Trips Gone By

We are getting ready to take another road trip - heading south to visit the beautiful parks of Southern Utah and combining that with a long-overdue trip to Tucson to visit family. I generally do a lot of research for road trips, so I've been perusing the maps and looking to the Internet for information on hiking trails and accommodations, best routes and road conditions etc. I'm on Information Overload. So my thoughts have turned to past trips...

Mark and I have actually visited Zion and Bryce National Parks before - both in the same day and both in just a few hours. We were in each park just long enough to find the visitor center and use the bathroom, and to walk briskly to the nearest 'overlook' and take a few pictures - presumably so we could at least see it when we got home. We're hoping that this isn't THAT sort of trip.

(Interestingly, my mother recalled the same sort of trip on HER only visit to Bryce - years ago when we were kids and my little brother fell asleep in the car just as we arrived and she stayed with him while my father and sisters and I raced to the edge of the canyon to see what there was to see. We were back in the car before my brother woke up and she never did see anything but the parking lot!)

Mark and I had such a quick trip through Zion - I've actually done this twice in my life - that I didn't realize until I started looking at maps of the parks themselves recently that there is another road deeper into the park.

(The first time I was there as an adult we were camping in the back of a pick-up truck and there was a fierce thunder storm that rattled around the rocks high above us and I was truly frightened that they would all crash in on us - the booming of the thunder was that bad!)

And speaking of trips gone by... one year we spent months planning a camping trip from Alaska down the Washington, Oregon and California coast and by the time we actually went, 2 other families - friends of ours - had decided to go with us (uninvited) - both traveling in considerably more elegant and functional RV accommodations than our pick-up truck provided. Every night I struggled with the gear and the 'bed' and the cooking supplies and the rain while the rest of them looked on in amusement from their RV sofas.

It was on a family camping trip to Yellowstone in 1962 that we decided to extend our reach to include the Seattle World's Fair. (It rained in Yellowstone and my uncle and aunt and grandmother were with us - and they were planning to go to the fair, so we joined them rather than endure the rain.) This trip has been discussed recently in the family (since I live in the Seattle area now) and we all have varying memories of it. The general consensus is that we did ride up the elevator in the Space Needle, although I only remember looking up at it, not out from it. We all remember that my oldest sister lost her contact lens on the sidewalk somewhere around the monorail and actually found it again a while later - by stepping on it. I remember the International Food Court and also remember that there was a lot of focus on 'the future' (read a Wikipedia article about it) in an exhibition on The World of Tomorrow and 'a 21-minute tour of the future' - and a Bubbleator, basically threatening us with a dire future if the Cold War ended badly. My mother says she mostly remembers waiting for my Grandmother to make it through the lines to the bathroom.

What we don't remember is that Elvis made a movie at and about the fair. We didn't see him either.

We actually made it to the New York World's Fair two years later as well. I have black and white pictures of the big sculptural 'world globe' that was the centerpiece of that fair like the Space Needle was the symbol of the Seattle fair. Mark was quite surprised when I went and found those pictures a week or so ago while watching the movie 'Men in Black' on TV - a movie in which the fair site and that globe are a big part of the setting and plot. (I surprise myself sometimes too.)

Anyway, back to Southern Utah. Our trip will include Zion, Bryce, Capital Reef, Arches and Canyonlands and the roads and sights in between. We're pretty excited. THIS time we're going to actually see it first hand.