Road Trip 2010
Tuesday, July 20th, 2010
By: Brandon Bailor
This post is in response to “The Plan”. Better late then never … right? LOL!
Well, the plan pretty much went off without a hitch! For those of you that follow me on Facebook, you were able to see the trip unfold in real-time 🙂 Left as-planned, and each leg of the trip went according to schedule. As all road trips go, it’s the scenery, and the unexpected happenings that make a road trip memorable and exciting. First unexpected happening was finding a friend of mine from Texas living in Denver. We ended up having breakfast with him … pretty cool.
Next was the fact that we got to see it raining on the Utah Salt Flats. The Utah Salt Flats are a desert. They were also formed by a large salt water lake drying up, so they are perfectly flat. When we drove through, it was raining … this had a bizarre effect. Because the flats are so flat, rain water has no where to go. It basically just pools up … one big pool. The flats looked like one huge lake again. I bet the water was only a half inch deep, but it was the entire flats. Very strange!
Yosemite was also not quite as planned. See, we had a ton of food packed in the car. Fresh fruit, lunch meats, breads, etc. We sat down for lunch at Yosemite … trying to plan a little hike. I read the place mat stating that the bears are waking up from hibernation in the spring, and are hungry. They can actually smell the food in your car, and they will come down from the mountains for it. If a bear gets to your car … not only is your car destroyed by the bear, but the park will impound your car, and impose a $5000 fine. I then felt it best to not leave the car sitting still too long while we hiked. So we decided just to drive around the park, see the sites, and take some pictures. The ranger station also said that the road to the Mariposa Grove was open … this is the grove of giant Sequoia trees. I wanted to show her, so we drove the 45 minutes through the park to get all the way down there, just to find out that the website, and the ranger stations were wrong. The last 2 miles of road to the grove were closed!!! F’ers! So we just hopped in the car and went to San Fran.
In San Fran, we checked into the hotel, and went to dinner at Bubba Gumps … I know … I should really mix it up a little when I go to SF. But the purpose of this trip was to show Michelle things that I like.
Next was Vegas. She was not a big gambler, so we really didn’t do any casinos except The Riviera (the one that the APA National tournament is held at). We decided to check it out, and just stumbled upon the BCA nationals! Go figure! Actually ran into one of Michelles ex’s there 🙂 Funny 🙂
Then we drove to Texas. Hung out with the folks, and headed home. The trip home took about 6 hours longer than anticipated, so I called off the next day of work.
All in all … good trip!
Category : Travel
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.