THE roadtrip - days 1-7

A detailed account of 23 days of travel, one month later, would be fraught with the inaccuracies of amnesia. So, good thing I scribbled in the car as we went along. Welcome to blog of excerpt of journal....

DAY 1: 25 May 08
We depart from Santa Rosa - a full van of 6 people - the french girls, Laure and Fiona, Cara, John (berkeley local and last minute addition), Brian and myself.

DAY 2:
'Once on the road we headed towards Bodie... a ghost town. Games to get to know each other... John went to 'Burning Man' - a hippie festival... interesting story...mmm. We spent the night with an amazing family in Crawley Lake near Mammoth Lake. They were fantastic! So generous, so kind, so energetic!... From mammoth Lakes we headed towards Bishop on the way to Death Valley.

DAY 3: 27th May
At Bishop we stopped for petrol... we took the road from there to Death Valley, on the way stopping at Manzanaar Internee Center where American/Japanese were held during WWII... The ranges here were awesome! On one side a red/brown spread stretching as far as you could see across one side of the freeway. On the other side, directly opposite, great tall snow covered mountains. Monstrous size!... I drove through first 1/2 of Death Valley... first time driving since a year when I left Australia... So John decided to leave our group today in Vegas...he felt it was too rushed...

... We had some fun late at night when Brian was driving, I was in the passenger seat, John was leaning over in between us and everyone else was pretty much asleep. We played a word association game and then asked each other random hypotheticals...we got off topic...

We're on the road to Grand Canyon right now....

DAY 5: 29th May
We're leaving Grand Canyon today. It's 9:43am. We arrived at GC on the night of 27th may - pretty much just showered and had dinner. Brian cooked pasta in marinara sauce - really good. In the morning we headed off for a hike... the hike down (and up) was amazing. As soon as I saw the flat topped mountains in the background, yellow cliffs dotted with vivid green in the foreground on the right and red/brown barren cliffs on the left. A cracked face with dry shrubs growing, pushing their way through... we set off around 11:30am, and got back to the top at 4:20pm - a 5hr hike around about. I took 100s of pictures... We met a sweet couple on the way up. The woman was particularly friendly. She reminded me of the beauty pageant winner from 'Miss Congeniality' except with brown hair. We met an Austrian guy on the lookout we stopped at for the sunset. We hiked along the south rim of the canyon for almost an hour - went from Trailview overlook to Powell Point. Sunset and overlook was great. Sun took fricking long to set... relaxing. enjoying the company...

... Brian and I bumped into Christian at the general store when we went looking to buy beer. A kid on our way in asked if we would buy tequila for him - said the police pulled them over and took all their alcohol and weed. .. it was a fun night. We were sharing our campsite with Ruth - a teacher, originally form Germany. She was great to talk to about travel, hiking and nature parks...

... We just left the Grand Canyon about 1.5 hrs ago now. .. Cara just said "There were almonds in the bag, but the bag was in the trash, but fell out of the trash and now the almonds are in my hand; can I eat them?", Brian responds, "Yeah"; Cara shoves the almonds from her hand into her mouth! :p

DAY 6: 30th May
We spent last night with Shaunae and Chris in St George - a Mormon couch-surfing couple, 22y/o and 29y/o. I have never met people into such an extraordinary range of extreme sports. Their stories are great - they meat each other hitch-hiking! ...

... Right now we're on the road to Zion National Park - we just passed through the Kolob Canyons - beautiful, tall cliff faced mountains. We met up with Max from Vegas this morning... So we just came out of Zion NP. Wow! We hiked to Angel's Landing which took us about 6hrs return... Crazy (and dangerous) climbing up rocks, isolated cliff faces to the summit of the rock stack... Cara had to help a lady down who had already made it up but got scared on the way down.... I did feel nervous when I climbed to the top rock of the first high landing - 'landing' sounds a little too broad - it was more of a foot square flat area on top of a high rock stack... I was balancing on a square of rock thousands of metres high! It feels like you're on top of the word there. The birds swoosh by you and you can hear the air moving. You look down and either side of you, left and right, there is a huge drop... We continued on to another landing top; across an almost bridge-like structure created out of rock...

... We're home now. Back at Shaunae and Chris's. A shower! Dinner! Sleep!

DAY 7: 31 May
Tired. angry. annoyed. It's about 6am after waking up at 5:15am. We spent the night at Zion National Park, sharing a campground with Travis and Chuck - both of whom we met on the shuttle and did the River Walk to the Narrows with...