Saturday, August 14, 2010

Take-aways from the trip:

-Indiana only has corn going for it. Never have I seen so many dead animals anywhere, including two deer on the side of a road less than a mile apart.

-Butterflies are beautiful, but dumb animals. Hopefully Darwin helps them avoid the highways in the future. Things found on the hood included queen ants, lady bugs, a cicada, small flies/ unidentifiable flying things, butterflies, bees, moths, and more butterflies

- Never leave Moab, UT with less than half a tank of gas.

-Denver was named by mistake for a former governor of Kansas, and was almost called Wyoming instead.

-We hauled farmer-john’s wife’s watermelon for half of the trip. We never figured out if it was from Kansas or Missour-ah. But it was a delicious finishing prize.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Day 10 - DURHAM!

We're finally in DURHAM!!!!!!!

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Day 9 – Baking in Alexandria, VA

Alex has always been told by his mom "just take 395" to get to his house in Alexandria. Foolproof right? Well it just so happened that 395 had been closed and DC would rather have you play the 395 detour scavenger hunt than take the time to thoughtfully plan construction on its already maze-like freeway system.

We’re here. Woot.

Monday, August 9, 2010

Day 8 – Bryd’s WV Pork Barrel: Appalachian Highway System

The Appalachian (ahh-chians, not ay-shins mind you Californians) Highway is one of the most beautiful in the country, with tremendous views from the steep and windy roads and wild-flowers all over. Too bad only 4 of us could enjoy it since it just seemed like a giant piece of pork barrel for WV. Thank you Senator Byrd!

We would also like to thank Google Maps for directing us to this scenic route that took us deep into the heart of WV. Google says it's the shortest road but I have a feeling that the interstates might have been a little faster... We got to drive through some quaint small towns and right up next to Seneca Rocks.

Other things to note about WV is that the English there is akin to that of the beginning of Deliverance and that you apparently take your house with you when you move.

Day 7 – From Louis the Saint to Louis the Village to West Virginia

Now here’s something nice to say about St. Louis, because Bambi’s mother would be very angry at us bitter bloggers. The Arch. That’s it. Despite efforts of residents and city officials to brand their city as much more than the holding ground for the Gateway Arch, we insist that there is really not much else to see. There’s a cool (and frightening for Alex) ride in cramped pods to get to the top. Once up there, there’s really not much to note except that the arch casts a very cool shadow.

Arriving in Louisville was a relief, especially since it meant that we got to socialize with outside life for the first time in days. Rebecca’s cousin and Mike showed us the cool side of Louisville, which neither traveler wanted to leave. What’s wrong with good food and cheap rent in funky old houses? So the 15-minute stop turned into a coffee and dinner event. Thanks for putting up with us guys.


Then we decided we’d try pulling an all-nighter to get to Alexandria. Somewhere around the KY/WV state line, we changed our mind and wanted to crash the night at the "Welcome to West Virginia" rest stop. Our fears got the better of us so we drove into Huntington: "We are Marshall!" to look for cheap lodging. Since we're almost to Alexandria, we allowed ourselves to sleep in and had an Indian buffet for breakfast. As we were leaving we drove by southern frat houses. The old guys chilling on the porch outside of Kappa Alpha Order were "we're going to lynch someone" creepy.

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Day 6 – KS and MO

Woke up in Lawrence and made the drive out to KCMO so that we can get some famous KS BBQ! But before we let our hungry selves pig out, we checked out what was supposedly North America's 2nd largest train station: Union Station and the WWI memorial right across the street. The train station was pretty impressive and had an awesome model train exhibit! :) and well the WWI memorial was kinda depressing but we got views of KS and all of its greenery from the top of the tower there.

Now.. the BBQ: it was tasty! :) We hit the joint (Arthur Bryant's) right around lunchtime on a Saturday afternoon. But the wait was good, b/c there were so many BBQ items on the menu that we didn't know what to get and everything looked too good! We ended up getting ribs and chicken with sides of potato salad and baked beans! MMMMMM! There were 3 different BBQ sauces for you to try out as well. And before we left KCMO, we checked out the farmers mkt on the ethnic side of town and picked up a KS? MO? watermelon from Farmer John's wife. Personal sized for Alex and Rebecca. Then off we went to Independence!

Independence was apparently the place to be in 1850- scandalous rich people and the beginnings of the Oregon Trail. We toured the Bingham-Wagoner estate because no one was at the lengthy trail museum. Although the old southern tour guide and the wedding arrangements going on at the house made it seem like a very amateur tour, it was by far the coolest we’d been on. Not only was nothing cordoned off, but the tour-guide encouraged us to manhandle just about every possession and heirloom we saw. Rebecca had to refrain from stealing the coolest dollhouse ever known to Kansas. On top of that, the tour-guide cared only about gossiping about risqué artifacts. After seeing an open field that apparently had original wagon marks on it, and Rebecca stopping Alex from urinating on the aforementioned field we were off to Truman’s pad.

Apparently Truman and his wife were more frugal than Alex. They painted their kitchen all an ugly blue and had just one nice possession: a piano. And surprisingly: a television (from which Mrs. Truman watched wrass’lin and baseball.) Apparently Truman was a scrub, since he technically didn’t even own the house he lived in. We couldn’t even take pictures to show the place, a complete 180 in freedom from the last tour. So we left for St. Louis, taking the broken-compass route to Oregon.

If St. Louis had a yelp, we'd give it 2.5 stars, just because it has the City Museum, which we didn't even have time to see. We got in near midnight to find that there was still bad traffic, likely due to its clusterfuck of a road system. By the time we found the City Museum (only because it had a Ferris wheel on the 20-story rooftop), we were sleepy and decided to head to our hotel without getting to go on giant slides like we had anticipated. Despite calling ahead of time, our hotel did not forewarn us that there was a big boxing match in town and most of the rooms were gone. Not only that, but despite boasting their "FREE" things on billboards, Drury hotels charge you $12 for parking on top of the $150 to sleep overnight. But I guess their sub-McDonald's quality "hot breakfast" makes it all worth it.

Friday, August 6, 2010

Day 5 – Buh Bye Mile High City, Hello Kansas High Plains

Never have we seen so many anti-abortion road signs and more dead butterflies on the windshield.

Our plan for the day was to get to Kansas City, MO by night and eat some bbq before heading to sleep. But we got a late start to our day as we toured the Colorado state capitol. As we walked up, Alex decided to start picking the abundant little apples (Manzanitas?) off of the trees surrounding the capitol and I was afraid that we were going to get in trouble as he sampled unripe cranberries too.

Some highlights from the tour: we had an Armenian tour guide who midway through, stopped and asked Alex what his last name was because he could tell he’s Armenian by looking at him. We learned all about the materials that Coloradoans had used to make the capitol including the rose onyx which is found nowhere else because they used it all up in the capitol construction (and also happens to have secret dirty patterns if you look closely)! We also went up to the dome that is pretty spectacular and got views of the Rockies and the Denver skyline. Lastly, the Armenian tour guide told us the story of the old caretaker of the capitol. This caretaker didn’t believe in paper money so he exchanged all his savings into silver coins. He had so much faith in the building that he kept all his savings in the tunnels beneath the capitol and when he died they tried to go down there to find this treasure stash but they only found two skulls. He told us that sometimes you’d feel the caretaker’s ghost if you tried to reach down through an opening into the floor below us trying to seek out the treasure. He then encouraged us to reach out and close our eyes and try to reach for the stash and as we had our eyes closed, he went over to an older woman and brushed her hand. She shrieked and jumped back as did the tour guide because no one had ever reacted like that. The rest of the group was thoroughly amused.

After our tour, we started driving towards KCMO and for lunch we stopped at an ancient Safeway to pick up some deli foods. This place looked like it hasn’t changed since the 50s. We did have a very filling lunch though. But the drive was still long and boring only made slightly better by the pro life signs and the anti porn signs. “Jesus heals and saves. Pornography destroys and enslaves.” These were plastered all over billboards along the interstate right next in front of strip clubs' billboards! Alex also didn’t indulge me with a stop at the Oz museum even though I would never again get the chance to drive through KS!

The 9 ½ hr drive became so tedious that we gave up on going to KCMO for the night and instead spent it in Lawrence, KS, home of the Jayhawks. Rock! Chalk! Jayhawks! KU! We got in at 10:30 and most of the restaurants and bars had stopped serving food so we had some non-memorable Japanese on Massachusetts Ave. This was the main street and had pretty cool shops and restaurants: had they been open though! :(

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Day 4 – Climbing the Rockies


We started off the day with a hike to the Delicate Arch. Yeah, that oft photographed red arch that's also on the UT plate. I was really surprised that Alex made it up there because of his fear of heights!


We toured and took pics at some of the other sights in Arches NP and pretty soon, had to head out of there so that we could make it to Denver at a reasonable hour. But before we left, we had to try the “famous” Moab Brewery that we were too afraid to venture out to the previous night. BUT, we didn’t even get to try their Deadhorse Ale because we had to drive soon after. Upon leaving Moab, we noticed that the town and Utah in general has a weird obsession with bikes.

Either way, Utah takes the cake for the most colorful state. Take that Colorado, which we are now about to enter. You can see the intimidating monstrosity called the Rocky Mountains from miles away. After listening to Taco Toyo cough and hack up the Rockies’ slopes we got to see an instant change from red landscape to greenery. Sadly, there isn’t much to see in the skiing capital of the universe except… well... ski lodges.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Day 3 – Utah National Park Tour on Speed

We attempted to access three parks in one day – waking up in Zion, hiking Bryce Canyon, and ultimately camping in Arches.

Started the morning off with the drive out of Zion through the Zion/Mt. Carmel Tunnel getting awesome views of the canyon. The Utah landscape is absolutely gorgeous between Zion and Bryce Canyon on Hwy 89. When we got closer, we parked outside of the park and took the shuttle in to avoid the parking lot wars.



Got off at Sunset Point and worked our way down the Navajo trail through Wall Street and down into the Bryce Canyon Ampitheatre. At the crossroads we added the Queen’s Garden trail because people were telling us that it is a must see… Well… it didn’t look all that different from the rest of the canyon ampitheatre. When an older dude overheard us, he chimed in that 50 yrs ago it was pretty cool and that it’s been eroded away now! I guess we came too late? But the trail back up from Queen’s Garden on the Sunrise trail was purty! We had arches to walk through and at every turn there were more and more vistas of Bryce Canyon! :)

All along the way, Alex carried Froggy in his arms because he had dropped him and broken him in half. And all along the way, we got inquisitive looks from fellow hikers and some even asked us what it was. It would have been too much to explain to them the Ashby Manor days so we referred to our favorite pop culture French film: Amelie. Even then, only the foreigners knew Amelie Poulain. One woman even asked us if it was our fertility frog… ERRRR…. AWKWARD TURTLE! Or should I say frog?


Then we booked it out of Bryce Canyon and started the drive on I-70E to Arches NP/Moab. It was a long 6 hr drive with tons of road construction and awesome lightning storms in the east. Turns out that we were actually driving towards the storm! As we got closer to Arches, the sky really darkened. We had driven into the heart of darkness with flash flood advisories. So much for our plan to camp in Arches! :( Instead we drove around to diff motels only to find that they had no vacancies for the night. Finally we found a Riverside Inn a little off downtown Moab that we crashed at for the night. I guess it was a blessing in disguise. We were really in need of a shower and comfy bed anyway after our two days of hiking.

For dinner we tried to hit up a local brewery for late night food, but lightning and thunder boomed nearby as we were going to the car. Fearing for our lives, we tried a local pizza delivery place that had a Berkeley-esque logo: Paradox Pizza. For the record, they had really good spicy veggie soup with peppers and onions. I had to have my soup! Alex did not take part in the awesome soup! He had a Hawaiian Italian with you guessed it: pineapple and prosciutto!

With our bellies full, we are heading to bed.

Day 2 – From Sinner’s Paradise to Angels’ Landing (well…. almost!)

Time zone change! We’re now on Mtn time!

Made it to Zion NP after a 4 hr drive on I-15N through the desert, valleys, and mesas. So being the super smart people we were, we decided to start the 4 hr Angels’ Landing hike in the late afternoon hoping to make it back down as it starts to get dark. It was immensely hot and hiking then was way cooler and shadier anyway!
After Alex coaxed me up to Scout’s Lookout by promising to carry me if I didn't continue, no amount of pleading would get him to finish the last ½ mile to Angels’ Landing. Alex wussed out as we started going up the anchored chains portion of the trail. For the record, he would like to cite the weather and impending darkness as the reason for not wanting to continue up. Thunderstorms were rolling in to southern Utah. However, I will maintain it’s because he’s just not man enough to handle the chains. The storm had passed and we didn’t see a single bolt of lightning!

The shuttle buses in Zion were really awesome, with open windows in the top and quirky drivers. We rode back to our campsite and started building a fire in the light rain. The rain persisted and we had a minor mutiny as Alex refused to pitch the tent in the rain and dark. After much fuss, careful not to set up camp on top of ant burrows, we passed out in our tents.

Haha… I wish that was the end of it, but in the middle of the night, a real storm really rolled in. It hailed and rained like no other with strong winds knocking our tent walls around because I refused to listen to Alex and stake down our tent. Well… I guess it was a fun night. At least we didn’t get too wet!

Monday, August 2, 2010

background & day 1 - the road to VEGAS

Rabbles and Alex are moving to the east coast via a cross country roadtrip through NV, UT, CO, KS, MO, KY, WV, and VA ending up in DC and NC.

Our mode of transportation: 2000 Toyota Tacoma: nicknamed: Taco Toyo.

We packed the car Sunday night with all our crap. And "enough food for Rabbles."

We had one last breakfast at ABC restaurant in the city with my parents and pretty soon we were on the road. Only 3 hrs late...

We started from the coastal fog of San Francisco and within an hour we were in the heat of the Central Valley. Pics will be posted when we have access to a real computer of the packed car and the major landmarks amidst the miles and miles of yellow hills on I-5.

As seen on fb, we found a stowaway: Froggy! He's been a trooper sitting in the middle seat of Taco Toyo. Alex seriously wanted to take him onto the strip with us.

The wait for check-in was insanely long but it was worth it when they upgraded us to a suite! We had a living room, two bathrooms, and a huge four poster bed on the top floor at the Flamingo. All for $50! The Flamingo is a bit older but I think that makes the pool and lounges areas way better because the trees have matured a bit.

We are now on our way to Zion NP, UT after we fueled up Taco Toyo and ourselves! Hopefully we make it in time to do the Angels Landing hike.