I’m back. Some people questioned our trip planning with incredulity, thinking if you centered your week-long stay in California you can’t possibly skip out on the big cities and the “night life”. I say screw that. That state is under-appreciated for its state parks, a fact I will gladly attest with panoramic pictures once I’m done processing them. For the time-being, I compiled a travel log of things we saw and did in a grueling trek filled with highs and lows.

Friday: After work, we drove the 3 hours from San Antonio to Laredo to meet up at the in-laws’ house.

Saturday: We woke bright and early to take the flight over to Las Vegas. Lost Wages?!Yes. It’s not my kind of town, but it was situated very nicely in the middle of our circuit of the travel plan to the surrounding area. Laredo baggage check confiscated my sunscreen and bugspray, but other than that we were clear for a smooth flight. From the air, it was surprisingly clean and well organized! Hoover Dam and the lake/river water looked incredibly curvy and interesting and blue and the communities were uncrowded and smartly arranged. We rented a car and had no problem taking a Mazda Speed 6 mistakenly when we had reserved an economy-type car. (Serves them right for not mentioning the extra money from insurance on the web site.) Walking the Hoover dam was first on the list, so we drove on over in less than a couple hours and checked it out. We didn’t stay long however, as the crowds were swarming and we were eager to get some of the major driving out of the way towards the Grand Canyon.

We stopped a couple of times for burgers and a cooler/drinks (we flew light) and burned some more time in Flagstaff at a Walmart where we picked up some electronics supplies. The air was crisp, cool, and nice but even so, the night spent in our car waiting for the Grand Canyon park to open was the most miserable I’ve had in a while and definitely the worst night of the trip. We didn’t bring camping supplies and didn’t check into a park, so the low-glow of a quiet town lulled us into a squirmy, fitful night of what could have been like 2 hours of sleep at best. The stars were out and incredibly bright, bathing everything in awful, yet pretty, light that kept me awake despite my best efforts. We had to “rough it” when nature called, to Sue’s chagrin.

Sunday: A very groggy and filthy early rise left us with plenty of time to wait for the sun to peak over the canyon. The gate to the massive earthen pit was wide open so we went on in and staked a spot amidst all the Japanese tourists and gushing teenagers. My green “army” jacket was all that kept my knees from knocking together it was so cold. But when the sun sloooowly crested the canyon, the sleepiness was well worth it. We stalked some deer near the parking lot and jumped in the car for an already tired journey west. The mojave desert wasn’t kind, but our second trip across it still wasn’t the worst by far. It was scenic, still dry, with way more shrubs than I had been expecting. Traveling past L.A., the weariness of the drive really started to set in, eyes heavy and a bit of the paranoid delirium. The heat compressed the “icky” feeling of being unwashed although I was too dry to perspire.

Had a nice run-in with some dumbshit border patrol guard at the California line who gave me flak. He asked where we came from  and I said we had flown in and driven from Vegas, which he declared was the direction I was going, not where I was from. My TomTom, iPad, and Roadmap disagreed, and depicted plenty of streets heading in a sheared direction from the northerly Las Vegas, but I let it go. Bakersfield occurred, and I was already squirming pretty bad in that dustbowl of an area, having had to drape towels on my arms to prevent  a pre-mature sunburn this early on in the trip. An environmental shift began and we became amused by how much of California is outright dedicated to agriculture: huge crops of various vegetables and yellow/brown dunes of brush. Joshua trees are the weirdest thing if you’re not used to them. They had a lot of pretty cultivation on the way to a little town outside of our destination, where we checked into Visalia, our motel stinking of garbage and wastewater, an oasis to our tired and filthy bodies. I took a 5 hour “nap”, bathed, and fell asleep once more.

Monday: We didn’t have far to go, but we took the winding path up into the mountains for our first of two nights at the Great Sequoia National park. The surrounding land looked so much like pictures of Italy that I was surprised when the mountainous terrain broke in and astounded me with trees wide enough to drive cars through. We spent about an hour going up and around, back and forth, left and right, snaking our way up to our campsite past the areas shrouded in a layer of dirt from the construction sites on the two lane roads. The grounds were labeled “Full” but we asked anyways, easily landing the best damn spot in the park. We were situated between our car and the creek, a secluded area near trails and more. Too bad we didn’t have a tent…. just a bear locker to store all of the crackers, cookies, peanuts, and cereal we had decided to pick up and munch on.

I believe this first day we checked out a bunch of trails into the heart of the Sequoia forests, which were even more impressive than the ones we’d seen towering above the road (you could pass the same tree like three times going up). They’re massive, like upside down carrots with little “twigs” poking out of each side near the top. Apparently they’re 3000+ years old and have immense fire damage that would eat away at their bases, leaving plenty of room to get in real snug and look inside. We saw the General Sherman and the Sentinel, along with all manner of cool formations they made whenever a group of them grew in close proximity. We checked out the creek and dipped our feet, climbed up Big Baldy, which was a large domed rock that overlooks a gigantic valley. And then there was the black bear. We were just literally hanging out on a fallen tree, a stone’s throw from camp, when I heard a grunting sound. The damn thing was easily 25 feet away and technically closer to camp than we were. We had been researching the hell out of these things to prepare for the maulings, but it honestly didn’t seem to care or pay us any mind. Sue was out of sight so I told her to run and me, I started backing away…. until my dumb self decided to hop up on the log and start snapping pictures. I got a few before I decided to make a break for it, the log separating us as the bear continued to pace up and down the creek. We even saw another one up in the hilly area BEHIND our camp, right before we saw a guy with an iPad out trailing the damn thing until I couldn’t follow them because of the forest occlusion.

Tuesday: Another terrible night in the car, but getting better. Temperatures made me miserable and my contacts were acting up already. Still, we managed to squeeze in some trails and another bear encounter. This time, a Japanese woman walked towards us on the trail and said, “There’s a DEER ahead.” We’d had deer creep up behind us all day earlier, but wildlife is wildlife. A huddled throng of people were oohing and aahing over a little brown furry lump that kind of sauntered literally across a little meadow in the mountains. I thought: Bambi, cool. Suelynn sneaks up for some snapshots when she gives me a horrified look. “It’s a BEAR and its mama!”, she whispers as we hurry away. Fuck those idiot tourists. They knew exactly what it was.

We were starting to feel the energy draining us, but the park manages to nickel and dime you on anything from cell phone calls (no reception) to showers. We had bought a couple of 6 dollar burgers (just the burgers) before we decided that the Crystal Caverns we heard about near the grounds just weren’t worth it. For whatever reason, you can’t buy the tickets at the caverns but rather at the camp lodge, so we checked with them and the service was too snippy to constitute any more expenditures. Nothing beats the formations of Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico anyways, we told ourselves.  We’d sacrificed this day (which was originally intended for exploring Yosemite National Park) for more of the Sequoias because the waterfalls were dry in the other park, but a day of rest seemed to fit the bill just fine. I had come back and the neighbors had stolen my bought cedarwood, but after that misunderstanding was cleared up I was then cleared for a nap on the bench, lulled by the flowing waters and perfect mountain air. That night, we finished up the s’mores [a purchased kit] and took some terrible pictures of the night sky, one of the most distinct views of the stars I had ever had.

Wednesday: We got the hell out of there. It was so pleasant, but I was starting to realize the amount of driving I’d signed myself up for. The whole trip was around 2000 miles and we were at or around the mid-way marker with a deadline to be on the flight from Vegas on Saturday at 8:30am. Today however we were heading further west, stopping at a Jack in the Box for some amount of familiarity. More beautiful and unexpected panoramas were in store whenever we rolled up on an above-sea-level man-made lake, me endangering myself even more-so as I flitted across traffic with bad contacts and the wife’s camera. This didn’t even compare to the hazards I would later experience in parking along the road up to 20 times along the west coast of California. We had hit the Pacific Ocean somewhere north of Monterrey and found ourselves driving further and further south as the fog was created and rolled up and over the steep cliffs with the rocky beaches below. So scenic. The air was unbelievably fresh and nearly knocked me back as it blew UP in elevation, across the road and scaling the ridges.

This is about the time we started seeing the god damn cyclists, the recklessly hopeless deathwishes on wheels, every one of them. We headed south to Julia Pfeiffer cove (sans waterfall) and marvelled at the breath-taking view before turning around and went back towards San Francisco. The iPad was super useful for finding the least expensive motels but, oddly enough, these coincided with the sleaziest, ugliest little dives I didn’t dare step foot into. Curious, no? I walked out on some dude who tried to rent me a room that opened into a back alley-way, but we found a reasonably clean spot with which to recuperate. The sun was blinding in the little carnival area on the coast, 30 minutes south of San Francisco as we turned in early, polishing off a lot of the finger foods before crashing into slumber.

Thursday: Why wait if you can get into traffic early? San Francisco proper was a god-damned mess. Sure, there’s plenty of interesting topography. The houses are pressed so close you couldn’t walk between them, rows and rows of interestingly artsy decorations, themselves. The colors were varied and you could “feel” the culture between the “granola people” and the fishing villages. But the traffic. We finally managed to cross the Golden Gate bridge, but it was nearly impossible to tell since a dense and unrelenting fog continuously flowed in over it (but nothing else)! We made it to the other side and were a little dejected as we stared out over the bay. We could see Alcatraz and the admittedly cool cityscape, but the bridge we were feet from was shrouded in terrestrial clouds.

We decided to abandon the pools of tourists and check out the Redwood National Forest which was immediately north. We saw nothing. Other trees looked so small after the trip to Great Sequoia that it wasn’t feasible to search for a place to park, get out, and walk miles to get to the entrance of the thing so we doubled back a few times to enjoy the awesome view afforded outside of the paid areas. There are way too many bikers in that city and the surrounding area, enough to never let you relax at the wheel, but it was the infuriating motorcyclists who jetted in-between parked vehicles that really got to me. We navigated to a spot overlooking the clouded bridge with the city in the back, as seen by those in my photos section. Amazing stuff. Later, The Palace of Fine Arts was a surprisingly impressive reproduction of a Greek amphitheater and the Pier 39 was as expected. Expensive. Crowded. We actually played it smart by being dumb and had gone down the wrong pier, allowing us to see all of the seals across the water without having to rub elbows with other tourists. Pretty sweet. A few dollars got our car back out of the spot where it sat for 15 minutes and we entered the exiting traffic, another 3 hours and a ORDER-ONLY pizza shop away from getting back on the main highway towards Vegas. Sue was a trooper, and drove us all the way to Bakersfield where we stayed at another smelly motel, but this time it stunk on the inside. Somehow it offended even me, though half my nostrils work. It was nice to finally lay down, however.

Friday: We began the painful journey back across the mojave desert once again, this time only half the distance since the freeway curved towards Las Vegas instead of straight across to the Canyon (and the dumbass border guard). Christ Almighty it was hot. 118 degrees to be exact if one doesn’t add a few degrees on the car’s thermometer due to the cooling effect of moving. To compound the temperature situation, we saw signs instructing us to turn off the AC to reduce the strain on the engine, thus reducing the chances of an overheat. The rental had 5000 miles on it when we had first started, but we did so anyways, miserable cars and their miserable drivers sprawled out next to call boxes being the only motivation to follow the signs. I believe I even saw an ambulance rush to one of them.

Once there, Las Vegas no longer had the “fresh” impression anymore. Instead, what I saw was cracked stucco buildings with a weather-beaten resilience. The “replica” buildings of pyramids and such were all nice and good, but things like a fake castle I saw and others had that kind of “realistic clarity” that you get when the sun dawns as you sober up, where cracks and textures become all too evident. I dunno. We had a full 16 hours to kill, but we ended up eating a strange garden pizza and “the Gotham” pie at a little dive with a ’50’s cafe’ theme before retreating to the airport and trying to get comfortable. We couldn’t even check in with our airline until it was “only” 4 hours from departure so we tried to settle in for the long haul instead of exploring. I blew 15 dollars on penny slots right there in the airport, just to say that I had gambled and lost in Lost Wages but surprisingly, that killed a few hours as I sat there pressing the button over-and over-and over with a single row bet (1 penny each) as I calculated the math and probability of the inner-workings of the machine. The odds are clearly against you. People came and went, blowing bills left and right but the only winner was the one-armed bandit (though I believe I saw a guy win 300 bucks on one of the 5 dollar machines).

Saturday Morning: We had taken turns guarding our stuff (the 15 inch pine cone from the national parks included), sleeping whenever possible as we curled up in a corner near the bathrooms, disturbed by anybody and everybody who sat next to us. Our flight went without a hitch if you don’t include the belligerent passengers whom are willfully ignorant. We rested for the weekend with the in-laws and finally walked in the door of our own home to a very happy cat named Dusty.

I’m not much of a traveler, but I’d like to think that the whole thing was well worth the exhaustion and expenditures. National monuments just can’t be substituted and it was the “little” things on this trip like a giant golf ball somewhere in the mojave that stand out to me as the mental landmarks of that week. Or was it a mirage? A testament to endurance and a truly unique set of days, the Vacation 2012 came to an end with a different mindset than we had started with. I really think that’s the point though: pushing yourself with bizarre and taxing trials so that you are practically begging to come home to the familiar, to the job, back to the grind. If that truly is the purpose, this vacation certainly did just that. I loved the trees and the air, the landscape and the cityview, but ultimately I found most solace whenever I made my way back and drooped heavily in a chair at our house, throwing the keys down and picking the game controller up. I’ve got the memories to prove that life has variety and I’ve got the photos to prove that I was there. Thankfully, we made it back safely and are primed for another trip…. give or take a year of course.