And The Rockets Red Glare

Independence Day was celebrated in true small town fashion. The neighbors contributed toward the purchase of pork, beef brisket, and ribs and one neighbor smoked it all. He used to participate in competitions, so the meat was high caliber and very tasty BBQ. Tables were set up in driveways and neighbors wandered from house to house eating, talking and introducing new friends and visiting family. Children played in the street, lighting off small firecrackers and smoke bombs. A few were in Karen's backyard swimming in their above ground pool. 28 adults were busy competing in a Chinese Horseshoe competition. It was relaxing and felt like a throwback to the 1950s. I love Karen's neighborhood.

As the sun set in the sky, the fireworks lighting increased. Several other surrounding neighborhoods were also setting off fireworks, so regardless of where you looked in the sky, you'd see something. Eventually, Bill pulled out the big ones and we watched for several hours as the night was filled with bursts of red, white and blue displays. It was quite impressive and at times I felt like we were in a war zone. The explosions were loud and the acrid smoke drifted through the air. After a while I took shelter in the garage and watched from the protective cover to avoid falling pieces of plastic.


From the block party to the fireworks, everything was a new experience for us and a lovely taste of Americana.

Time with Family

Yesterday was an opportunity to rest and catch up on some sleep. I typically wake early regardless of when I go to sleep, but I slept in and got up at 7:00 a.m. It was a slow moving morning, since my parents usually don't rise until 11:00 or later. Once everyone was up and ready, the boys and I went with Karen, Bill, and Hunter so they could buy more fireworks. Hunter had some spending money and he wanted to buy some that he could light.

Fireworks are a big deal here. I was fascinated by the huge selection and stacks of smoke bombs, sparklers, bottle rockets, artillery shells, and firecrackers. There was a large truck that also had boxes and boxes to replenish the supplies as needed. People spend hundreds of dollars loading up for an evening of cracking, booming, flashing, and sparkling. Zach decided to buy a few to light too.

After a quick lunch, we went to the bowling alley and bowled three games. Bill is an excellent bowler and put the rest of us to shame. I used to bowl in a league when I was in junior high, but I think the only time Zach or David bowl is when we get together with my family. The bowling alley was high tech, so we had fun taking our pictures and adding them to the screen and logging into Facebook to track our progress.

When we got back, my nephew Chris was there. He stayed for dinner and his girlfriend, Amber joined us. Amber owns the home next door to Karen and Bill. When Amber moved in, Karen got to know her, and played matchmaker by introducing the two. They are a cute couple and Karen gets to see Chris more since he's over at Amber's more often. Who says parents can't pick out your partner? It sounds like a great idea to me.

Karen lives near the end of a street that forms a circle. It is a friendly neighborhood. The neighbors all know each other and look out for one another. They bring out their lawn chairs and sit in someone's driveway visiting and drinking beer. At 9:00 p.m., it still wasn't dark out and the kids were riding bikes, lighting sparklers, and playing while their parents talked and told stories. 

Lincoln has its fireworks display on the 3rd so they don't have to pay their workers overtime on the 4th. I stayed awake long enough to watch the Lincoln fireworks display over the top of a neighbor's roof. When I went to bed last night, people were still milling around and chatting. I'm told they were out there for several more hours, but I drifted off to sleep to the sound of cracks and sizzles.

The Badlands...Not So Bad

Today was our longest day yet. I’m typing this at 9:41 p.m. and while Zach is driving with another 3-4 hours left before we arrive in Lincoln. So why are we still driving you ask?

Before leaving Keystone, we decided to take a run down the President’s Alpine Slide. We took a ski lift to the top of the mountain and then we each rode a wheeled sled down 2000 feet of slide. It was fun but we lost about an hour as we enjoyed zooming down the hill.

We finally hit the road for Badlands National Park. It was 1.5 hours away. We punched in Badlands National Park and my GPS decided to take us to the southern entrance. To get there we drove through Pine Ridge Reservation to the visitor center which is just a portable trailer. After speaking with the ranger, we realized we should have turned a different way 30 miles back, so we headed back the way we came and then an additional 30 miles to the Interior Entrance and the main visitor center. That ended up being an additional hour of unnecessary driving. The only good thing was that on the way to the Southern Entrance, we saw a herd of privately owned bison close to the road. Unfortunately, we didn’t think fast enough to stop and take a photo. When we backtracked, they were nowhere to be seen. They must have moved on to greener pastures.

 

The Badlands is a barren land of tan rock that looks like dried mud. It is slowly eroding leaving canyons and walls to view and explore. We went on several hikes and visited a working fossil lab in the visitor center. Hikers regularly find fossils buried in the walls, but alas, we found none. It was still pretty cool to see paleontologists slowly drilling rock away from a fossil. She looked like a dentist cleaning tartar off of someone’s teeth.

Everything in the park is spread out, so to get anywhere it was a drive. We took the scenic loop and ended up further north and west in South Dakota which again added time to our trip. Before leaving the park we drove 5 miles down a gravel road toward Prarie Dog Town. The prarie was full of prarie dog holes with the little critters popping their heads up out of holes and running from one hole to the next. They were squeaking at each other and it was fun to try to predict where they would pop up next. It was kind of like “Whack a Mole.” Off in the distance we saw some buffalo so we took some photos and headed out once again.

 

Aside from a quick stop at Subway for sandwiches and stopping for gas or to change drivers, we’ve been driving ever since. Well, it’s my turn to drive…

P.S. We arrived at 2:00 a.m. We’ll spend the next three days visiting with my sister, brother-in-law, nephews and my parents.

Mountains & Monuments

It's Tuesday morning and today is the last leg of our trip to Lincoln. We have a long day of driving ahead of us, so we decided we should break it up with a quick trip to Badlands National Park. We'll leave in just a bit.

We spent the night in Keystone, South Dakota after visiting Crazy Horse Memorial and Mount Rushmore. Keystone is a cute little mining town that exists mainly to host the many visitors to Mount Rushmore.
Our drive through Wyoming was uneventful and David got to do some of the driving this time. We disagree on how fast he was "allowed" to go. You can read his perspective on his blog at: http://favoritesonsspiel.blogspot.com/

Crazy Horse Memorial is an unfinished monument to the Lakota leader. The memorial is a work in progress and will take more years than I will be alive to complete, since it is funded only by donations and admission fees. It was the belief of the sculptor, Korczak Ziolkowski, that this should not be a state or federal project and his family carried on this philosophy after his death in 1982. Even though he is gone, the artist's wife and seven of his ten children have continued the project. We spent about two hours looking through the exhibits and learning about the sculpture, sculptor, and the Native American people. I bought a necklace made of red jaspar, silver, and black buffalo horn. It has a carved turtle ("Keya" in Lakota) pendant that represents overcoming obstacles in life and finding alternatives and solutions to problems that are faced. I like that idea.

Mount Rushmore is less than 20 miles from Crazy Horse also in the Black Hills of South Dakota. We arrived right when it was starting to rain. It was dinner time, so we decided to eat at the Carvers Cafe at the monument and wait for the rain to subside. The skies cleared soon and we proceeded to walk the Presidential Trail which takes you to the base of the mountain for different perspectives of the sculpture. We climbed up and down about 400 stairs and took more photos than we ever needed of the four presidents. 

We wandered through the Visitor Center, and watched a movie about the sculptor and the reason why these four president's were chosen. Originally, the idea of a mountain sculpture was to highlight the legends of the West like Lewis & Clark, and Buffalo Bill Cody. But the sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, a prolific artist of the time stated that he would not devote his life to this project unless it was something that had meaning to the entire nation. He chose the four presidents, to create an eternal reminder of the birth (Washington), growth (Jefferson), development (Roosevelt), and preservation (Lincoln) of a nation that is dedicated to democracy and liberty.

We stayed for the lighting ceremony which happened at 9:30 p.m. It took that long for it to get dark enough. It was a nice ceremony that stirred the patriotic spirit within me. It was a good end to a fun and educational day.

Rocky Mountain High

I'm sitting here in our hotel room in Cheyenne, Wyoming. We are staying at the Historic Plains Hotel, an awesome old building located in downtown Cheyenne. I love old historic places and this is perfect. We are on the 5th floor and our room is the nicest we've had so far. We have a sitting area complete with couch and two easy chairs. The hotel was built in 1911 to serve cattle barons, oil tycoons and travelers on their way to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. It has a century of history and is just plain cool.

The hotel is across the street from a movie theater, so Zach and David decided to see the late night showing of Iron Man 3. They were excited, because tickets were only $3.50. We spent most of the day in the car, so they are enjoying a little entertainment.

We left late from Grand Junction this morning, because we slept in and then took our time posting blogs and photos. By the time we got on the road, I knew we weren't going to be able to do much of anything in Denver. To complicate things even more, we hit a lot of traffic on I-70 and that added about an hour to our trip. The drive though long was lovely as we climbed higher into the Rocky Mountains. The Colorado River was our constant companion, and we saw people rafting and tubing along the way. At one point, I commented to the boys that I felt like we were in a model railroad. The red mountains and the green pine trees just reminded me of the landscape used by model train builders.

Near Red Rocks Amphitheater

I wanted to stop and see Red Rocks Amphitheater located just outside of Denver. We got there around 4:00 p.m., but our plans were foiled when we realized they were having a concert and a thousand people were converging onto the site. That was a bummer, but I also had been told we could see dinosaur footprints nearby, so we began the hunt for those instead. After several trips around the mountain, and asking for directions, we successfully discovered Dinosaur Ridge which has a wealth of fossils including dinosaur footprints. It was a fun experience for the closet archeologist hidden in me.

Zach having a conversation with a dinosaur

Fossilized dinosaur footprints

It was getting late so we decided to forego a trip into Denver and instead stopped for dinner at Jay's Grille & Bar before heading onto Cheyenne. Since last night we ate at Pasta Jay's, we thought it was apropos to eat at another restaurant with the name Jay in it. It was in honor of our missing traveling companion whose name starts with a J.

Despite the delays and disappointments it turned out to be a pretty nice day.

From Hoodoos to Windows

Yesterday was a busy day. The goal was a little hiking and exploring of two National Parks about 270 miles apart. Bryce Canyon is one of my favorite National Parks. I love the magical hoodoos that are a fairy world of castles and turrets. Last time we were here, we only looked at the views from above. But this time, we chose a short hike called Navajo Loop which was a steep descent into the canyon and then back out. The hike itself was only 1.3 miles, but the elevation change was dramatic and the views were exquisite. We took lots of photos mainly because I stopped so many times to rest and drink some water.



















Around mid-day, we said our goodbyes to Bryce Canyon, and drove toward Arches National Park. The plan was to get there early evening when hopefully the temperature had cooled down a bit. The drive was long and desolate. Not much but open space in this part of Utah. The boys watched the movie Inception (David's favorite) and Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog (produced, written, & directed by Joss Whedon during the writer's strike) to pass the time.

The massive rock formations at Arches National Park are impressive. The red rock looks like a giant's play area filled with red clay that has been rolled, balled, and pinched. Everything is huge. The temperature was bearable so we got out of the car several times to hike around the big structures as the desert wind blew through our hair.

It was getting late, and we still had more than an hour drive to our motel in Grand Junction, Colorado, so we left the park and decided to eat dinner in the town of Moab, Utah. We were hungry and the food was delicious. We arrived around 10:30 p.m. and collapsed into bed with satisfaction of a mission accomplished. We could have spent more time at any of the parks we visited, but we got a decent taste of each and a renewed appreciation of the glory of God's creation.

Hiking the Narrows

Years ago, when the boys were much younger, we took a similar road trip to Nebraska. While Joe & Zach have some memories of the trip, David just doesn't remember it. So I wanted to make sure that we went to some of the same places we enjoyed on that first trip including three National Parks in Utah: Zion, Bryce Canyon, and Arches.

Yesterday we went to Zion National Park. We stopped in town and rented some footwear and a walking stick, because we were going to hike the Narrows! Or at least part of it. This was something I always wanted to try, but the boys were just too young and we weren't prepared back then.

Zion National Park is a gorge that has been slowly eroded by the Virgin River. The sides of the canyon tower over you as you drive to the different trailheads. Many of the peaks have biblical names and even a few Mormon titles. The three most impressive are The Three Patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, & Jacob. They keep a watchful eye over the many visitors as they travel through.

While there were many hikes we would have liked to venture on, our purpose was to hike the Narrows. So we took the shuttle to the end of the line at the Riverside Walk. This is a mile-long paved hike that takes you alongside the Virgin River. It was hot, really hot, but we were on a mission. When we arrived at the end of the Riverside Walk, we walked down to the river edge and continued to hike up and IN the river. It was awesome!

Hiking the Narrows from the bottom up is about a 5 mile hike one way. 75% of the time you are in the water; there just isn't any dry land to walk on. You can also hike from the top down and that's about 16 miles. The river is shallow and at most you might have to hike in waist deep water. The views are spectacular and majestic.

We only had time to hike about a mile or two up the river, but it was fabulous and exhausting. I chose the rocky shoreline when available, but Zach and David always took the hardest route, against the current. Although cold, the water was cool and refreshing and most of the time we were in the shade as the canyon walls were so close to each other that direct sunlight couldn't find its way into the canyon.

We left around 6:30 p.m. and headed to Bryce Canyon. The drive was beautiful, but we were tired and couldn't wait to check into the Lodge and get some dinner. After settling in we had a light dinner at 9:00 p.m. and collapsed into bed. The only sad part of the day was that Joe wasn't with us. It was his birthday, and I think he would have liked the hike.

We are staying in Bryce Canyon National Park, so WiFi is limited to the lobby and coffee shop. David and I woke up early to see the sunrise over Bryce Point. We snagged a quick breakfast at the coffee shop, uploaded our photos and blogs and now we are headed out to explore Bryce Canyon and then on to Arches National Park.