Becky and I have arrived safely in Westwood. Our apartment, and our neighborhood, are amazing. Orientation for law school starts tomorrow, and class starts on Monday. I’m really excited to get started, but I’m also going to miss our time on the road and these past few days just exploring the city and buying furniture and food.
I’ve posted a bunch of photos from the trip. They’re in chronological order.
Our first night we stayed in Indianapolis. We didn’t really do anything there. The next day we drove through Illinois en route to St. Louis. We did make a stop for the Lincoln Log Cabin State Historic Site, which of course ended up not being Abraham’s cabin, but rather his father’s. Though the stop was fun, we decided we would try to avoid any further tourist traps.
St. Louis was very, very cool. It reminded me a lot of Philadelphia, with its emphasis on local history and linking it to today. There are even a lot of shared street names between the two towns. We of course went up in the arch (very cool, but the tram cars can get really hot and a little musty), and we rode a riverboat (it was a fairly boring stretch of the Mississippi; I learned a lot more about barges than I really needed to know). We also checked out the courthouse across from the arch which was the setting for some of the Dred Scott trials.
After St. Louis we stayed a night in Blue Springs, Missouri, then spent a few hours in Kansas City in order to humor Bagby. We ate lunch at Arthur Bryant’s, which was disgustingly good. We also drove around the city and checked out a whole bunch of good stuff.
Next we had the pleasure of driving through the great state of Kansas. I have nothing at all to say about that, except maybe that you shouldn’t do it if you can avoid it.
Denver was our next destination. We stayed in Aurora, but ate dinner downtown. The next day we went to Red Rocks Park and Amphitheater, a great setting for concerts and probably the hilliest damn place I’ve ever seen. Next up, we checked out Boulder (very cool) and then drove over to Rocky Mountain National Park, which was probably the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. It’s great for non-hikers, because basically all you do is drive around and stop at various lookout/information points that they’ve created. At one point we were at over 12,000 feet elevation, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I suffered from a bit of altitude sickness, in the form of dizziness and lightheadedness. But it was definitely worth it.
After that we had a long drive to Green River, Utah to spend the night. The next morning we drove to Zion National Park, which was probably a close second to the Rockies in terms of sheer natural beauty. Most of the park is connected via a shuttle bus, with six or seven different stops, most of which have trails which you can walk. Becky and I did the one called Emerald Pools, which was just over a mile long but surpringly treacherous. There were stretches where if you weren’t paying attention and veered off to one side, you would fall down about 200 feet onto solid rock (this is often fatal). So, that was really, really cool.
We explored Zion just a little bit more after that and than drove on to Vegas, where we stayed at the Orleans. We got two free buffet dinners and in the end it was actually both the nicest and the cheapest hotel we stayed at during the entire trip. We gambled just a little bit ($4 was lost) and just had a lot of fun walking around and watching other people do crazy stuff.
That brought us to Friday, the Big Day. We left Vegas around 10:30am and started to drive through Death Valley. This was probably bad planning on our part. We almost immediately ran out of gas, which would have been a complete disaster given temperatures that were way, way above 100 degrees. But we managed to make it through Nevada, a sliver of Arizona, none the worse for wear.
Even though we were coming into LA at rush hour on Friday, we were able to navigate the entire way without hitting any traffic. I took this as a sign that we were making the right move.