Utah Trip - August 2023

This is a short entry to close out this blog. We had heard Utah was a beautiful state, but we were not prepared for the scale and diversity of the natural sights. It’s always a good thing when a place turns out far more stunning than you could have imagined.  We had planned to see four of Utah’s national parks and ended up seeing five, each of which was very different from the others. Our Nissan Kicks rental took us 2068km in a week and we didn’t have so much as a single incident on the twists and turns of the mountain highways.  The trip home from Las Vegas via Calgary was pretty uneventful, except for a 90-minute delay on our Calgary > Halifax flight. Fortunately, we were able to spend most of our four hours in Calgary at the Westjet Elevation Lounge, whose food was surprisingly good! We landed just after midnight Halifax time tonight. Great to be able to sleep in our own bed, after seven different hotels on the trip.  This is the last trip I’ll take during my feder...

We woke up feeling pretty tired after yesterday’s marathon of sightseeing on the hottest day of the trip, as well as the drive from The Arches to Richfield, UT.  But we were happy to know that there was just 285 miles between Vegas and us today, as opposed to 460, which would have been the case had we not driven to Richfield yesterday. The Richfield hotel was a simple place with a simple breakfast, but we had enough to give us a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed start to the day, and we set off for Vegas at 8:45AM. We made a couple of quick stops enroute, including in St. George, UT to see the large Mormon Temple there, and arrived at our hotel around 1:30PM.  After a quick acclimation, we returned the rental car, as it would have proven more of a parking hindrance than a help, in our exploration of The Strip. We then took an Uber to ground zero of The Strip — The Bellagio — and started our exploration in the 102 °F  heat.  Every half hour, The Bellagio does a fountain s...

After seeing a new national park per day for the last four days, you might think we’d wake up this morning feeling a bit tired of it all!  But noooo… We had The Arches before us today, and the excitement at seeing one of the USA’s top national parks was heart-pounding. So you can imagine our shock and horror when we arrived at the entrance to the park, just outside Moab, where we had spent the night, and realized we were supposed to have made a reservation to enter! Being a Sunday, we figured we were doomed.  We got in a long line and eventually a park ranger told us there were some spaces still open for the day.  We had to leave the park to get a cell phone signal, but we eventually did, logged into the reservation site, and lo and behold, we got a spot for 10AM!   A nearby State Park along the Colorado River provided just the right amount of time to explore a fascinating area on the edge of The Arches.   In the end, all worked out well:  we loved our vie...