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Published: July 10th 2007
It’s hard to keep up with our blog when we stay in hotels that have Internet for $13 a day!! Sorry, but it’s not worth it Southern California was awesome. We met up with Lindsey’s
Uncle David in
Marina Del Rey. After driving down
Route 1 all day we were really hungry! We went out to dinner at a popular Mexican restaurant right down the street from his house. The food was so good! We’ve realized that a big part of why we like a place whether or not they have good restaurants!! After we stuffed ourselves full we walked along the canals in
Venice. The homes were absolutely amazing! A lot of them had windows that spanned the width of the wall and the height of the ceiling and they retracted so the homes were almost like open air homes when the windows were open, must be nice! We went back to the hotel that we were staying at and CRASHED. We were SO tired. In the morning Lindsey and David dropped off her car to get her brakes checked. We were worried after having been through the
Rockies, Tahoe, Yosemite, and down
Route 1. They picked me up
and we went to a little breakfast café right on the beach. We literally sat with our feet in the sand. From our table we could see the
Santa Monica Pier. The restaurant was right on Route 1 so we headed north to see the homes along the water in
Malibu. We drove to a spot where he went mountain biking a lot and hiked up so that we could see the view of the ocean and the city. I had never realized what the smog was really like until we went up there. The visibility was like a bad hazy day. The hike itself was really nice though. We drove back to Marina Del Rey and this time we went down to the beach. We finally made it to the
Pacific Ocean! We played around in the water for a bit before heading off to lunch and then for dessert at Coldstone Creamery. Lindsey was hoping that she would have a new cousin that day, but the baby decided to stay in the oven for a few more days! Still no word yet… we’re were hoping for 07/07/07, but no luck. Around 4 we started off to my
Uncle Bob and
Aunt Carmen’s house in
Rancho Cucamonga. Of course we hit TONS of traffic on the highway through
Los Angeles. There was no way to avoid it. We drove to
Cable Airport where my cousins were having a cookout before their Boy Scouts Court of Honor. The boys are all scouts and John was advancing in rank. It was cool to see the ceremony because we had never seen one before. The next morning we went over to
Cucamonga Canyon. The Canyon had a few small cliffs that you could jump off of into small pools. We hiked up river a while in the 100+ degree weather and cooled off in the waterfalls. Someone had put ropes up so that you could climb the waterfalls and the rock walls around them so we did that.
Michael told me that one of the waterfalls was too hard, so of course I tried it. I was almost to the top when my shoe fell off and I couldn’t brace myself with my bare foot on the rocks on the waterfall. I slipped off and fell, crashing into the rocks with my elbows and knees, getting an ugly burn the length of
my torso. Very easy way to get really hurt… if I had done something worse to my elbows besides just the pretty bruises that I got, it could have been bad news! Of course Michael then made it gracefully up the waterfall… apparently not as hard as he thought! About an hour later, Lindsey got herself tangled in one of the ropes and we had matching rope burns…OUCH! The hiking was awesome. We hadn’t really gotten a chance to get much exercise in the past few days, so it was certainly welcome! We went back to their house to get ready for
VEGAS!! We were really excited to hit up Sin City and see what kinds of stories we could come back with. We headed out pretty late, we left their house around 8pm, and it was a 4-hour drive. It was awesome to drive there in the dark. The stars were amazing. The moon was rising in the distance and we could see it come up over the desert. Before it made it to the horizon, it looked as if there was a city off in the distance. Turned out that it was the light from the moon reflecting
off of the low clouds. So beautiful! We arrived in Vegas around midnight, and I'm glad that we did. Talk about a city that never sleeps! The weather was gorgeous when we got there. I would say about 70 degrees. We checked into our hotel,
New York New York, got ready and hit up the casino. We gambled until about 3am. I was up $16 and Lindsey was about even by the time we went up to our room. Not bad for 3 hours of gambling in Vegas! The next morning we got up at 6am and went to our run…after 2 ½ hours of sleep and the hot (100 degrees) sun our 5k run was hard needless to say. We finished in 27:32 and 27:35. The hot weather made us second-guess whether or not we wanted to do the 10k in
New Mexico. At the time that I’m writing this, we’re driving to New Mexico… don’t know yet if we’ll even make it there in time or not! After the run we went back to the hotel, ate lunch, and then took the nap of our lives. It was so refreshing after the little sleep we had had the
night before. We got up and went to the pool. It was so crowded that we had a hard time trying to find a spot that was actually in the sun! The cement and the chairs were so hot from the sun that we kept going in the water to cool off, which if you know me, must have been hot, because I hardly ever go in the water. After enough time in the sun we went upstairs, showered, and headed out to the strip. Man, I know that I’ve said it a lot, but IT WAS HOT. Upwards of 110 when we went for the walk. We went into the
Monte Carlo, where we eventually got dinner, the Bellagio where we watched a few poker games,
Le Paris where we stood in line for dinner but eventually gave up because it just took so long. We would have walked more, but it really was just too dang hot. Back to the hotel to gamble! Before we went and gambled, we went on the roller coaster that went 67 mph. It was a lot of fun. When we got off, both of us had REALLY sweaty feet. I don’t know
if it was because I was so worked up from nerves about the roller coaster or if it was because it was so hot! Probably a mixture of both. We played the slots for a while before Lindsey switched to Roulette. We made a few friends there and basically stayed there for the rest of the night. When all was said and done, we were both down, but we sure had fun while it lasted! In the morning we decided to sleep for as long as we could to catch up on what we had lost in the city that really doesn’t ever sleep. We were really excited when we got up in the morning, because today we were going to see the
Grand Canyon! We had certainly been looking forward to that! We piled our stuff into our car, which has started to look like something picked it up and rolled it around for a while and then set it back down. Amazingly enough though, we still knew where everything is in that car. We started the drive out of Vegas and headed for
Grand Canyon, AZ. About 20 minutes into the drive, our air conditioner gave out. GREAT.
We found that it was much cooler to blast the AC while it was working and then keep the windows rolled up, even though it was 115 out that day. Opening the windows was just too hot. On the way, we stopped at the
Hoover Dam. This basically was just a resting stop for us, we changed, and walked around a bit, took a look at the dam, and then hopped back into the car to hopefully make it to the Canyon for sunset. Just outside
Grand Canyon National Park, we stopped in
Tusayan, AZ to look for a place to stay. Our plans changed a bit and we wanted to spend the next day looking around the canyon. After we found a place, we raced over to see the sunset. Everything we read about the canyon said that you wouldn’t even know that it was there until you were actually there standing at the edge. Wow was that true! It was crazy that the land around us driving up was forest and flat and then all of a sudden, canyons bigger than you have ever seen. We did get to see it a bit of the sunset, but we
couldn’t make it in time to see it actually setting over the canyon. Beautiful just the same. It really is something that everyone should go see once in their lifetime. I plan to get back and go camping for at least a week and do all the fun things like rafting, hiking, mule riding, etc. someday! We walked around outside the visitors center reading all of the information that they had up about the canyons. It was so peaceful out there. Not a sound except for the stillness around you. We decided to get up for the sunrise, but when the alarm went off at 5:15, we changed our minds! Of course . We got back to the canyon at about 10am. We took the free shuttle around to the different view points. We were equally as amazed this time as we were the day before. Just breathtaking. On the
South Rim, the elevation is 7,000 feet and you can see 10 miles across to the North Rim which is at 8,000 feet. At 3pm we left and went to the Tusayan General Store to pick up some things for our 10 hour car ride to
Roswell, New Mexico. At
this point we had decided that we would get to Roswell to get our race t-shirt, but that we weren’t actually going to run it. At about 5pm, we drove through the town of
Meteor Crater, NM. Apparently about 50,000 years ago, a meteor 150 feet in diameter crashed in the flat desert there and created a crater that was 700 feet deep and 3 miles in circumference. The place had a cool museum and it made for an interesting, spontaneous stop. As we drove we saw some pretty landscape. The sun during the sunset was huge and when the moon came out it was gigantic and a burnt orange color. It looked like an orange slice! We passed through
Albuquerque at about 11:30pm. It is in a valley and we were coming to it after going over a big hill. It felt as though we were in an airplane… we could see the city below us and nothing but black sky, stars, and the moon around us. Very cool experience. We drove until about 1:30am and stopped in a small run-down town called
Vaughn, New Mexico. It was the only place that we had seen for miles. Waking up
at 4:45am so that we could get our t-shirts was hard. We did it though. On the way there we saw a really bad accident that must have just happened 35 miles from Roswell and about 75 from Vaughn. Clearly someone had fallen asleep at the wheel. Because there were no towns near, we passed the Roswell fire trucks, ambulance and police cars speeding towards the scene. Definitely the drawback of living out in the middle of nowhere! We ended up getting to Roswell ½ hour before the race was supposed to start. It was then that we decided that we should in fact run the
Alien Chase 10k. Good thing we did!! We got 2nd and 3rd in our age group again! My mom called and told us that there was a little write up about the race in the Cape Cod Times, which was awesome! There was an alien festival going on while we were in Roswell and apparently it was covered nationally! We went to the UFO museum and research facility to see the alien fanatics and read about the crash of July 1947. Pretty interesting stuff actually. We left Roswell around noontime and headed for
Carlsbad Caverns. I’ve been wanting to go there since I learned about it in the 4th grade! It was so beautiful. The pictures definitely don’t do it justice. Thousands, probably more like millions, of years ago the area had been a reef at the bottom of an ocean and the caverns had been created during that time. They were discovered when pioneers thought they saw smoke coming from one of the nearby hills and went to investigate. What they found were thousands of bats coming out of a hole. They decided that if there were that many bats coming out of a hole, it must be one pretty big hole. One of the guys decided to go in the caverns and found miles of caves, there are still some that are being discovered today. We left the caverns totally beat from the only 3 ½ hours of sleep, lack of sleep from Vegas, and the 6 mile race that we had done that day. We headed for
Fort Stockton, Texas where we were going to shack up for the night before heading out to
Stonewall, Texas where a friend of mine has a winery.
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Leslie
non-member comment
Sweet trip!
Man, Heather, you and Lindsey are hitting ALL the highlights! Wow! I love reading about your trip...It's like going with you, but I don't have to ride 10 hours at a time in your messy car! Can't wait to hang out when you get back!!! Love, Les