Oh, my Arches! (National Park)

We had a pretty good day at Arches National Park. We finally got to experience some warm Southwest weather, but fortunately for us it wasn't really a scorcher. The high was a bit over 90 degrees, but it wasn't very humid so it was bearable. The sun was pretty intense, though, so any shade was welcome.

This park has a lot of different rock structures and I again had fun trying to capture the different looks in pictures. Many of the arches are visible from the road, but there are some that require various amounts of hiking to see well. With the weather a bit hotter than we are used to, we didn't do all the hikes, but we still were able to visit quite a few arches. We even had a picnic lunch at one of the picnic tables that was tucked under a nice shade tree.

I guess we're about done with the various rock formations of the Colorado Plateau, the next stop is Durango Colorado and a ride on the Durango and Silverton RR. WOOHOO!!

Catching up on pictures

I managed to get a bunch of new pictures posted to my Flickr account. Check it out!

Pictures for:
-Bryce Canyon
-Trip from Capitol Reef NP to Natural Bridges National Monument
-Inside National Bridges National Monument
-Arches National Park

More fun with auto repairs (same song, second verse)

I think the bad shocks we had on the car ended up hurting the rear tires more than we realized. I happened to take a look at them when we were packing up on Friday morning and noticed that they were wearing very badly on the outside edges. One of them is close to showing cords through the rubber, so we are on the lookout for a tire shop that can get us set up with a pair of new tires. There was one tire shop where we were on Friday, but they didn't have any tires in our size. Towns that are big enough to have a tire shop are few and far between out here, so we called around a bit and found a shop near where we'll be on Monday. They happened to have a bunch of tires in stock that will work for us, so I guess we'll get to do some more car fixin' on Monday.

yay.

I'm not sure what the tires looked like when we had our shocks replaced a couple of weeks ago, but it seems to me they would have said something if they looked this bad at that time. I'm hoping that the damage to the tires was already done and what we are seeing now is abnormal wear because the tires were already damaged internally before the shocks were replaced...

A quick visit to Natural Arches National Monument

The last couple of days had us running ragged, so Saturday was made into an easy day. We slept in and then decided that our next destination would only be about four hours of driving. We took a route that allowed us to make a visit to Natural Arches National Monument. This spot is fairly unique in that it has one of the largest concentration of natural arches that you'll find anywhere in the world. It is a fairly small area compared to the other national parks that surround it, so it isn't very busy. We had a nice picnic lunch there, complete with a raven that desperately wanted us to look the other way for just a few minutes.

We ended the day in Monitcello, UT and spent a good bit of time swimming in the pool. The kids have been getting a bit burned out with all the park visiting and driving, so they really enjoyed the goof-off time. Tomorrows' goal is Arches National Park. Looking at the weather predictions it appears that we may actually have some hot weather to deal with. It would really be the first hot day of our whole trip! Anyone in Michigan feel sorry for us???

Here's just one quick picture of one of the arches in Natural Arches National Monument:


While driving around southern Utah we've been continuously surprised at the variety of rock formations. I suppose if you lived here it would all be commonplace, but for us Michiganders it seems like there is something new around every corner. I've got whole bunches of pictures for anyone who is interested in seeing them... heheheheh

This particular formation wasn't really all that spectacular, but as soon as I saw it it made me think of pictures that I've seen of a submarine performing an emergency surfacing maneuver. I wanted to post it here, so I found it and while I was resizing it I noticed that if you look near the base of the larger structure, you can see a gorilla face in the rock. Can you see it? Or is it just me? ;-)

Havin' too much fun...

to get more pictures uploaded, that is!

After Zion N.P. we headed over to Bryce Canyon N.P. which is only a short drive away. We decided to pay a few $'s more to stay in a hotel near the entrance. It turns out that the hotel we chose was brand new and very nice, so we had a very nice night. Friday's weather was a bit chilly, windy, and rainy, but the rain part came and went so it didn't really ruin our day. We realized that it was the rainiest day so far on our trip, so we've got nothing to complain about in that area. We sat out some of the worst rain in the visitors' center watching a movie about the park and then drove as far as you can go into the park. Once to the end of the line we started working our way back, checking out the scenic spots as we went. This strategy worked pretty well because by the time we got to the end of the line the rain had become just intermittent sprinkles. After a while the sun even started to peek through from time to time.

Bryce Canyon is the type of place where I go crazy with a digital camera. I ended up taking so many pictures that I haven't had time to pick out a few good ones to put online. Here's just one shot looking out over one of the more spectacular places in the park:

Entering Zion

Thursday was a short but good visit to Zion National Park. Although not nearly as big as Yellowstone, Yosemite, or Grand Canyon, this park has a remarkable diversity in the scenery you can find. I was fascinated by the many different textures in the rock formations and tried to capture as much as I could on "film", but many pictures were taken from a moving vehicle and the day was a bit cloudy so the camera didn't always achieve proper focus. I still managed to capture a few good shots. I uploaded quite a good batch to my Flickr page if you'd like to view some more.

Apparently we've been able to maintain our powerful cooling effect over any area we visit. The Zion park rangers told us that it was 104 degrees in the park on Wednesday, but it was only 78 degrees when we arrived on Thursday. Needless to say, that doesn't bother me at all!

The car has even managed to cooperate pretty well for the last few days. Maybe we'll make it home without too much more grief.

Bryce Canyon tomorrow! We're staying right outside the entrance and we've already spotted a bunch of red rock formations. I can't wait for tomorrow.

Good times, bad times...

Our visit to the Grand Canyon did include a reminder that there are still a lot of good people in the world. We initially parked in a fairly remote parking lot so that we could walk to the shuttle that would take us on the shuttle-only road along the South rim. We decided to put on suntan lotion and such and in our desire to get ready and head for the shuttle bus, we managed to walk away from the car with one of the doors standing wide open. We didn't discover this until three hours later when we returned from the shuttle bus. As we walked toward the car our hearts sank because we thought someone broke in to the car. Fortunately for us nothing was disturbed! We couldn't believe it! Even though it was a remote lot, someone had to have noticed a car door standing wide open...

The bad time was pretty minor in the grand scheme of things... I've been taking a LOT of pictures (just ask Bev) and most of them have been taken with my dad's camera. This camera has a button on the back that you can use to easily change the size of the picture you want the camera to record. This may be a nice feature for some, but for me it has turned into an annoyance. Twice on this trip I've found that somehow the camera got switched to a size that I didn't want. It happened again in the middle of our day at the Grand Canyon and I didn't realize it until I downloaded the pictures to the computer. Oh well... I guess I'll live!

I can see clearly now.... (at the Grand Canyon)

We tried the Grand Canyon again on Wednesday and this time the controlled fires were not an issue. The weather was quite nice and we had a great day spent trying to comprehend just how big this canyon really is. I took a bunch of pictures, but if you've ever been here you know that pictures can't capture this place properly. Here's just a few pics - check out my Flickr page for more.

What we saw at the Grand Canyon

NOTHING.

That's the short answer... The long answer is that we headed to the South rim of the Grand Canyon and made it to the park entrance around noon. Unfortunately cars were backed up a long way from the entrance. We found out that the park staff was doing a controlled burn of area vegetation and the smoke was making the road in to the park very dangerous, so they were escorting a few cars at a time past the smoke.

We decided that our schedule would allow us to try again tomorrow so we turned around and headed back the way we came. We stopped at the National Geographic visitors center and watched the IMAX movie of the Grand Canyon. Julie and I thought it was really cool, but Bev and Katie had a hard time watching some parts. We also did a bit of trinket shopping and then found our motel for the night.

This was the one place on our trip where we had made reservations. We spotted this place while researching our trip and thought it would be pretty cool. They have a few old railroad cars that they have converted to hotel rooms and the info we found made it look like an interesting place to stay.
Here's one of two cabooses they have converted into motel rooms:

Unfortunately we waited a bit too long to make reservations and the cabooses weren't available. We ended up with a room in an old Pullman car:

There are three rooms in this car and they aren't quite as nice as the rooms in the cabooses. We are all a bit underwhelmed at the experience, however, as the park is a bit old and it could use some freshening up. Compared to the Best Western that we stayed in last night, this place is a dive and the room actually cost more. I guess the novelty of staying in an old railroad car is worth something, but I think we overpaid...

We did get a treat at sundown, however:


Oh, and for all you Michiganders that are suffering in the heat and rain - I just wanted to let you know that we are now having absolutely marvelous weather. This part of the country is at a bit higher elevation so the high temperature today was about 81 with no humidity to speak of. It's cooling of quickly now that the sun went down and I'm sitting on the deck outside our room with a jacket on. Jealous yet? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!

Homeward bound! (sort of...)

Well, we officially started heading home on Monday! Just because it's going to take almost two weeks to get there doesn't mean we aren't on our way. ;-)

We left L.A. just a bit after rush hour so we didn't have any traffic problems and we made our way to Hoover Dam and took a power plant tour. I found it very interesting, but the rest of the group was a bit less impressed. Our primary focus on this trip is to see naturally occurring wonders, but I felt it was worth it to see this man made wonder.




Making a visit to the dam should be just a bit easier within the next year. They are currently rebuilding the highway that currently crosses Hoover Dam. They are adding a bridge that will still give a good view of the dam, but will allow all the traffic to flow smoothly past that area and only those that want to tour the dam will need to slow down. Today they inspect every vehicle that crosses the dam and it really slows things down. The other headache is that the tourists on the dam also block traffic, so there is a double whammy in affect.

I find construction projects fascinating so I took a bunch of pictures while on site. These next two shots show the main arch of the bridge. The work crews actually have to climb a set of stairs up to the working area on each arch segment so they can continue to build forms and add concrete. That's gotta' be a bit of torture for anyone who doesn't like heights!



After Hoover Dam we headed East towards the South rim of the Grand Canyon. We made it to Kingman, AZ before we called it a night. We found a nice hotel for not too much $'s and the kids enjoyed a nice swim in the pool before we called it a night. There was even a bit of a bonus included as the hotel was located on the Mother Road:

More fun with auto repairs

Before we left on our trip I did a bit of agonizing over whether or not I should replace the seven year old OEM battery in our car. I didn't do it because it was acting fine, but it turns out that was a mistake. On the Friday evening run from Sequoia N.P. to Pastor Pauls', the battery pretty much gave up. The first time we stopped for gas the car would barely start itself, so we never shut it off again until we parked at Pastor Pauls. The next morning the car started, but when we took it to an auto parts store to have the battery checked it tested poorly. A new battery and we were on our way. At least that repair wasn't totally unexpected.

Now we are noticing that the cooling system may be having issues. We've had the temperature gauge quite high a couple of times and then it suddenly drops. I'm thinking it's a sticky thermostat, but with our luck it could be worse. grrr.... I'm trying to decide if I should just have it replaced, or see if it continues to act up.

I shoulda' bought a new car for the trip!

Our family also sends a big THANK YOU! to Pastor Paul and his wife Ellen for a great visit. We had fun talking about things old and things new, got fed like royalty, and were able to have a couple of nice relaxing days (after we fixed the car, that is...).

We didn't remember to get a picture of our visit here until we were almost ready to leave. By this time Ellen had already left for work, so we are short one host:

I'm glad we had the chance to visit L.A., but no one in our family is planning to return any time soon. It would be a pretty big adjustment to move there from little ol' Borculo, but Pastor Paul claims it can be done!

The glitz and glamour of L.A.

We arrived a bit late at Pastor Pauls' a bit late due to our ever-helpful GPS, so Saturday didn't start very early for us. It worked out pretty well because our main goal for the day was to just take in a few sights around the big city. Pastor Paul took us on a ride from his house in Bellflower across town to Hollywood and Beverly Hills. On the way we passed fairly close to the downtown area:


Once to Hollywood we walked around a bit to see who we could spot on the walk of fame. Jim Backus was one of the few stars that the kids recognized, and that was only because we had recently rented a DVD with a bunch of Gilligans' Island episodes. Overall, we were not impressed with Hollywood proper. It seemed pretty old and dirty to us. Definitely not a place that should be a tourist draw. We didn't do any of the studio tours or things like that, so I'm not sure if that would change my attitude toward the area.

We had to work at getting a good picture of the sign as the day was quite overcast. Normally you can see the sign from a long ways away, but on this day we had to find a road that would get us a bit closer.

There was a bit of activity outside the Kodak Theater. There were several people in costumes just hanging out and entertaining the people.

Of course, we couldn't get this close to Beverly Hills without taking a quick tour past Rodeo Drive. No, we didn't stop and go shopping....

We finished off the day with a trip to the ice cream shop. It was a nice low-key day that we used to de-stress after the late night run to L.A.

The joys of GPS

We learned an important lesson regarding having blind trust in your GPS unit. When we left Sequoia National Park we needed to get to L.A. to visit with Pastor Paul. When we knew we were close to the exit we just told the GPS to go there and didn't bother verifying the route with the atlas. It turns out that the GPS decided that the quickest route was a road that started with 40 miles of twists and turns that would make a snake proud. The route I would have taken if I had used the atlas had about 10 miles of twisty roads and then nothing but straight highway. Not double-checking the GPS probably cost us close to an extra hour of travel time, not to mention coming close to getting everyone in the car sick. AAARRGHH!!

The sights of Sequoia

Friday found us heading to Sequoia and it was a beautiful day. The fun started on the main drive in to the park when we encountered mama bear and her two cubs:

There are three things we really wanted to see while in the park. One of them was Moro Rock. This is a large rock that is situated in a place that has a fantastic view over the surrounding area. The climb up the rock is a bit of a challenge because of the altitude, but it's worth it when you get to the top.

The second thing we wanted to see is the collection of the largest trees in the world (as defined by volume). This picture shows Julie standing in front of The General Sherman tree, which is hailed as the largest tree in the world (by volume):

The last thing we wanted to see was the Crystal Cave. I'd been hoping to be able to take the kids on a cave tour so they could experience something completely different and this tour did not disappoint. Katie gave us a chuckle because she initially did not want to go in the cave, but after we were in for a while and did the lights out session, she wanted to keep the lights out! Talk about changing your mind...

Overall it was a great day in the park. Check out the Flickr pics for more pictures.

Gearing up for Sequoia and Kings Canyon NP

We decided that Thursday would be a short day in anticipation of a full day on Friday. We travelled from San Simeon to Visalia, which is a pretty short day. We found a hotel with a pool and the kids are finally getting to experience the southern California weather. It's over 90 degrees here and the locals tell us it's cool for this time of year. They are finally getting to swim in an outdoor pool and enjoy it!

Tomorrow will be a full day as we are planning on rising early and visiting Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park, after which we will be heading to Los Angeles for a visit with with Pastor Paul and his wife Ellen. Pastor Paul was leading our church (North Blendon Christian Reformed) when Katie went through her experience with leukemia and we're glad to have the opportunity to see him again. We're looking forward to a good visit and we're hoping that we'll be able to see some of the famous sights in L.A. A weekend in the big city should be about enough for us, though - there's quite a difference between Borculo and L.A.!!

It's likely that I'll not be posting tomorrow - I doubt that we'll get settled in at Pastor Pauls early enough to send anything to the blog.

Can't go any farther West!

Wednesday morning found us prepping to get underway after our visit with Brian & Kim. We had a great visit and our kids really didn't want to leave because they were having so much fun playing with their cousins. Thanks again, B&K, for an outstanding visit! Bev and I are hoping to make it back sometime, but next time will be on the motorcycle so we can enjoy some of the great roads out here.

We picked up our car from Performance Automotive in Modesto and all is well again. I highly recommend them to anyone who happens to need auto service while in the area!

We didn't actually hit the road until after lunch, but we were still able to make it out to the coast and ride Highway 1 from Monterey to San Simeon. Unfortunately the car repair put us a bit behind schedule, so we couldn't devote as much time this stretch of road as it deserves. We stopped at plenty of overlooks and such, but we were really hoping to have some more time to get down next to the ocean and maybe walk a bit of the beach somewhere. Even with a compressed timeline we were able to see plenty of views that make this road famous. Here's a few - visit my Flickr page for a bunch more:

Yosemite, 2nd visit

Monday brought another beautiful day and we decided to head back to Yosemite to try and see some of the things we missed on our first visit. We got a bit of a late start because we needed to bring our car to the shop before we could leave. Fortunately Kim was nice enough to let us use her van for the day. Our girls have really been enjoying visiting with Abby, so we took her along for the day.


We packed a lunch and the first thing we did when we got to the park was to find a picnic spot near the base of El Capitan and had ourselves a nice little picnic.


From our picnic spot the next goal was to make the run to Glacier Point. This area provides spectacular vistas overlooking the river valley area. It was cool at the upper elevations, but overall it was a gorgeous day.



The final spot we wanted to visit was the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias. The size of those trees continues to amaze me!


We exited the park at the South Entrance and headed back towards Brian and Kim's house. We were running a bit later than we wanted to and ended up making half the trip after dark. Unfortunately we didn't make the smartest decisions on what route to take and had to do way too many miles of mountain twisty's in the dark. It did make me want to come back here someday on the motorcycle, though!

Bein' mellow in CA

After our Saturday road trip to San Francisco, we decided that Sunday would be a mellow day. We attended church with our Brian and Kim and the kids and then spent the afternoon enjoying a beautiful California day. The kids set up a sprinkler under the trampoline and enjoyed bouncing around in the cool water.


They also set up a slip'n'slide and had fun with that for a while.

On Sunday evening Bev and I visited with my uncle Cal and aunt Mary Aukeman. They live about ten miles from where we are staying. It's was nice to be able to actually get to see where they live after years of having to build a mental picture.

Road trip in an American made car

Early on I posted about trying to make sure our Buick Rendezvous was properly prepped for this road trip. We had it checked over to try and find anything that should be fixed prior to leaving so that we wouldn't have to deal with it while on the road. Well, it turns out there were a couple of items we didn't handle properly.

Problem one is related to the fact that global warming is experiencing implementation issues. We hadn't experienced any weather warm enough to want to use the air conditioning until we reached California. When we turned it on, nothing happened. RATS! Fortunately it hasn't yet been warm enough for that to be a problem, but we're headed to the southwest and we know that we'll need A/C for that. Fortunately we were planning to stay with our nephew for a few days so he made an appointment at a local shop to get it checked out. Of course, being a GM vehicle, it turns out that the repair is going to be expensive (Is there any other kind of repair for an american made car?). The shop found that the A/C evaporator sprung a leak. This is going to be the third evaporator for this car - the first one was replaced under warranty when the car was two years old.

Problem two is suspension related. For the last month or two it seemed like the car didn't ride as nice as it did when newer, but an inspection didn't reveal anything obvious. I suspected that the rear shocks were going bad, but they didn't exhibit any of the classic signs like oil leaking out. After checking into some prices for shocks and finding that they must be made from precious metals, we decided that they were good enough for now. After riding to California with a fully loaded vehicle, we realized that something had to get fixed or we would go crazy, so while the car was in the shop getting the A/C fixed, we decided to have shocks put on as well. We're hoping that improves the ride just a bit.

If any american car company execs happen to be reading this, please burn it into your brains that ultimate success comes from quality products, not slick marketing campaigns...

I really do want to support American car companies, but it's getting increasingly harder to do when I compare the long term reliability of my Japanese vehicles to that of my American vehicles. There's nothing more irritating to me than to be doing major repairs (for a second time) on a car with with less than 100K miles. grrrrrr....

Picture outage...

Update: I upgraded to a pro Flickr account so no more upload limits... Now I can really bury y'all with pics! heheheheh

I goofed uploading pictures to my Flickr account and toasted my upload limit. I'll be trying to figure out the best way to get more pictures available, but until then, what you see is what you get...

Sorry!

San Francisco in a day

On Friday night we reached our nephew's house in Riverbank, CA and the girls were so happy to FINALLY get to their cousins' house! We settled in and made plans to visit San Francisco on Saturday. The weather was perfect for a visit to the bay (is our luck with the weather finally changing?). We didn't make any major plans other than to visit Fishermans' Wharf and a quick visit to the Golden Gate Bridge area. On the way there we decided it would be fun to ride the cable cars so we set about finding parking somewhere near the cable car starting point. NOTE: If you are planning on finding parking in SF on a beautiful Saturday in June, it's better not to have a tall vehicle that has a cargo pod on top - most parking garages have a clearance of 7 or maybe 8 feet.

We managed to find parking and worked our way to the cable cars. On the way we spotted these funky little machines that you can rent to tour the town:

After a considerable wait to get on the cable cars we had a fun ride down to the waterfront. I am fascinated by the engineering that went in to making the cable cars work.

Fishermans' Wharf was very busy and Katie ended up not liking the crowds a whole lot, but it certainly was a change of pace from the national parks that we've been visiting.

Of course, we had to make the obligatory trip down Lombard Street:

Good views of the city abound while driving around:


We made a quick visit to the Presario and then headed back. There was certainly a llot more that can be done in the city, but we decided to save most of them for another visit.