A Grand Canyon Adventure

We didn’t quite know what we were in for when we set out on our road trip. But the best road trips always start that way. I am no Jack Kerouac, nor am I Jack London, but the open road does beckon to me from time to time. On Christmas day my in-laws and I drove to St. George, Utah to visit some relatives. Abby and I decided that we would take the opportunity to drive even more so that I could see the Grand Canyon. I had never seen that inverted cathedral to the elemental beauty of nature.

Monday afternoon, we traded our Camry for Abby’s parents’ Prius, and set out toward Las Vegas with Pop-Tarts, Abby’s sisters Maren and Emily, and a new found sense of freedom. We listened to Mike Birbiglia as we crossed out of the fuzzy city limits of St. George. Joshua trees make me happy, and there are thousands of them between St. George and Vegas. By 4:00pm we were driving through the traffic of Sin City.

We stayed in Sam’s Town, a western themed “gambling hall” off the strip on Boulder Highway. Abby was driving and let me off at a side door (what we thought was the front door) in order to get checked into the hotel. The tacit agreement was to find each other again by the valet station. I had to walk through the casino in order to find the front desk. By the time I got to the desk and checked in, I thought I knew how to get back out of the casino and to the valet parking, but the casino was a giant maze. I was a mouse in that casino maze. I was seized by a sudden sense of panic; I realized that I had left my cell phone in the car. I decided that the best course of action would be to go up to the room and call from the phone in the room.

I rode the glass elevator up to the 5th floor and stepped into my room. It was nicer than I expected, standard hotel fare. I went to the phone, it was the first time I had used a land line in a long time, and dialed. Luckily, a few weeks ago, Abby wrote her phone number on a scrap of paper and told me to put it in her wallet. I can never remember her number, so I used my cheatsheet and made my $4.50 long distance call to Abby sitting in the valet pick-up lane. I told her that they would need to just meet me in room 504. I then nervously looked out our window, waiting to see Abby and her sisters walk through the middle of the hotel. No such luck, but I do think I saw George Lucas. Or maybe George Lucas was just on my mind and I saw an anonymous middle aged man with a gut and a beard. But if I were George Lucas two weeks after the opening of The Force Awakens, I would be incognito at Sam’s Town, off the strip and away from the nerds. 

The girls knocked on the door after lugging their bags through the casino, to the second floor (Bingo Floor!), back down to the first floor, through the rain forest, through a tiny nondescript door mark “hotel area” and then up a not-glass elevator. Then they walked all the way around the hotel until the found room 504. I definitely got the better end of the deal on the elevator front. Glass elevator is to regular elevator as paper is to rock.

Emily and Maren claimed that the best burgers in the world were at Shake Shack, so we freshened up and headed to the strip. We parked in the only place that we knew we could get free parking, which happened to be on the other end of the strip. The strip is like the world’s stinkiest, least classy mall, but it still can amaze. The strip is as fake as the “celebrity” impersonators in front of Treasure Island. To be honest, the person in the homemade Elsa costume with a pumpkin-shaped head really freaked me out, but I couldn't stop staring. That ungodly knock-off is the strip; it’s fake, we all know it’s fake, but we can’t stop staring. Ends up the burgers were not “the best in the world,” but they weren’t bad. We stopped by M&M World and Coke World. 

At Coke World, we split the around the world platter—a tray full of sodas from around the world. I paid $1 to Maren to drink all of the “Beverly” from Italy. She took me up on it, but almost vomited afterward.

Even mass transit on the strip seems to be an imitation. Since we had tromped our way down the strip and we were tired, we decided to get on the Monorail to go head to the car. What an overpriced joke of “mass-transit.” The Monorail really is just one more opportunity for the casinos to advertise to tired tourists. But there was a cute old couple on our car with us. Someday we will all be old.

Make it rain!

That night, Abby and I went down to the front desk to ask for a razor. No luck, but we may have gone back up to our room with $60 more than we had when we left.

The next morning we headed out to Boulder, Nevada. Driving through, Boulder appears to be a charming little tourist trap on the way to Hoover Dam. 

The Dam, by the way, is beautiful. Its enormity is not the source of its beauty, but rather the details. I am a sucker for Art Deco, and Hoover Dam is rife with it. From the Angel memorial, to the intake towers to the classiest public men’s room in the southwest, it is beautiful.

Bathroom floor decor

We offered to take a photo for a family from Cincinnati at the Hoover Dam. After we had crossed the desert from Hoover Dam to Kingman, and from Kingman to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, we walked up to the edge of the canyon and saw that same family from Cincinnati taking photos. Being a tourist is weird.

No photograph or video can adequately capture the Grand Canyon. I won’t bore you with my description either. It is cool. You should see it. I wish we would have stayed a night at the Grand Canyon so that I could see more of it.

I had one big dream fulfilled on this trip: I got to go to Tuba City. Tuba City was a dream for me. I bought a pizza for the road and reveled in the fact that I had arrived at the town where every tuba player would like to end up at least once in their life. My sisters-in-law, however did not consider the town to be anything but a nightmare. We went to two restaurants and two convenience stores before we found a ladies room that wasn’t closed.

Then we headed north. Eventually, the road wound up the side of the mountain. None of us were expecting the sudden twists and turns of a mountain road. It was the kind of dark that is unique to the “empty” parts of the world where civilization has yet to pollute the landscape with its electric lights. The road had been cleared of snow, and seemed dry enough to go the speed limit. The piles of snows on the side of the road looked like they had been there for a couple of days. Suddenly, what looked like a rock on the side of the road, almost in our lane, moved its head. Instinctively, I pulled the car toward the center of the road, quicker than the time it took me to process what I had seen. It was a cow. Abby and her sisters all laughed; I laughed. 

A little later, I rolled down the windows and told the girls that it was a freeze-out. Emily stuck her head out the window and looked up at the sky. When I rolled the windows back up, Emily told us all, gasping to regain her breath, that the stars were incredible. Abby and Maren in turn stuck their heads out the window and looked skyward. I would have to wait for a straight stretch some time later to do the same.  

We stopped for gas in Jacob Lake, at 7,921 feet; there were piles of snow taller than me. I stepped out of the car without my jacket. The cold nipped at me as I fueled up.

The roads from Jacob Lake to Fredonia, through the polygamist town of Colorado City, and on to Hurricane (pronounce Hur-e-kin by the locals) were almost empty. I drove, the sky was dark, and I was free.