Honeymoon Day 23: Zion National Park

On the morning we traveled to Zion National Park, my yin awoke at 5am to the sound of a hundred fifty Chinese gamblers in the hotel lobby awaiting a Vegas-bound bus. I had seen two behemoth charter buses in the parking lot the night before, but I was too tired to consider what this might signal for the next morning – the last thing we wanted to hear after twelve hours of driving and four hours of sleep were pre-dawn caffeinated ejaculations in Mandarin and/or Cantonese.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that this inauspicious start was inversely related to the day that followed. Accepting a partial refund of our hotel bill and pocketing three bananas from the breakfast bar as reparations, we drove to:

We first heard of the park from Andrew and Allison, who told us that we should skip Death Valley – and even Sequoia – rather than missing out on Zion. This proved to be some of the wisest counsel we received over the course of the trip because both my yin and I (much like Lauryn Hill fifteen years earlier) fell in love with Zion:

The park is in southern Utah and allows in only a limited number of vehicles at any time to cut down on the traffic and pollution within the walls of the canyon:

Which were formed eons ago by the Virgin River:

north fork of the Virgin River

Its landscape is unlike any other place we saw (or have ever seen for that matter) with small groves of cottonwood trees alongside the riverbanks and beautiful wildflowers growing from the scorched earth:

There were also caves in the sheer cliffs:

author, after scaling up the wall

And stunning cactus blooms, which never ceased to grab my attention:

Our friend Francis, whom we met at Yosemite, recommended two trails to us: the Narrows and Angel's Landing. The first of these trails was closed, however, due to the snow melt that rendered portions of the trail impassable. So, we made our way to Angel's Landing, undoubtedly one of the most unique hikes we've ever taken:

approaching the summit

The reason for Angel's Landing popularity is the final half mile, which takes at least an hour to complete and requires that hikers climb across a narrow, spin-like formation that resembles a two-humped camel. On either side are 1500-foot drops, and at times it is necessary to use a chain to haul oneself up the incline:

my yin, mid-climb

We later learned that two people died on Angel's Landing as recently as last winter, but the views from the summit are stunning, affording panoramic vistas of the canyons that stretch in all directions:

view to the south

view to the north

There was even one of my beloved cacti bravely growing on the ledge:

from a distance...

and a closer look

Inspired by the flora flourishing amid such harsh conditions, I did my best impression of the tree behind me:

(after finding a relatively level spot)

And a stranger was kind enough to take this picture of my yin and I:

After a second, easier hike, we headed back to our campsite:

my yin journals into the sunset...

Which stood in the shadow of a giant rock formation known as the Watchman:

We slept well that night and dreamed about the canyons that would follow in the coming days...

Honeymoon Day 22: Fresno to St. George

We arrived in Fresno around 11pm and pulled into the parking lot of a Super 8 Motel. While I checked us in, my yin watched a prostitute stroll by on the road running in front of the motel. Fresno is the agricultural center of California, which makes it a mecca for long-haul truck drivers, and one can only assume that this concentration of lonely, road-weary men also makes it a well-prostituted area.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that the motel room was both clean and quiet, and we got a great night's sleep before leaving early the next morning. On Allison and Andrew's recommendation, we had decided to go to Zion National Park, and along the way we wanted to see the massive trees in:

While the redwood is renowned as the world's tallest tree, the sequoia is both the largest in circumference and overall volume:

my tree-hugging yin

In fact, this specific tree, named the General Sherman, is the single largest in the world:

over two thousand years old

Walking around in a grove of these giant trees left both of us speechless, and it was hard to believe that such a massive being could come from such a small source:

before

after

After leaving Yosemite, I had told my yin that at least I didn't have to worry about being eaten by a bear anymore; but on our walk down to see the General Sherman this is what we saw twenty feet from the path:

an adolescent (brown) black bear

This was far closer than any of our other bear encounters, and the above image was taken without the benefit of a telephoto lens. Wanting an even closer look, I sprinted back to our vehicle in the parking lot to retrieve it (a decision that would prove to be unwise), but by the time I made it back the bear had retreated back behind some boulders:

I think he probably wanted a siesta...

When we finally returned to the car, I realized that our car keys had fallen out of my shorts' pocket. Luckily, I had the foresight to wire a spare key to the car's undercarriage before we left Florida, just in case of this type of situation. Nonetheless, the lack of keyless entry was a slight inconvenience, and I spent the rest of the day doubly paranoid about locking ourselves out of the car.

Leaving the park, we got stuck in an hour-long delay because of road construction, and it soon became clear that we wouldn't be able to make it to Zion. We called ahead to St. George, Utah, and booked another cheap motel room. When the the flag man (woman, actually) allowed us to continue down the mountain, we zipped our way through the rest of central California. These are some of the things we saw:

wind farms

oil fields

and lady bugs

One of my favorite sights, though, was this road sign just outside of Bakersfield.

I emailed it to my grandmother

When the sun went down, we had only made it as far as Barstow, and I had random snippets of Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas running around my head. We were about to enter "bat country", the winds were blowing warmly across the night, and a full moon loomed over the Mojave Desert:

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We sped across the empty lands of southeastern California and passed Las Vegas just before midnight, arriving in the land of the Mormons sometime after 1am...

the image of Las Vegas receding into the past...

Honeymoon Days 20-21: Big Sur to Yosemite

My yin and I left Big Sur on a Tuesday morning, and rather than taking Highway 1 back north to Monterey, we opted for a tiny road – barely visible on the map – that cut east across the Santa Lucia mountains. There were steep banks on either side of it, no guardrail, and the road afforded some of the most magnificent views of the Pacific we saw during our travels:

Unbeknownst to us, it also cut straight through a military base, and there were intermittent signs that warned civilians about the dangers of being shot:

like this one, for example

Although I'm sure we were in no danger, it felt pretty odd. The road was completely deserted, and we passed by bombed out husks of cars and small sheds that had obviously been used for target practice.

Luckily, we traversed Fort Hunter Liggett unscathed and eventually made our way to an equally deserted road that brought us to California's central valley. This dirt road obviously existed to connect farmers on one side of the mountain range to the other, and we were grateful that we had filled up our gas tank before taking it:

the car morphed from black to brown by the time we reached asphalt

By lunchtime we were in San Juan Bautista, which is home to a famous mission used as one of the locations in Hitchcock's Vertigo:

This is the hallway Madeleine ran through:

And here is the bell tower that sounded her death:

Happily, this excursion was more than just situationist nostalgia, and I was truly taken by the beauty of the building and its surrounding grounds. Constructed in 1702, it still functions as an actual Catholic Chirch:

the main worship chamber

a groovy idol

a giant cactus

After finishing our lunch we continued onward towards Yosemite, but along the way we learned that every accommodation within 100 miles of the park was booked, and that the lodging within the park had been booked since they opened the reservation system at the start of the year. This year's record snowpack (twice what it is normally) had caused all of the alpine areas of the park to be closed. This caused two things: 1) There was only one walk-in campground; and 2) the waterfalls were beyond spectacular. These items, combined with the fact that California's schools had just begun summer break meant that the park was teemed with tourists.

My yin and I decided to use the city of Merced as a staging ground, calling AAA and finding a "home hostel" that could provide lodging for the night. We called the number and spoke to a woman named Jan, who told us that we could check in after 5:30 that evening. This gave us a little time to kill, and we used it to do our laundry, which had reached a critical level of filth since leaving Eugene:

In the parking lot, I was a approached by a tall stranger driving a cargo van. He told me that the city of Merced was 1/3 full of illegal immigrants, 1/3 full of drug addicts, and 1/3 full of crazy people. I nodded in agreement, being that his very presence proved at least 1/3 of his theorem.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that we ate ridiculously good Chinese food that night for the ridiculously cheap price of $11.89. It was easily one of the best meals we had on the road, and I have no idea what such a fine restaurant is doing in such a nowhere place.

Wait a minute, this is also beside the point.

The points is actually that we spent the night in Jan (and her husband Larry's) home hostel that night, which is basically a regular house that's been outfitted with bunk beds in the spare bedrooms. Fortunately my yin and I got a room to ourselves, and we spent the night to Larry telling stories around the kitchen table. As Paramahansa Yogananda once wrote, he was "one of those long-winded fellows whose conversational powers ignore time and embrace eternity."

Larry, Jan, the dog, and a German student named Bertram

We left Larry's before 7am the next morning, drove to Yosemite, and found ourselves in a preposterously long line for camping. We were told people had been lining up since 6am, and they ran out of sites long before we made our way to the ranger booth.

This was probably for the best, though, because Yosemite is like nothing so much as the National Park equivalent of Disney World (or Land). People were literally shoulder to shoulder everywhere we went, and after the empty peacefulness of Big Sur it was simply too much to process. My yin and I decided to make the best out of the rest of the day, then leave at sundown.

First we hiked up to Mirror Lake, which I wanted to see because of this famous photograph by Ansel Adams:

I even did my best to replicate it from memory, but it didn't quite come out right because I forgot which orientation he had used:

By now it was getting hot, and we hadn't seen any evidence of the alleged snow that had shut down most of the park. Wanting to investigate these claims, we decided to hike to the summit of Yosemite Falls, which is the tallest waterfall in North America:

the water falls nearly a half mile (2,425 feet)

This was easily the hardest hike we had ever done: 3.6 miles one-way, straight up. It was challenging (and blistering) for both of us, but provided some incredible views of Half Dome:

Yosemite's most famous rock formation

And stunning double rainbows that Mardou had told us to look for:

Looking at the distant peaks, it also confirmed that there was, in fact, snow at the park's higher elevations:

my yin and I at the summit of Yosemite Falls

The above picture was taken by a hiker named Francis, who had already hiked to the summit once that day because he was "in training" for an upcoming event at Mt. Shasta. One of the pleasures of this trip has been meeting people like Francis, and he gave us tips as to what hikes we should take at the other parks we planned to visit. Sadly, we didn't take a photograph of him:

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Incredibly, there was a group of rock climber on the next peak over, who were walking a tight rope across the gorge. The scope of our own achievement seemed suddenly less impressive, and my yin and I watched in wonder at the daredevils walking across the sky:

really?

The hike down was almost as challenging as the hike up had been, and at times the spray from the falls was so heavy that it collected in the leaves of trees and fell to the ground as rain. Upon our return to the valley, we took the shuttle back to our car and left via the southern entrance. Although it was incredibly dark, our fancy new camera allowed us to capture Yosemite's famous "tunnel view" as a parting image:

exposure time=3.2 seconds

We set our sights for a cheap motel in Fresno, and took a final photograph just as nightfall descended:

last image before leaving Yosemite

Honeymoon Days 18-19: Big Sur

My yin and I left San Francisco a day earlier than we had initially planned. We came to this decision upon the realization that, while a lovely city, it is still a city nonetheless and subject to all the annoyances that occur when too many people crowd themselves into a place too small to hold them.

As I've gotten older, I've learned that there are more sublime pleasures than the city has to offer, and no matter how exciting or hip an urban center is, its ability to entertain relies more upon its capacity for distraction than awe. With this in mind, we headed on down the coast to Big Sur, stopping along the way to pick some strawberries on Highway 1:

This was easily the most radical roadside fruit stand I have ever seen, and inside there were posters of Caesar Chavez and signs stating that all of the workers who picked berries there were union members. Best of all, the whole thing was done on the honor system. Rather than a clerk, each customer made his or own change from a tray of cash at the counter:

Since we had changed our plans, we didn't have a place to stay that night and rolled into a campsite off the beaten path just as darkness descended. This was our first night of camping, and it was more challenging than I had anticipated to set up our tent in the dark. In spite of this, we managed and woke the next morning to see the fog filling up the valley below us:

After breaking camp we continued onward, but unfortunately the Henry Miller Library was closed for a private event. Undeterred, we drove on.

(it was a Camper Van Beethoven concert of all things)

Everything was enshrouded by a dense fog at this point, and although it made the ocean invisible at times, it also gave everything a palpable sense of mystery:

By the time we reached the home of the elephant seals north of San Luis Obispo, things had cleared almost completely. We stopped to watch the seals, which seem to spend most of their time either fighting one another:

Or snuggling:

much like humans, no?

We reached Hearst Castle at noon, which I had insisted we visit even from the early stages of our planning. My interest in William Randolph Hearst comes from two things: 1) he was allegedly the inspiration for Citizen Kane; and 2) his granddaughter is one of my all-time favorite kidnap-victim-turned-bank-robbing-terrorists.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that Hearst Castle is beyond compare, making even the Vanderbilts' Biltmore Estate seem insufficient in comparison.

my yin at the entrance to one of the guest houses

Hearst started building his palace on his family's land as soon as his parents died, and he didn't stop construction on it until his own death nearly thirty years later. It is simultaneously grand and gaudy, including everything from a tennis court:

To a movie theater:

He had an outdoor pool adorned with Corinthian columns:

(and by "Corinthian", I mean they were actually from Corinth)

And an indoor pool with real Roman ruins:

In his dining room he had freaky, chimerical statues from medieval Europe:

And used confession chairs as wallpaper:

He even had a special cage built for his polar bear:

yes, polar bear

Overwhelmed by these exorbitant displays of wealth, my yin and I found ourselves looking much like the statues surrounding us:

my modest yin

discus anyone?

don't pull your hair out!

By the end of the tour, the fog was only a memory and our drive back north allowed us countless views of the stunningly blue Big Sur coastline:

Along the way we took a short hike to a waterfall:

Before finally setting up camp once more at Limekiln State Park, which gets its name from the wood-fired kilns that once turned redwoods into lime:

you see what they did there?

Exhausted by the tour and lulled by the sound of waves crashing on the cliffs below our campsite, my yin decided to take a nap:

I soon joined her.

We took another short hike after our nap and returned to camp just in time for sunset. To get a better view, I scurried across the slippy rocks where the stream flows into the ocean, carrying our brand new fancy camera. My yin did not approve:

Thankfully there were no missteps, and the images speak for themselves:

sunset at Limekiln

a solitary bird

a colony of purple flowers