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While perusing the internet this evening, I noticed a blog post from a user whose picture was of a Barack Obama campaign COOKIE. Needless to say, I found this fantastic and sought a picture out to share, and I found one, but I also discovered that there is an entire Flickr pool dedicated to photos of Obama cookies (and cupcakes). DELICIOUS!
I find myself in the office on Sunday, which means I am neither having a lazy Sunday nor getting to the task of editing photos and writing up the rest of the Southwest trip. In time, lovelies. For now, I’ll just pass on the music recommendations I’ve received, and heeded, from friends this past week. Armed with a lot of coffee, music recommendations, and a shiny new account at last.fm, I’m not finding this quite so painful as it could be.
- The Velvet Underground & Nico (on last.fm here; this proved to be perfect for my mood earlier this week)
- The 88 (on last.fm here; I listened to “Over and Over,” but “Kind of Light” will be playing next time I need an upbeat pick-me-up playlist)
- The Stone Roses (on last.fm here, but “The Second Coming” is the only album I’ve found so far with complete full tracks)
Perhaps more appropriate for your lazy Sunday is some Pop Procrastination in the form of Britney Spears’ new music video. Watch at your own risk; the song, “Womanizer,” is in my opinion both terrible and terribly catchy, and you may end up with an endless chorus of Britney’s digitally altered voice calling you a womanizer (baby). The video itself isn’t really all that great, either; I think the point of it is, “Hey y’all, I’m not crazy anymore, and I’m also hot, so here’s a video where I don’t have dead, vacant eyes, I’m not wearing a bright pink wig and talking in a bad British accent, and also? I’m kind of naked!” Apparently youtube has flagged the video as suggestive, as well, prompting login requirements, so here’s a link from MTV. Bottom line: I dislike the song, I’m “meh” on the video, but I am genuinely happy that Ms. Spears is back in the game. You go, Brit-Brit.
It’s going to take me a few more days to whip my Grand Canyon photos into shape so that I can give you a long, blathering recap with pretty pictures interspersed. So for now, let me whine tell you about what we’ll call Day 2.5 of our trip, the part we spent in Tusayan, between about midnight and 11 am on Day 3.
So, for the record, it is my official opinion that the best place to stay when visiting the Grand Canyon is in one of the Grand Canyon Lodges, right along the South Rim. Next time, I have my sights set on El Tovar, which opened in 1905 (!) and has hosted the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Albert Einstein. It’s a couple hundred dollars a night at El Tovar…for a queen room with a terrace overlooking the canyon.
Of course, staying at El Tovar or any of the other lodges requires advance booking, so the last-minute, barely-a-week-in-advance planning precluded us staying there. In fact, it precluded us staying at most places in the vicinity of the Grand Canyon. Tusayan is the other usual place to stay close to the canyon; it’s close to the park’s south entrance, and features a strip of hotels and other tourist trappings. There was only one hotel in Tusayan that seemed to have rooms left: The Grand Hotel Tusayan. Even with a AAA discount, it was more expensive than the canyon-view rooms in El Tovar; it was also twice as much as the next-most-expensive hotel we stayed in, and three times as much as our suite two blocks from the strip in Vegas. But I wanted to be able to get to the park for sunrise without getting up at 3am, so I booked the Grand Hotel with the thought that sunrise over the Grand Canyon would be worth it. And then, since it was already obscenely expensive, I paid the extra $20 for a room with a balcony.
Well.
As we pulled into the Grand Hotel at 1am, after driving over 400 miles, I announced that I was no longer willing to get up at 5am or 6am or any other time prior to sunrise in order to get to the canyon after all. Instead, I declared, we would get our money’s worth from the hotel by sleeping in and enjoying its many amenities. Swimming! Lounging on the balcony! Tiny bottles of shampoo and conditioner!
Well.
Note for the Grand Hotel, Tusayan:
Please observe the following picture, from Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, of a balcony:
Our “balcony,” on the other hand, was on the ground floor and separated from the asphalt of the parking lot by only a small strip of grass and some sort of fake rock structure. Not. A. Balcony.
The rest of the $255 stay at the Grand Hotel featured a lot of sleeping, no breakfast included in the room, no breakfast for under $10, and a used washcloth left by some previous occupant hung over the shower curtain rod. The room itself was nice, and it didn’t take us long to get into the Grand Canyon, but somehow the 20 extra dollars for the non-balcony with the non-scenic view was the dealbreaker.
There was a lot of hemming and hawing at this point in our trip about what to do with Day 2: Zion National Park, or Bryce Canyon? Zion National Park was our original plan: it was a more reasonable drive from St. George, and we’d bought dry bags in preparation for hiking the Narrows, through the Virgin River. But on Day 2, following the reading of guidebooks, the advice of several others, and a stubborn curiosity about these things they call “hoodoos,” I announced that I wanted to head for Bryce, and then stop at Zion if we had time on our way back south.
We took the highway up to Cedar City, and then drove along Utah 14 and then U.S. 89. It was a beautiful day and we were still awed by the scenery, so we stopped several times to walk around riverbeds, gape at red cliffs, and photograph scenic views:
Shortly before we reached Bryce, along Utah 12, we got an unexpected treat: Red Canyon. Red Canyon, in fact, had the reddest red rocks we saw in Utah.
So, in short, we were already overdosing on beautiful scenery before we got into Bryce Canyon.
Since we went to Bryce relatively spur-of-the-moment, we didn’t really plan out our time well. Instead, we followed the advice of our Lonely Planet Southwest USA Guide and drove the length of the scenic road through Bryce Canyon, out to Rainbow Point, and worked our way back (if you’re interested, there’s a large .pdf map of the route here). It took longer than we expected, and aside from a brief jaunt along the rim trail between Ponderosa Point and Agua Canyon, we mostly followed the fairly unsatisfying strategy many other tourists were using: drive to scenic overlook, park, take photos, repeat, repeat, repeat. Our favorites were the Natural Bridge and the views of the amphitheater from around Bryce Point, but the photos from Rainbow Point are also gorgeous. See a slideshow of nine of my favorite photos, including this one:
We saw a few other random but interesting things in Bryce: this little guy (no more than a couple of inches), a sign warning us that a bear has been frequenting the trail we were on, and controlled burns, part of the ongoing “prescribed fire” at Bryce.
By the time we left Bryce, it was getting relatively late, we hadn’t eaten anything since the unsatisfying breakfast, and we had another goal for the day that had been discovered that morning in the aforementioned Lonely Planet book: Kanab, Utah’s “Little Hollywood.” For Andy, who is generally fascinated with Westerns and cowboy-hat American culture, Frontier Movie Town’s advertised dinner avec movie gunfight re-enactment on old Western movie sets was pretty exciting. But times had changed at Frontier Movie Town since our guide was written, and now the dinner and re-enactment is primarily for busloads of tourists. So we had dinner at Nedra’s Too; as the guidebook claimed, the salsa was delicious, but we found the rest of the food and the service less fantastic. Then we headed back to Frontier Movie Town to wander the old movie sets and await the impending arrival of a tour bus (you can see Andy’s pictures of the old sets at Frontier Movie Town on Flickr).
And then, this is what happened: a bus full of French tourists arrived and descended upon Frontier Movie Town. Staffers came out with their cowboy hats and fake guns, and then ushered the tourists out onto the set, dressed them up as cowboys and Indians, and helped them re-enact a brief scene from a Western movie. And so there we are, in Southern Utah at sunset, watching a bunch of French tourists run around an old movie set doing some extremely politically incorrect impersonations of Native Americans and clambering around on hobby horses. Talk about a sentence you never expect to write.
Once the show was over and the requisite tacky souvenirs purchased, we got back on the road for a miserably long drive from Kanab to our hotel in Tusayan, south of the Grand Canyon. The thing is, it would have been a gorgeous drive…if it had been light out. Instead, we drove through Marble Canyon, across the Navajo Bridge, and along the eastern section of the South Rim of the Grand Canyon with views of nothing but the inky black night. The moon was starting to rise over the Grand Canyon when we drove through, which probably would have been beautiful had we stopped; but not knowing when it would fully rise, where to view it from, or how much longer I could keep driving before falling asleep and inadvertently driving us over the Canyon edge…it didn’t seem quite worth it. I got stopped by a park ranger and told to drive slowly because of lots of wildlife in the area; it wasn’t until we were out of the park and almost in Tusayan that an enormous elk walked into the road right in front of us.
Since it was well after midnight at this point, I’ll write about our stay in Tusayan tomorrow, as part of Day Three!
