Day 9: Monday, September 10th

“No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” – Lin Yutang

Today's planned route: St. George, UT to San Diego, CA; Goin’ home is pretty much a straight shot down I-15!

They say that a fool and his money are soon parted… the first stop out of St. George after an hour and a half of crossing the Nevada desert is Las Vegas. In tribute to my cousin Gerry, who retired from the Palace Station sports book 5 years ago, I stop there to try my luck with the slots. OK, well it’s close to the freeway, maybe that’s why I stop, figuring to win the $300K progressive jackpot that will allow me retire when I show up at work tomorrow morning.

Once I plop myself down in front of a slot machine, I become dismayed by the “progress” that gambling joints have made in the digital age. Last time I went through this town for any longer than 15 minutes, I encountered the electric push button changes that replaced the standard levers on slot machines. This time, I find that not only can I not use my spare coins because they’ve covered the coin slots with chrome steel plates (so tell me what’s the sense of putting coins into a jar now?), but if I want to win the progressive jackpot, I have to be a card-carrying member of the Palace Station club.

I slip a twenty into the bill feeder, and only minutes later I’ve played through it. One more attempt, I think, to at least pay for gas on the trip. I saunter over to another likely machine, but that $20 bill goes pretty quickly too. It seems like only seconds ago I walked up to the machine to feed it.

With my $3 winnings on the way to Zion, I am now $37 down. I guess I’ll keep my badge for a while yet and not mail it to the address posted on the back. I’m back on the road in hopes of beating the rush-hour traffic in Rancho Bernardo, four hours away.

There is more traffic between Vegas and San Diego on the drive home than any combination of the Utah and Arizona back roads that I’ve taken over the 7 days of the tour. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many trucks, often slowing down the rest of us by passing one another (you’ve been there!) and at one time through Victorville all three lanes of a three lane southbound track of I-15 have trucks attempting to get ahead of one another.

SIDE TRIP: To pass the time on a long trip, I sometimes mentally keep track of the license plates I see along the way. I won't bore you with the detail, but my count on this trip was 42 states, with Alaska being the star find. I was surprised to see (besides the obvious southwest states' plates) a good number of folk from Wisconsin, out to escape their summer, I suppose. Oh, the humidity of it all!

I thought I learned from the last trip home from Denver, but I guess I haven’t. I elect to take the I-215 south fork towards Riverside off of I-15, especially since the northbound track worked well on the way into Nevada a week ago. And for the second time in a year, I encounter a traffic jam trying to merge off of I-215 onto I-215 (no typo, the southbound freeway has an exit to get onto an on-ramp to a freeway with the same designation where the CA 60 splits it east and west). And again, as I did last year after waiting for 10 minutes in bumper-to-bumper 5 mph traffic, I decide to take the on-ramp to Hwy 60 west to where I know it crosses I-15. So despite Mona’s constant yelling at me to make a U-turn at the next opportunity to get back to I-215, I go the 10 western miles out of the way to avoid the mess I left behind.

One other traffic snarl on I-15 between Fallbrook and Valley Center keeps me in gridlock at 3-5 mph for 20 minutes, with no obvious cause once the traffic gets back underway at speed. Probably the dog-in-the-road theory happening here, the idea that a dog crossing the road causes the oncoming traffic to brake, and then there’s a ripple effect that can last for an hour from traffic that comes up behind.

So maybe there was an accident an hour ago.

Now I’m coming to the end of the road, figuratively as well as literally, home again to San Diego. Some reflections on the trip I’ve just experienced:

I like traveling during the week after Labor Day. There is overall a lack of crowds (except for buses carrying European tourists) because most families with school-age children are back at home in their routine, easing the park population. Additionally, it’s usually a nice time of year seasonally, as the temperatures are going down (well, maybe not in the Southwest anymore), and the chance of precipitation in most areas of the country is sparse.

I have truly enjoyed the scenery in Southeastern Utah. Even the drives between the NPs are exceptionally scenic, yet visually diverse as far as landscape formations and colors and flora. After I got used to the rhythm of going from park to park (and made it past the first day's long drive), I settled into the driving part pretty well.

One good thing about traveling by car is that you can take a lot more stuff with you than when you fly. I was able to pack a sweater for that morning I got up at oh-dark-thirty to watch the sunrise at Bryce Canyon, even though I knew it would be over 85 degrees for the rest of the day. Of course, if the extra stuff is important at all, it means you get to lug more baggage from the car to your lodging for the night.

On several days the timing was such that I didn’t actually have a lunch stop. It was fortunate that I brought along some snacks, as a few of the parks had no place to buy food within the park proper. I guess I could’ve planned the food allocation better, but that would have taken even more research.

"He travels fastest who travels alone." – proverb

“The man who goes out alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.” – Henry David Thoreau

"Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter." – Izaak Walton

I’ve been asked how would I have done with someone else aboard. Well, it WAS a preliminary test for the longer road trip ahead, the one where I take 2 months to tour the US. For the most part, I don’t mind being by myself. I think there were times where I would've liked to have someone there, at least at the actual park locations, to share the vistas and the walks and talk about the information on the placards posted along the way. Maybe even on some of the longer driving stretches. But all-in-all, it was a good way to find solitude, and learn some more about how I would deal with encountering strangeness for long periods of time. (I don't mean eerie strangeness, but new and different environments and new people that I may or may not react well to.) One of the good things about "tourist" locations, though, is that if you say hello to someone, especially on a hiking trail, 90% will say hello back.

But yes, not having to allow for a passenger's needs did have its good points. Like, no one to complain that I stopped at McDonald's once or twice and that I picked it up at the drive-in window, then ate as I drove. (It was chicken, honest!)

“We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” – T. S. Elliot

Almost 2200 miles and 40 hours of driving between stops over 9 days through 5 National Parks, 2 National Monuments, a State Park and a Navajo Tribal Park. I’ve taken almost 1300 photographs (yeah, digital!) of countless rocks, recharging the camera batteries 6 or 8 times in the process. I’ve got a damaged windshield, a dirty car, dozens of travel brochures and tons of stories to carry me through the winter.

It seems like such a long time ago that I set out (late) on a Sunday morning in early September. Like my 7-day, 7-state whirlwind trip to New England in the fall of 1999, now that I’ve got a general view of the Southern Utah National Parks, I can pick one or two spots to come back to and visit more leisurely. But there is soooo much more of the US for me to see yet…so I’ll keep my navigation software up to date.

Thanks for hanging with me for this long, if you managed to do so. I’d love to hear your comments about the trip, my writing efforts, even my photography skills.

Yours in adventures yet to come,
JT
jtgregory@gmail.com
November 10th, 2007

Today’s drive:
St. George, UT to San Diego, CA via Las Vegas, NV
Just over 7 hours, 443 miles (includes 20 minute freeway logjam north of Valley Center)

Tomorrow:
Back to work!