When I discovered that, as beautiful as it was, I couldn’t get a more meaningful experience at the Grand Canyon in the time I had, and without some planning, I decided to put it on my ‘revisit’ list and rush off to something that I could experience in one day. In fact, I had to, it was only available for one day. The Trinity Site, the location where the first atomic bomb was tested at 5:30am on July 16, 1945,…
The Grand Canyon is probably the most iconic of all American road trip destinations, and it was certainly on my bucket list for this trip, but until I started approaching it, it never occurred to me to ask… which side do I go to? Well, because I’ve got all the time in the world at the moment, I decided to go to both! Since I was coming from Utah, the North Rim was first. The drive in was just beautiful,…
Even from a distance as I approached Zion National Park I could tell it was going to be a special place. The cliffs seem to rise vertically out of the desert, with varying hues from deep reds to almost white. Approaching from the south, there’s a main road that runs straight through the park, passing through two tunnels, and another that branches off of it and is accessible only by shuttlebus to limit the traffic there. Since it was later…
I had been to Salt Lake City once before to visit the parents of a friend when I was about 20 years old, and I remembered it as being a beautiful city, with wide avenues and flowers on every street corner, so I was looking forward to finding out if it had changed much. I’m so happy to report that SLC is much as it ever was, perhaps grown a bit larger, but still one of the nicest cities I’ve…
Ok, enough time spent in California, there was a lot more of the country to see, so it was time to start heading back east again! Immediately after leaving the Jelly Belly factory, I headed up into the Sierra Nevada mountains toward Donner Pass, where many pioneers came through the mountains on their way to California. There was a statue at the pass to commemorate all the pioneers who suffered the hardships of crossing the mountains and helped open up the…