From One Extreme to the Other (Our Trip, part 2)

Hoover Dam provided a transition from the wild extremes of nature to those of human nature. It's an amazing engineering feat, explained so that even we non-engineers can begin to understand how difficult it must have been. Yet it came in early and under budget, due in part to the hundreds of workers who died in the process. It's a tribute to what people can do when they set their minds to something seemingly impossible.

And I guess the same can be said of Las Vegas, though with less admiration. On the one hand, the Strip was far from the dirty, tacky place I'd expected. We spent much of our time walking around the grand hotels, and they do take your breath away--in both elegance and mileage! No dime or detail was spared to create The Bellagio, The Venetian, Caesar's Palace, Paris, New York, The Mirage, etc., or should I say to re-create Lake Como, Venice, Rome, etc. The fountain picture, the only one we took in Vegas before the camera died, represents well the grand and beautiful side of this city my Frommer's guide called "Disney World on Steroids." The high point was probably Cirque du Soleil's "Mystere." If you haven't seen a show by this group, put it on your must-do list. Another place well worth the admission was Siegfried and Roy's Secret Garden, a gorgeous zoo and serious research facility with more than a dozen very active white tigers and lions, alpaca sheep, and dolphins. We also saw David Copperfield's show, but he was surprisingly underwhelming. I got the feeling he was both bored and more impressed with himself than we were.

As for the decadent side of Sin City, I found the worst thing to be the hawkers of girlie shows who line the sidewalks clicking their fingers against the ad cards they stick in your face. Watching people gamble can be both exciting and depressing. Other than wasting a few bucks on the slots (actually, Ray won there), we didn't gamble, preferring to spend our money on beautiful expensive food. Not to mention Venetian glass earrings. But hey, I bought the cheapest ones in the store!

Three days in Vegas was enough to say Been there, done that. Next time I want to see Rome or Paris, it will be the real deal. But the rest of the West--well, I'll be back.

From The Land of the Gods

We're in the middle of our long-awaited trip west, where our most frequent utterance is "Wow!" followed shortly by "Double Wow." Beyond that, it will take a better writer than me to do verbal justice to this land, so I'll just summarize our travels and share a few photos.

After a painless flight to Vegas and a half hour lost to congestion there, we (Ray and I with friends Linda and Rich) were finally on our way to Zion Natl Park. As the land opened up and vast vistas spread out before us filled with giant formations I'd never even imagined, I could feel my blood pressure drop and my breathing expand. Even Ray relaxed! He even turns off his crackberry for an hour or two now and then. We spent the first night in lovely Springdale, Utah, at the foot of Zion Park, and the second at the park lodge-both very nice. We walked along the Virgin River or just stood still gaping at the rocks towering above us--and sometimes at the climbers who dared to scale them. The weather was perfect.

Exiting the park via the Mt Carmel Scenic highway, with its hairpin turns, was unforgettable. A few hours later we arrived at Grand Canyon Lodge in rain and fog. I was astonished. Who ever heard of RAIN at the Grand Canyon? isn't this desert country? Soon it stopped and we walked in the fog out one short but sobering path to the end of a promontory, where the clouds lifted enough for a few frustrating glimpses of what lay beyond. We went to bed a bit disappointed, which made the next morning all the more wonderful, when we saw the canyon in all its glory under a brilliant sun. After walking the paths by the lodge, we drove through a gorgeous pine-and-aspen forest to other outposts, marveling at the vastness and variety of the land forms. Then we returned to the lodge, snagged chairs on the porch, put our feet up, and decided what music to put on our ipods for the sunset. (I chose Handel's "Zadok the Priest" performed by The Opera Band, which repeats the word "Rejoice" over and over in a glorious crescendo. It was perfect.) That hour watching the canyon formations glow and darken as the sun descended was one of the most magical and unforgettable of my life.

Today is the first of two days at Bryce Canyon. Each of these parks is so glorious and so completely unique. At Zion you are humbled and awed by the majesty and power of the rock walls rising hundreds of feet over your head; at the Grand Canyon you look out and down at the endless beauty below and the flat emptiness of the South Rim beyond; here at Bryce you are again staring down, now at the tops of "hoodoos" that look like giant sand dribble castles left by giants playing in the dirt. Ray and Rich descended to the canyon bottom, a short walk down and a long steep climb up. Linda and I were content to stroll the path along the rim.

Tonight we'll return to the park from our motel nearby to see the stars. Time for me to get out of the room and take a walk in this glorious place before it gets dark. We'll spend two nights here, then on to vegas. Right now it's hard to imagine enjoying its man-made "beauty," but I'm sure we'll manage to have fun!