a propane heater nearby to keep the slight chill at bay. 

Saturday, having verified on line that the car museum in Rangely, Colorado, was open from 10AM to 6PM, we went for breakfast in Heber City and then drove east. It's about three hours, each way, and included passing through one of the two counties I had yet to visit in Utah. The sky was clear, though oddly hazy at the edges when we left Park City. The route took us through national forest lands, with trees and rivers and reservoirs in the first half of the trip, and high desert after that. There is, I am always reminded, a stark beauty to desert landscape, and this trip was no exception. It was almost as colourful as the Painted Desert: greys and reds overtopping each other, browns dark and light, mountains in the distance ... except that there didn't seem to be any distance. In fact, throughout the day, the visible horizons got closer and closer, and the scent of wood smoke got stronger and stronger until the sun turned red at four in the afternoon. Ah! Fires out west! That explains it.

smoke from forest fires

So after our three-hour drive to Colorado, we pulled up in front of the Rangely Auto Museum. Which was closed.

feet on the ground: Kennedy Station

We had lunch in a little Italian place in town, then headed back through the smoke. I took a detour through the little community of Bonanza, Utah, just for the variety, and along the way we found a historical marker for Kennedy Station, a stage stop on the route between Vernal and the Dragon Mine.

 

 

sheep parade

 We also got stopped by a flock of sheep running across the road in single file on their way to a watering hole. After watching them for a few minutes I decided just to plow my way through, as there appeared to be about twenty minutes' worth of sheep yet to cross. They were still crossing when they went out of sight in my rearview mirror.

So now it's Sunday. Breakfast this morning was in a grill a few miles up the road. There aren't a lot of choices in this town. This place wasn't bad, but the service was ... uneven. Hint to waiters: when someone orders coffee, that should include cream, sugar, sweeteners, and a spoon. And when you refill the cup, it's best to stop pouring before pulling away. And even in a fancy-schmancy resort town like this, two dollars for a single slice of toast is too steep.

Well. So. Sunday noon and we head down to Main Street, where we earlier identified a bar that would have the Aston Villa:Liverpool match showing. That match proved to be a metaphor for this entire trip so far: exciting, engaging, intensely disappointing. Villa beat the Reds, 7:2. Sadness overwhelms.

But not for long. After the crushing defeat, we walk farther up Main Street to the top of the town, thinking of making a small hike to the Ontario Tunnel, which turns out to be a drainage culvert. Somehow that lacked appeal, so we went back down the hill a ways and found a shaded bench where we planned to do a little people-watching. That turned into hours and hours of people-watching, and so far that has been the best part of this trip.

This Year's Huntsman Trip Pictures Posted

The pictures for this year's trip to the Huntsman Games are up now. They include photos taken at Bisti Wilderness in New Mexico, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Capital Reef National Park, Utah. My favourites are the pics from Calf Creek Falls, the high point of a six-hour hike. Carly liked that part best, too.

Bisti Wilderness

Capital Reef

Devil's Garden

Calf Creek Falls

The 2015 Huntsman Trip

Fresh from my trip to Wisconsin in September, after a week of decompression (and laundry), the wife and I took off for Utah, where she was registered to play soccer in the annual Huntsman Games, a seniors' sports tournament with any number of different competitions. She has found herself a team out of Dallas (with a few stray members from Oregon --- don't ask me how that happened), and this is her second time in the competition. As we tend to do, we combined the trip with other, theoretically less strenuous, things.

We prepared for the trip by getting our new dog Carly medications to deal with motion sickness: she pukes when we drive. We had the same problem with our dog Homer, of beloved memory, but he grew out of it fairly quickly, and we hope Carly will, too. In fact, after two days of medication (during which she was somewhat listless, though not as drugged-out as Homer had been), we decided she didn't really need it all that much, at least on the highway; and indeed, after that she only threw up once, in city traffic. So I guess it's not the motion so much as the unanticipated stops, starts and turns that upset her.

Study in Black and White

We spent the first night in Alamogordo, at a barely-acceptable motel in the run-down part of town, then went out early to White Sands. I had been there a couple of years ago, both in the afternoon and the morning, and am still amazed at the differences in the light there. But this time, sadly, the sky was heavily overcast, so the pictures aren't as eyepopping as they were back then. But doesn't Carly look good in that landscape!

De-Na-Zin

From there, we drove up toward Farmington, in the northwest corner of the state, stopping at Bisti (or De-Na-Zin) Wilderness. (Not sure why the two names.) Not an easy place to find: county roads, some unpaved, and almost no signage. The wilderness area stretches some miles across an Indian reservation, and photos I've seen of it make it look like a spectacular landscape. We, however, were (it appears) at the other end of the wilderness area, which was nowhere near as eerie. Pretty, but not up to expectations. In any case, storms were coming in from the west, so we spent only a short time hiking in the stark desert valley.

the other end of the Wilderness
(photo from Roadtrippers.com)

and there's a rainbow, too!

Next morning we were off early again, and happened to be at Shiprock, New Mexico, just as the sun was hitting the eponymous rock. 

Sherry waving from the promontory
Natural Bridges NP

From there, we went up to Natural Bridges National Park, one of the older parks in Utah. There are three main natural bridge formations in the rock --- rock that is far, far older than at Arches, and not as colourful, but still impressive. We found a trail to one that didn't look too strenuous, but there were ladders along the way that we couldn't traverse with Carly. So we took turns: I waited with the dog while Sherry hiked out to the viewpoint, about twenty minutes' trek each way, then I went while she waited. (There was another trail that led down to the actual bridge, but that was much, much longer and about a 600' drop.) By the time we got to the last bridge site, those storms were about to hit again, so we went for the car and headed off to Torrey, Utah, the other side of Capitol Reef, for the night. I had planned originally to spend time at Cap Reef, but we decided that it was better to spend more time exploring Natural Bridges instead. We'll have to go back to Cap Reef (again) some day --- after all, that was what prompted me to buy an off-road-capable vehicle in the first place --- but other than a drive through it on the flooded highway, we didn't see any of it.

I had, of course, no intention of spending 3 days watching old women play soccer again --- after Escondido, I probably never will --- so I had arranged for my friend Curtis to come up from Las Vegas, and he and I went up to Bryce Canyon for a little hiking. We got to the park in the afternoon, checked into our hotel, and after a really, really bad lunch at a really crappy local fast-food joint -- the only place we could find -- we went into the park and hiked the Queen's Garden trail, so called because there's a rock that looks like a well-known statue of Queen Victoria. And it really does. 

Next morning we drove over to the optimistically named town of Tropic, Utah, and hiked into the canyon on the trail from there, a good morning's travel, during which I was confirmed in my opinion that Carly is not a good hiker's companion. Yet. Maybe when she's older.

That night, Curtis having returned to his digs in the Sin Capital of America and I to my hotel in Hurricane, Utah, we went to a team dinner at a really nice restaurant on a cliff overlooking the small city of St. George, where the Huntsman Games are held. Wish I could remember the name of it. On Saturday, Sherry's team won the Silver Medal in the women's over-60 soccer tournament, and we headed down the road to Havasu for a week's visit with her dad Ben and his wife Lana. 

When they bought the house out there, they brought the boat out from Phoenix, and bought a pair of waverunners and a rail (sort of a dune-buggy), so I was looking forward to some novel and exciting activities. But one of the waverunners had been sold, as junk apparently, and the rail had a flat tire and no clutch, which left one waverunner and the

London Bridge

boat. And of course the first few days were spent just visiting, though Sherry got her exercise by digging a trench in the back yard for electric lines going out to the gazebo her dad had put in. (I helped a little, just to have something to do besides walk and go take pictures of London Bridge.) Finally came the day when we took the surviving waverunner down to the lake and put it in. I took a couple of rides on it. It's fun, but would be more fun if somebody else could have come along. It's like a motorcycle, but with a soft landing when you fall off. (I didn't.) I'd do it again, but living where I live I don't see much point in owning one (or two). That part of Lake Havasu, slightly south of the bridge, isn't very crowded, at least on weekdays, but there were enough kids on loud machines churning doughnuts in the no-wake zone to keep me irritated.

Fritz and Carly

Carly had the best time of her short life in Havasu, since Ben & Lana have a puppy -- a giant puppy -- about her age, named Fritz. They kept each other entertained the entire tie we were there.

We were going to take the boat out the next day, but the weather called for thunderstorms, so that was out; and the day after that, when we actually got some lightning (though not much else). And after that, we headed home.

To find a giant crack in our bedroom ceiling. It collapsed today. Ain't life grand.

Beginning of the End of the Road

What that means

Our last day in the condo in Birch Bay was a quiet one; I went up into the town, such as it is, to have lunch with the Church Lady and the Perfesser (Buttermilk didn't want to go). We picked a place called CJ's Beach House, with a deck overlooking the bay; we chose it just because of that deck, and because, well, there aren't a whole lot of options in the little shoreline community of Birch Bay. As it happened, the place wasn't bad. The food was good with the exception of the shrimp used to top the seafood salad; they were small, cold, limp cocktail shrimp, so if I were to ever go back I'd order something else. But the service was very good and the ambience, featuring the bay across the road (with almost no traffic), was superior.

After that, we went back and fetched Buttermilk and forced her to indulge in some ice cream from the C-Store in town, then dragged her up to the little miniature golf place for a round. (I won't mention who won; I've already taken all the bows I'm going to take.)

In the evening, the Perfesser mentioned that he wanted to try something called a "poutine," which we had seen on menus in a number of places. It was described as french fries covered with sausage gravy, and he thought, repulsive as that sounded, that we ought to at least try it. After all, we wouldn't go to Delaware and not try scrapple, would we? We recalled, perhaps incorrectly, that Bob's Burgers & Brew in Ferndale had had it on their menu, so we went to the Bob's location in Birch Bay ... which didn't have it. Not only did they not offer it, the hostess wasn't entirely sure what it was. "Is that that Canadian thing with the gravy? Yeah, we don't have that." Ah, well, so we have at least one thing in Canada to look forward to besides the 2015 Women's World Cup.

What that means

(The Birch Bay location of Bob's Burgers & Brew was nothing special: I opted for a New York steak, which was a mediocre cut served slightly overcooked and, all things considered, slightly overpriced by local standards, and, it naturally follows, grossly offensive to the sense of value honed in south Texas.)

Then it was back to the condo for a last round of margaritas.

Morning comes, and off we go. On the way down to Sea-Tac, we stopped off at Burlington in response to the powerful and ineluctable call of Lafeen's Donuts. This time, it looked like hundreds of people had read and believed my previous post, as the display cases were stripped nearly bare. I could not, therefore, get an exquisitely light French cruller, nor a thick, fruity apple fritter; but had to settle, regrette rien, for a chocolate-dipped old fashioned doughnut and a blueberry fritter. (It's been almost a week and writing this makes me think of contacting them to enquire about a care package.)

Then it was down to the long-term parking where I'd stored my little convertible during the Group Tour. A quick goodbye to Church Lady and the Perfesser (because by now the rental charges on the anemic Rogue were accruing hourly), then throw our stuff in the Roller Skate, and we're off for home, the long way.

The first order of business was lunch, which we had at Las Palmas, a Salvadoran restaurant just down the street from the parking lot, where I had eaten a pretty good breakfast two Sundays before. Salvadoran food is similar in many ways to Mexican food, of course, but with a tropical twist that makes it identifiably different, certainly from the Tex-Mex variety that's so common in my home town, and from the more exotic varieties that are available in many places in south Texas. My own experience with Salvadoran restaurants back home is limited -- I can only think of two that I've been to, though I've been also to Honduran and Costa Rican restaurants, which I think are indistinguishable in any meaningful way from Salvadoran cuisine.

What that means

Our lunch wasn't quite as good as that breakfast, but it wasn't bad. I had a spinach papusa and a papusa revuelta (if memory serves): beans, beef and cheese on a thick, pillowy tortilla. Both were ordinary-good, neither was exceptional in any way. Overall the place was good enough to recommend but not good enough to recommend heartily ... except that it was cheap. And when I compare the prices I've seen around Seattle to the prices I'm used to around San Antonio, I think Las Palmas is an excellent place for lunch.

N.B.: Las Palmas appears now to be out of business (2020).

By the time we got to the freeway after lunch, we had discerned that the air-conditioning in the car wasn't working. That's not a big deal, I suppose, in Seattle, even in August, but we had six days in the desert southwest ahead of us. In fact, the drive across eastern Washington was looking like it would be hellish. But first, we decided on a stop at Snoqualmie Falls, it being a beautifully clear day, and much cooler up in the mountains.

After all the build-up to Snoqualmie Falls -- it was on the list of Things To See four years ago, and again two weekends before, and I never managed to get up there -- you would think a curmudgeon like me would have been disappointed. I wasn't. It is a beautiful waterfall, in a nice setting, with a pleasant lodge above it and not really all that many people for a magnificent summer Friday near a big city. In fact, I wish it had been another day, when I didn't have to get back in the car and head on down the road. It would've been real nice to have spent more time there.

We drove, top down, across eastern Washington. Boy, was that a mistake. Generally, my rule is this: if it's not raining, the top will be down if the temperature is more than 70 and less than 94; between 55 and 70, and between 94 and 97, it depends on other factors; but at 55 or less, and 97 or more, the top will be up. But then, I usually have air conditioning. Not this time, so I left the top down even though it got to 103, and nary a cloud in the sky. (Some smoke from the continuing wildfires, but that hardly qualifies as the silver lining in that particular cloud.)  So when we pulled into Baker City, Oregon, we were a little crispy around the edges. (After that, no matter the temperature, if the sun was up, so was the top.)

Baker City is a charming little community in eastern Oregon, once a stop on the Oregon Trail, later

Geiser Grand Hotel

(and still) a center for local agriculture. In the 1880s, it was prosperous enough to have a landmark hotel, the Geiser Grand, which was renovated about 20 years ago and returned to its former glory. I don't usually stay in such luxury, being too cheap to throw much money at a place to be unconscious; but every now and then I like to splurge, and in all honesty it wasn't really that much -- about what you'd expect to pay in a Hilton Garden Inn (which I'd never stay in, given a choice) or a Marriott. For the price we got an elegant room with a king-sized bed, a 14-foot ceiling and huge bathroom. The kind of hotel where they have embroidered bathrobes hanging there for your use. Not quite the Plaza, but beats the hell out of any Hilton Garden Inn.  Outstanding service, too, except in the bar.

twilight in Baker City

It was just coming sunset when we arrived, and it was First Friday, when this surprisingly arty little town has its monthly gallery walk. There were rumblings of distant thunder and not many people on the streets, but the several galleries in the town's Historical District around our hotel had a number of patrons in them, and enough interesting artworks visible through large windows that I would have been happy to browse among for a few hours -- but it was already pretty late and we were hot and tired and in need of a drink, so we passed on all the galleries and just strolled down to the one tall building in town, around that block to the courthouse, and back to the hotel bar. Then we retired to our room and slept the sleep of the exhausted cattle baron.

compare this to May 2013

We had no specific plans for the next day, except to get to Panguitch, Utah, so as to be within striking distance of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. That didn't stop us, though, from taking time to see Shoshone Falls, in Twin Falls, Idaho. I had been there a year ago on the Western Circuit (an excellent trip that, I'm surprised to discover, I wrote nothing about; though I posted lots of pictures), and was as impressed as any yokel by the massive amount of water cascading over the cliff. That was in May, though; in August, it's not quite the same experience. Still nice, pretty, unexpected in such a desert, but not awesome.

There aren't a whole lot of towns in Utah south of Salt Lake, but Panguitch, a town I stayed in with a friend a couple of years ago, is a pleasant little town with almost all the motels in Southern Utah (it being 20 miles from Bryce Canyon and close also to Zion National Park, Cedar Breaks, Grand Staircase-Escalante, Capitol Reef, and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon). It also has at least one good restaurant, the Cowboy's Smoke House. (Don't get the brisket; it was dry two years ago and is still dry, but the sausage is very good and the pulled pork is outstanding. So is the service. The prices are reasonable but they only take cash. They're open, and packed, until 10.)

What that means

In the morning, we headed for the Grand Canyon. We had breakfast at the unexpected Bäkerei Forscher in Orderville, Utah. What is a high-quality German bakery doing out in the rural wilds of the Colorado Plateau? Well, obviously, they're doing a successful business, judging from (a) the big, clean, sparkling new building beside the highway and (b) the display cases that looked like everyone in Utah had been there that morning before us. From what was left, Buttermilk had a nice rhubarb streuseltaler, moist with a nice crunchy topping; while I had a vanileshiffen, which had a very good cream filling inside a slightly dry bread shell (which made it perfect for dunking). The prices were not as high as at similar snooty bakeries back home. The counter help, which may or may not have been German, was a little vague in replies to my enquiries about their offerings, so I gave up. (Besides, I didn't really want to know about the pastries, I wanted to eat them.)

(This is getting too long for most people to bother with reading, so I'll break it off here and continue it on another post.)

On the Road Again

Back on the road for five days now, a different state every night. We left home Saturday, after depositing Homer at Doggy Camp (because he's just not fat enough) and headed west on ... ugh ... the freeway as far as Fort Stockton; then went north through Carlsbad and Roswell to Albuquerque, where we had a short visit with my old friend Kilby, who recently moved back there from Pennsylvania. Next morning, up the road to Colorado (completing, incidentally, New Mexico on my County Count, not that that matters). I decided I'd planned too much driving for Sunday, so instead of going up to Pagosa Springs, we went into Colorado at Durango, then up the San Juan Skyway through Silverton and Ouray (where we had lunch at Billy Goat Gruff's Biergarten, with good local beer and reasonably good German food), then around the mountain to the entrance to the canyon where Telluride lies. We stopped at a place called Keystone Overlook and decided not to go into Telluride, which is just another quaint mountain resort town. Instead, we headed south and spent a good chunk of the afternoon touring Mesa Verde.

The Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde N.P.

The entrance road to Mesa Verde National Park is one of the most dramatic drives I've ever made. You start on the plateau; ahead of you is a mesa jutting out from the higher plateau, maybe 900 or 1000 feet high. The road into the park loops into the canyon east of the promontory, then rises in a series of switchbacks until you're up on the higher plateau. From the top you can see a hundred miles, to the mountains we had been in earlier that day. 

The visitors' center is fifteen miles from the park entrance. (I had no idea just how big these western parks are.) There you can arrange a place on a guided tour of several of the primary cliff-dwellings; we opted for the 5pm tour of the Cliff Palace, the largest collection of ruins in the park (which, I believe, is the largest collection of such ruins in the world). Another five miles took us to the place, where we waited on an overlook for the rest of our tour and our guide.

We, it turned out, were the entire 5pm tour, so we ended up with a private tour by Ranger Jo, a woman in her 70s who humped up and down the steep trail like a mountain goat. She pointed out a stand of wireweed and had us taste it; this was, according to her, the only "salad" the indians had. In the spring, she says, it tastes like celery; this time of year it's similar but bitter.

Ranger Jo has been around Mesa Verde a long time, and knows the history of the park from a personal point of view. That made for an interesting and occasionally idiosyncratic tour, which we enjoyed thoroughly; though I could have done with fewer reports of conversations she's had with "Grandfather," a Pueblo Indian of her acquaintance who is her primary source on points of culture. I don't know the man, but from what she told us, he is pompous about Pueblo culture to the point of arrogance, or maybe just utterly ignorant of the culture of the white people around him. (Thinking about it reminds me of a line I heard from some woman doing stand-up on the Comedy Channel: "Somebody called me a racist. That's awful. That's an awful thing to say. That's worse than calling somebody a Mexican.") Anyway, we had a nice hour-long tour and then were on our own. We drove around the park, stopping here and there to get out and see various ruins in the canyons that cover the park.

Monday morning we stopped briefly at Four Corners, a dusty third-world outpost on the Navajo reservation where four states come together. We took the obligatory photographs of ourselves standing if four states at once, had a nice chat with a couple of the stray dogs, and left. 

The road west was under construction. There were crews doing resurfacing work along 100-yard-long stretches of highway, but they closed miles-long sections down to one lane to accommodate them, requiring additional personnel to drive the pilot cars. These drivers were also, apparently, in charge of passing on gossip to flagmen along the way, as we had several times to wait while our pilot exchanged pleasantries. Judging from the body language, he's an amusing conversationalist.

The road took us to Monument Valley, another Navajo tribal park. This one seemed much more developed on the way in, but the paved entrance and modern visitors' center and hotel proved to be just window dressing. The loop road that takes you down among the many fabulously-shaped buttes is not intended for passenger cars. (They don't tell you that at the gate, though the woman issuing our tickets was nice enough to suggest that we might want to put the top up.) The road is rocks and sand, more suited to a beat-up old Land Cruiser than a passenger car, and while I didn't bottom out, I had to attend so closely to choosing my path along this poorly-made roadway that I couldn't enjoy the scenery at all while we were moving. (I've seen better roads in the Congo.) After we'd gone about a third of the way down this 17-mile road, I decided that, since we'd already seen the major sites -- Elephant Butte, Camel Butte, the Mittens, the Three Sisters and one that looked for all the world like Droopy Dawg -- that I'd had enough, and we turned back. And got stuck in the sand.

In the Visitors' Center there's a panel talking about the creation of the park back in the 1950s, over the objection of some of the tribe. The argument that carried the day, it seems, was that if they put in a park it would keep white folk out of the rest of the Res. Every bump and rut in this pathetic road made it clear: they don't really want people to come visit. So, now that I've seen it, I'll never have to go back to the Navajo reservation. And now that I've seen Arches National Park, I won't much miss it. It ain't nothin' in comparison.

Landscape Arch

Arches National Park is one of those places that has to be seen to be believed. We got to the park around 5pm, and after a stop at Park Avenue, a line of impossibly thin vertical rock slabs like skyscrapers lining a city street, and Balanced Rock, we drove to Devil's Garden, at the farthest end of the park, and hiked out to Landscape Arch. This gossamer rock vault is three hundred feet long, and looks like a stiff breeze would topple it. I had seen it pictured on a magnet in the Visitors' Center, and thought afternoon would be the best time to get pictures of it. We were going to go back to the park early the next morning to get photos of other sites.

Unfortunately, Landscape Arch is situated so that by evening it's pretty much in the shade, as you can see. Morning would have been better. Oh, well. But the next morning we went to the Delicate Arch Viewpoint, a climb of about 200 feet from the parking area. To get to the arch itself would have been twice as high a climb and three times as long a hike, so we decided not to do it. Instead we went to the areas called The Garden of Eden and The Windows, both of which were stunning no matter which way you look.

Leaving Arches yesterday morning, we drove across Utah, along one of the better freeway drives in the country -- Interstate 70 across the unusual landscape of the San Rafael Uplift -- and then onto US 50, into the Great Basin. Four years ago I had gone to the Great Basin National Park Visitors' Center to get a passport stamp, but arrived fifteen minutes after closing. My intention in planning the day's drive had simply been to try again for a stamp -- there didn't seem to be any big attraction at the park, which seems to exist only for people who like to hike and fish and stuff. But on arriving in time to get the all-important passport stamp, I found that there's a drive that goes up to view the glacier on the side of Mount Wheeler, and the ranger said it only took about 45 minutes to get up there. It was early enough in the day, so we made the drive.

I'd never seen a glacier before. Now that I've seen one, I'd kind of like to see a real one. Technically I suppose it is a glacier, this paltry patch of white stuff on the north face of the mountain, but it's hardly the kind of thing we southern boys envision when we hear the word "glacier," which usually occurs in the context of grinding out landscape for huge lakes and mountains. This thing hardly seemed adequate for two pitchers of margaritas. Guess I'll have to go to Alaska sooner than planned.

Last night we stayed in Ely, Nevada, an unimpressive little town an hour from the Great Basin park; today we drove across Nevada on US 50 (which Life Magazine once dubbed "America's Loneliest Road," recommending against driving it "unless you're confident of your skills." I guess it's been improved significantly since then, as it's a pretty good road, even through the many mountain ranges it crosses) and are now holed up for two nights in South Lake Tahoe, California. I'm really, really, really looking forward to a day of rest.