Road trip USA: Conclusion

And we're back.

Last legs
(Bears gone wild)

Viva Las Vegas. I've been to Sin City before, but while I was underage. That's not to say that I even gambled this time, but it was still fun to go around the casinos. I actually wanted to play some poker, but the buy-ins seemed too high. That, or I just wasn't looking hard enough. There were also poker games where you played against the house, which were blatant ripoffs that should be well avoided.

The World Series of Poker was going on at the time, but I didn't bother going because the two-block walk to the Rio in the excruciatingly humid Nevada desert heat was just too much, especially since it wasn't the main event yet. Instead, we spent most of our time indoors, checking out casinos and shops, staying where the air was artificially cooled. We had a great lunch at the Harley Davidson restaurant, where Harleys both new and old were displayed on platforms mechanically dragged around through the ceiling of the shop and around the walls. It was quite cool.

I had a cheap prime rib for dinner at Circus Circus, where we were staying, and Liza managed to earn a cool $1.95 afterwards from the slot machines after careful strategies involving one dollar notes. She had $3.60 at one point but got too greedy. After Liza's gamblathon, we were both pretty tired from the day's travels (mainly the walking), so we finally called it a day and crashed in our hotel room.

The next day started later than planned, and the entire day turned out to be a mission. Still tired from the day before, we checked out of Circus Circus at around 8:30 and began to make our way for Sequoia National Park. The journey was marred by various stops (mainly for gas or food), and it took just over 7 hours to reach the national park. The roadwork within the park didn't make moving any quicker, so we slowly made our way to the first major attraction, the General Sherman Tree, the largest living tree in the world (in terms of trunk volume).

We had a side-quest of trying to spot either a bear or a cougar within the park, and had no such luck for the first couple of hours. At about 6 hunger had struck us hard, and we were forced to stop at the first place that served food, Wuksachi Lodge. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise for two reasons. First of all, the food was magnificent. I had the Trout Paccata, and it was worth every penny (though it literally cost me all that I had left in my wallet). Second, because of the delay in travel, we managed to be in the right place at the right time when Liza spotted bears above a stretch of straight road.

I quickly pulled over, slowly reversed a little, and there they were... bears... in what seemed to be some sort of mating ritual (so to speak). It was quite funny. The first time we ever see a bear in the wild and they're going at it right in the open. We couldn't stop laughing about it until we reached King's Canyon National Park (Sequoia National Park's twin park) where Liza promptly told the clerks at the Grant Grove Lodge about the bears. The clerks also found it highly amusing.

Now knowing that bears were around, we were kind of half-scared that a bear would come and destroy our car in search for food if we were to camp in the campgrounds or something like that. We also didn't have exact change for the campground self-registration, so we decided to move on towards Yosemite and hopefully pull over at a highway rest stop to catch some sleep. Unfortunately the highway wasn't a very big one, and didn't have any places to rest like a huge interstate would have, so we ended up at a motel in Fresno, which was en route to Yosemite. We figured that although we were paying a bit more than what we would have for camping, we would still have the benefit of being much closer to Yosemite the next day.

Today was the final day of the trip. It was actually supposed to be the second-last day, but we decided to drive back a day earlier to save on a night's accommodation. This also gave us more time to get our stuff out of the car and give it a bit of a clean before handing it back to the rental company. The day started off like most others on this road trip - with a drive to the next location. The final stop before heading back happened to be Yosemite National Park on a particularly warm day.

I guess it's not really unseasonal for it to be hot during the summer, but I class any day over 30 degrees Celsius to be uncomfortable. Today it peaked at 36, and I sure felt it, especially with my last clean shirt being black in colour. Still, I persevered and enjoyed the sights the park had to give me. It was a beautiful forest in a valley overlooked by massive granite monoliths, the most outstanding of which were El Capitan, the largest granite monolith in the world, and the Half Dome, which is a huge piece of rock that looks much like its name suggests.

Bridalveil Falls and Yosemite Falls were also nice, but the lack of water took away from their attractiveness. It was a similar story for Mirror Lake. It would have been nice to make the short trek over to the small lake, but we figured that it wouldn't really have too much water due to the drought that the area had been having this year, and the heat didn't really encourage a 2-mile round trip. We only spent a few hours looking around, and decided to try to make it back to the bay area by sundown.

The last hour or so of the drive provided much excitement. The on-board computer signaled that we had low fuel coming into the city, and we were trying to guesstimate how much we would need to put into the tank to make it back to the house, then back to the rental car company tomorrow. It felt really close in the end because the computer had changed its mileage range prediction from a number to simply saying "low", which could have meant anything from 40 miles or below. We did happen to make it back to the house, but refilled a dollar's worth of gas at the nearby station just to make sure it didn't run out on the way to the airport.

It feels good to be back in familiar territory. Being on the road for a long time was fun, but it sure had its limitations. Many a time did we run out of battery for iPods and thus ran out of music for the long drives. Many a time did we go without showers or flushing toilets for hours, even days. Many a time did we run into random logs on the road. Ok, maybe that was only once, but yeah. It was definitely an enriching experience, and has added a lot to my general knowledge base, not to mention some great memories. The one highlight for me that really stands out was seeing Bryce Canyon for the first time. When I saw the Grand Canyon as we drove into the park, my reaction was, "wow, that's cool." For Bryce Canyon I almost had to do a double-take. It was just so incredible. The stampede at Space Mountain and the bear sighting were also great.

Road trip USA overview

Days on the road: 12
National parks visited: 6
Car breakdowns: 1
Theme song/s: U2 - Where the Streets Have No Name, Steppenwolf - Born to Be Wild

Well, I guess that's it for now. We're headed to the east coast on Saturday (by plane this time), with Chicago being our first stop. Updates shall come as often as my laziness and net connection decides.

Oh, and a big congratulations to the Anaheim Ducks for being the first western conference team to win the Stanley Cup. They played well throughout the entire season, including the playoffs, and beat a very good opponent in the Ottawa Senators (whom I was backing by default since they were the last Canadian team left) and thoroughly deserved to win this year.