Road trip!!! (and something more)

I know it's been a while since I last updated my post. But I have just been too busy (read lazy).

Well to be honest the first few weeks of December I actually had a lot going on. As I mentioned in my last post I had been planning a winter break road trip with one of my Austrian friends. During the semester it was pretty much impossible to visit places more than a few hours drive away from Grand Junction (the classes were almost ruining a perfectly good vacation, I mean student exchange), but winter break offered an excellent opportunity to do some traveling.

Our itinerary was following: Grand Junction, Colorado - Moab, Utah - Grand Canyon, Arizona - Flagstaff, Arizona - Las Vegas, Nevada - Yosemite, California - Santa Cruz, California - San Francisco, California. That was as far as I planned my way (I knew that my friend was going to continue to Los Angeles after San Francisco). We wanted to save some money so we decided to camp whenever possible, even though it was winter. We only booked motels in Las Vegas and San Francisco in advance.

We spend two nights (one camping, one in a motel) in Moab. While there we visited Arches National Park (third time for me, but we still found some new arches), Dead Horse point and Canyonlands National Park.

Some new arches

And that's how one gets around the law in Utah (apologies for the picture quality)

Dead Horse point

Next day we spent mostly driving to Grand Canyon. On the way we stopped at the Horseshoe point (just before sunset). We arrived at Grand Canyon when it was already dark and the camping that night was pretty cold, I have to admit. During the night the temperature dropped down to -10 C (after all the rim is at 2200m elevation). But it was worth it, because it enabled us to start early the next morning and hike from the rim to the bottom of the Canyon (which was the first time below 1000m elevation in four months) and back up (26k, 1500m elevation difference, 7,5h total time).

Horseshoe point

Yeah right! Let's do it!

You can't actually see the river from the rim

After that hike we needed a warm place to stay for the night and found a cheap (39.99 + tax) decent motel in Flagstaff (nice little town by the way). After the night we needed to drive through Arizona and found a nice camping site at much lower altitude near the Nevada border. We were less than two hours away from Vegas so the next day we had time to hike to some hot springs and visit Hoover Damn before arriving to Vegas. The evening we spend exploring the Strip and realized that you would need to be willing to spend quite a lot of money to pass more than one evening there (gambling, the shows, clubs... everything is pretty expensive). But it is a unique place and definitely worth seeing, at least once.

Our camping setup

There were three different pools: 40, 35 and 30 degrees (or something)

Hoover Damn

Bellagio

Then it was a driving day again. On the way from Vegas to Yosemite there wasn't really anything worth mentioning. Except the fact that once you get into California everything becomes more expensive (cheap motels were now 59.99 instead of 39.99). Yosemite is sort of weird place. There isn't anything that special about it, but somehow it's mesmerizing. That's why we spend one day there hiking and one day skiing. We would have liked spend even more time there but a big snowstorm was hitting the area so we just decided to have one relaxing day and then headed to the West Coast.

Yosemite Valley: top of El Capitan on the left and Half Dome far back

Skiing (40k) in beautiful conditions

Why is there a speed limit on a skiing trail? Cause the track is groomed on a road that's closed for winter

The days between Yosemite and San Francisco included one night at a campsite, some running on the beach in rain, biking along the shoreline and some huge trees.

Shoreline in Santa Cruz

Big Redwood trees in Big Basin State Park

In San Francisco we wanted to visit Alcatraz. But since we hadn't bought the tickets in advance we knew we had to get to the ticket booth early in the morning to have a chance to be one of those 40-50 people who get tickets. So we woke up around 6am and got to the ticket booth around 7am. There were already a lot people in line and as you might guess we were the first ones not to get tickets. So instead we rented a couple of bikes and rode around San Francisco almost the whole day. Not a bad way to spend a sunny day. But we still didn't give up with Alcatraz. So the next morning we woke up an hour earlier and got to the booth little bit after 6am. It was Christmas Eve and slightly rainy so there were only a few people in line. We got tickets and spent the next few hours on the Island. Later in the day we went to a church for a Christmas carol event and had "Christmas dinner" in a great Italian restaurant.

Sea lions at Pier 39

Silver Door Bridge (no, that's not right...)

Christmas Eve in prison

Fortunately they let us out

I had been thinking about going to visit a couple of my friends in Bend, Oregon after San Francisco, but eventually I realized it would have involved too much driving (1000miles) and been quite expensive. Flying there would have also been expensive and also inconvenient since Bend isn't a huge city. So I decided to just head back to Grand Junction. This meant early morning wake up again since my friend was driving all the way to LA that day. That's one way to spend your Christmas Day, waiting at airports and sitting in airplanes.

Since getting back to Grand Junction I've been living at my friends house and spent most of time with the ski team. Last weekend me and two other skiers from the team went to Soldier Hollow in Utah for higher division ski races (which were also FIS-races). My shape was far from even my average ski performance. Apparently you can't build your fitness in two weeks after 3 months of lacking training, and when you try things go even worse (I was barely able to reach 170 bpm max heart rate in the races). But it was memorable experience to compete on 2002 Winter Olympic racecourse in excellent conditions.

Soldier Hollow stadium