Roswell

(End of day seven) - I had such high hopes for Roswell. When we entered the city we were greeted with a themed Mc Donald's which had a spaceship shaped playland. Our hopes were shortly dashed as we pulled into the hotel and along with all the other hotels in town it was booked; everyone but Motel 6 and the Leisure Inn. We were told we did not want to stay at Motel 6 because it was "dirty and not safe". Really? What kind of trouble can you expect from a small desert town? The bigger question was why everything was booked. Who goes spring breaking in Roswell New Mexico? I mean aside from people like us and that's only because we were driving through it anyway. Well, it was a little out of the way but we at least had to go through New Mexico I'm not saying I would made a special trip of it. As it was 11:30 pm at night and the next town was 125 miles away we took our chances at the Leisure Inn because it was at least supposedly clean and safe.

We drove back through town to the "Inn" which was probably built in 1965 and had not been updated since 1984. I have to tell you, nothing makes you feel more safer then talking to a guy through bullet proof glass and a hole only large enough to pass a key through. It was clean if clean means there's no shit smeared on the walls or blood on the carpet. What clean does not mean however is that there won't be a dead bug and pube laying on the side of the bathtub. At least they had a bathtub, not like those bastards in Vegas. The first thing we did was turn on the heat since it was like 30 degrees and the room was insulated about as well as my attic crawlspace. The next morning was for spending time with some aliens on our 8th day.

This is the awesome hotel artwork. I know the picture is a tad dark but trust me, it looks better that way.

Day Eight

We took our time tooling around in Roswell. There wasn't a whole lot there but it was entertaining and fun natured. The light posts were in the shape of alien heads and there were lots of shops to buy alien themed crap. Guess what I brought back for everyone???

The next stop was to the UFO museum. Now if right now you are wondering what exactly the big deal about Roswell is I'll give you the short version. By "short" I mean a dumbed down version like the ones used to explain things to people that ride the "short bus". In 1947 a farmer came across some strange wreckage in his field. (Are you still with me short but rider?) He showed the authorities in town who showed it to the government who showed it to another part of the government who took it and pretended nothing happened. Like all good conspiracies, there are convincing parts to both sides of the story and continually try to gain momentum to solve the problem or answer the questions everyone wants to know. Where you lose people is when you try to legitimize a UFO museum by hanging a detailed mysterious government transcripts next to a signed head shot of the lady who played the mom in E.T. At least pick a side or get someone in that has displaying skills.

After reading all the evidence I've come to the conclusion that when the government tries to cover something up it's usually just to distract you from something else entirely. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a spaceship but whatever it was the government certainly doesn't want people to know the truth about. Finding a weather balloon doesn't make you suddenly relocate in the middle of the night. One of the museum people was there talking to some guy about how President Clinton tried to find out the truth about Roswell so he hired an CIA man to look into it. When the man came back he told the president that it was something they should not purse because it would be too dangerous. I'm not sure it that's true but they did have two letters signed by both President Clinton and Bush stating that there are parts of the government that because of their nature are allowed to operate out side of laws.

My advice to the people of Roswell, you are known for one thing and one thing only so whore it out. Whore it out to the Johns and the 40 year old virgins that throw money your way, whore...it....OUT! Give people tours to the crash site, create a space resort, give seminars on how to avoid being abducted, do anything and everything you can to cash in.

Our stay ended with a meal and a final tribute. As we drove out of town we played the theme song from The X-files. Nerd on man, nerd on.

And yes, that is a sequined UFO

Kia Will Feel My Wrath

When I get home the first thing I'm going to do is call Kia and give them a thorough lashing. First, after 2 days on the road we realized that our temporary dealer's license expired on the 18th. So we are driving cross country on an expired license. Next we noticed the light on the dash that says passengers side air back off stays on half of the time. According to the manual that means there is a glitch with the passenger side airbag. Magnificent! Does that mean it might not work or does that mean the glitch is just in the dashboard? The most obnoxious thing we have encountered is the door ajar sensor. It started just going off every once and a while when we would turn corners. So we would just open and shut the doors and that would usually take care of it. Apparently though after a few days of that the short has gotten worse and we are now treated to a constant beeping telling us the door is open when it isn't. We were driven so insane by the noise we pulled over bought some duck tape and taped the box of a Tylenol container to the sensor button. Then finally there was peace.

Day Seven

Most of today wasn't all that exciting. We stopped to see "The Thing" I won't give away the ending just in case you find yourself in that part of Arizona.

Most of the day was spent seeing this. Not very exciting.

We did find entertainment in our two new friends Archibold and Leona

Then, just like Bugs Bunny we took a wrong turn except we didn't end up in Albuquerque, we made it almost to El Paso. This put us back about an hour so instead of getting to our destination at 5:30 we got there at 6:45.

We had only one place in mind today and that was

White Sands National Park in NM. It is where they test missiles and such but this particular area was more for tourist. The visitors center was closed by the time we got there but the park was still open. I guess it worked out for the best we ran late because we were there for sun set. What you will see is not snow, it is miles upon miles of white sand. Well actually they are mineral crystals, bits of rock were washed from a mountain then into a lake. The lake then dried up and the sun formed the crystals. It was a beautiful place to see.

DAY SIX - Montezuma Doesn't Just Give You The Shits

It's also a national state park called Montezuma Castle. Basically a city built into a cliff, it was inhabited by about 100 people around 1400 AD. Then for some reason they all disappeared and abandoned the place. Gee, I can't imagine why people would stop wanting to climb a 30 foot ladder several times a day just to get to their house, especially as they age.

Sadona

We continued on our way to Sedona because everyone said it was so pretty. Well, it was pretty but it was also crawling with tourists. There is also apparently some magical vortex I'm not exactly sure what it does but if a hippy says it's magic...well how could a hippy be wrong?

A Little taste of what Roswell will be like.

After driving around and not being able to find a parking spot we traveled a little farther down the road and came across a restraunt called The Red Planet. It was space themed and gave us a

little taste of what we might find in Roswell. The also have really good chili burgers.

Good Friends

I'm very lucky to have such good friends who were gracious enough to let us stay with them for the last two nights. I have known her since I was in 3rd grade and she is still willing hang out with me. Since she is one of the 5 people reading this so I would like to say "thank you" again for letting us invade your home for a few days. (and to your husband for allowing it)

They also have two great dogs Keeva and Rafter (I hope I spelled that right) who made the stay even more enjoyable. It gets lonely on the road without ours and they helped fill the void.

Day Five

We got up, used the handicap shower and got ready for the day. First on the agenda was to enjoy the few hours we had in Vegas then drive to Phoenix to see our friends. Our first mission for the day was to find the largest drink possible, then have lunch / breakfast then sober up, then start the drive. As you can see, we felt the Paris theme this time. It was only later we saw the drink on the right. That would have been awesome if we were staying the full day. Instead we had to settle for the one on the left. I also had to call my boss to remind him of the fun I'm having not being at work.

We also walked around. Here is a sampling of the things we saw.

Damn, Hoover, Dam

So while I was nicely sleeping off my strawberry daiquiri Sean woke me up so I could see the Hoover Dam. They currently in the process of building a new bridge to drive across and that was really more interesting to see then the dam itself. I couldn't believe the amount of people that had made this destination a vacation spot. I mean, if we had not had to drive through it I certainly would not have gone out of my way to see it. My feelings could be summed up best by the 7 year old standing next to us. Her parents were trying to make it seem impressive and she responded by saying "so what is it a big wall?" Only my words were more like "you woke me up for this?"

So here are the dam pictures already.

On our way to Phoenix we stopped in Kingman to have lunch. In the bathrooms they had one of the most flattering mirrors I have ever seen.

A Few Words About Arizona

Now Arizona is a fine state, I've never had any problems with it. It's visually appealing, it has cactus, mountains and dirt. What is isn't though, is a nice place to drive through unless you like to feel time moving in reverse at 55 miles per hour. For some reason the miles, upon miles, upon miles of road in between towns cannot be traveled on faster than 65 miles per hour. That is until they decide to make you drive 55 or even 45 just because they might decide to do some construction some day. If that isn't enough to make sure you don't get where you need to get in a timely manner, they also force you down to one lane and only allow you to pass the 15 trucks in front of you every 10 miles. Just in case though, you think you might want to push your luck at 70, they make sure to have police about every 2 miles waiting to pull you over so they can make more revenue so they can hire more police. We wouldn't want the blue hairs getting out of control in the winter. At least the terrain was easy to look at.

Mt. Timpanogos

DAY FOUR

Our first stop Tuesday was to Mt. Timpanogos. We weren't able to go way, way up to the top due to the road being closed for the winter. We did however meet a nice flock of wild turkeys.

From there we went south to Zion National Park. This would rank as one of my top 5 places to see before you die. It was absolutely breath taking. We probably walk about 10 miles most of which was steep rocky terrain which left us tired and sore. It wouldn't have been so bad but SOMEONE thought it would be fun to go to the top top and when we got there we found out that there was no path back. So we had to go all the way back down and then around a different way while sunlight was limited.

We drove to Las Vegas and arrived about 11:30. Arriving at the hotel Bally's Sean had an excruciating sinus headache so I went in to get the room. When I walked in there were about 20 people in line a head of me and three people running the check out counter. All of which were very slow and hated you. I finally got to the counter and the lady told me she was closed "sorry". She, was an assface. Anyway they told us the only nonsmoking room they had left was a handicap room. I didn't care I just thought there would be bars on the tub and everything would be low. Well we finally got to the room and all I wanted to do was take a nice hot bath. Guess what? No bathtub instead, they had a wheel in shower. Awesome if you only want to wash the bottom half of your body. We were so tired we didn't want to go back out. We figure we will see hang around a little in the morning. By the way, you had better appreciate this posting since it is costing me $14 to have Internet access. Stupid Vegas nickle and dimeing you! Here are the crappy pictures we got so far. The blurry one is from about 20 miles away. As you can see Vegas takes up about half the earth's electrical power.

DAY THREE

Against Our Better Judgement...

So last night the news said there was going to be a huge blizzard basically covering the entire state. We were hoping they were wrong even though they had a 100% probability. (hey, a person can hope right?) Anyway we woke up this morning to snow so we had to scrap our plans to visit Yellowstone because we are smart enough to know not to get caught in the mountains during a blizzard. Having already had enough of Wyoming, we decided to try our luck just pushing south to Utah hoping we could drive our way out of the storm. We left a 8:00AM and headed south. It was snowy and you couldn't see much of the distance but the roads weren't bad. 70 miles to the next town of Thermopolis we stopped for gas. The gas lady said they were going to shut down all the roads out of town especially the one the went into the canyon. This of course was exactly where we were headed. We decided we would take our chances and go anyway instead of staying an entire day is some po dunk crappy little town. Lucky for us they didn't turn on the road closed signs in time and we got through to the canyon. A few miles into it we realize it might not have been the best idea since visibility was next to nothing. The road weren't bad so we pushed on. We are hardy born and raised Minnesotains, we like this type of adventure.

I should mention in the first photo we are surrounded by mountains aren't they lovely?

Wallpaper Fail

We stopped for lunch in Rock Springs, WY. We were please to see their attempt at fixing the wallpaper.

And yes, that is crayon

Ut-ahhhhh

I will say that I'm not going to hurry back to Wyoming anytime soon. After spending almost two days there, it was way more then enough. As soon as we crossed the boarder to Utah two things happened; one the snow stopped and there were traces of the sun and two, I flipped Wyoming the bird as a final farewell. I have a picture but since my mom is one of the 5 people that check my blog I will refrain from posting. Instead I will post a lovely view of Utah.

DAY TWO

We covered a lot of ground today. We actually left on time this morning.

Burt Reynolds the face of Harley Davidson? South Dakota love its large statues.

I thought we were just going to see Mt Rushmore but apparently we found the lucky day God was going to be there. Either that or we needed to prepare for our doom.

There's nothing like going to see and celebrating someone else failure to complete something big.

I guess there's always Crazy Horse...er wait hmmm, that isn't finished either.

We were in South Dakota back in the summer of 2000 and there was a huge fire that swept the Black Hills. Over all it burned over 83,500 acres. It's sad to see now almost 9 years later the massive destruction that is still present today. This picture doesn't even do it justice, from the top of the hill all you could see was miles and miles of what the fire left behind.

Devil's Tower

The Visitors Center was of course closed for the season but we were still able to get some good pictures without paying the $10 just to walk around it. There were also lots of prairie dogs making it known we were not welcome.

Over the mountains and through the woods...

More than half of Wyoming is hills, junkyards, and nothing. If you can make it past that you get to travel through some mountains with more nothing. I can't tell you the excitement of stopping in towns populated by 10 people. I'm not kidding either it even made the map.

Tomorrow they are predicting blizzard conditions in the area. I just want to see Old Faithful and leave this no mans land.