Aloha all,
Sandra and I truly love living on Maui. What’s not to like…great friends, great weather, great island. In all our travels, we have not found a place where we’d rather live. However, our big passion are road trips. Even in our tropical island home, we occasionally get nostalgic thinking of our past road trips.
So for the past few years we have been hatching a plan, which we call “The Best of Both Worlds”. We plan to live on Maui for half the year and road tripping in an RV for the other half. Luckily, my job is very mobile and Sandra’s company is nice enough to give her 6 months unpaid vacation. And for once, the high rental rates on Maui are a good thing. It took a few weeks, but it was well worth the effort to clean out our condo to rent it out for the 6 months we are gone. We probably could not afford this otherwise. I do not consider ourselves hoarders, but it’s amazing how much stuff accumulates living in the same place for 10 years. Who needs 7 umbrellas or 48 light bulbs? It felt good cutting down at least on some of the clutter. After all: We know how happy we are on the road with so much less stuff. The best things in life most definitely are not things. We still packed what we could so that we would not have to buy too much of the same stuff we just had to give away. Considering our bags at the airport weighed in at 49.5 and 50.0 pounds, I think we did quite well.
From our past trips and from months of research online, we pretty much knew which RV we wanted and that the best selection for those was in Las Vegas. It was still fun to shop around and look at the various models, even though we ended up with the Winnebago Minnie Winnie 22R which had been our favorite to begin with. This was the first time for us to stay in Vegas away from the strip. Our hotel was on Boulder Highway, which happens to be the RV Dealer strip. And on this trip RV dealers were more important to us than card dealers. Actually, instead of our ridiculously low gambling limit of about $20/day we only spent $2 on gambling this time. We feel we are lucky enough without winning a jackpot.
The money we did not loose gambling we spent on show tickets. We got to see Hamilton, which had just opened at the Smith Center in Vegas. Now we know why everybody is going gaga about this musical. It is THAT good. In fact, it’s our new favorite musical. I love that it does not only seem to attract American history loving musical enthusiasts like us, but people of all ages, all colors and all backgrounds. The other show we saw was Cirque De Soleil’s “One”, the Michael Jackson show. Quite the spectacle and luckily so different from Hamilton that we can’t even compare it. Because if we were to compare it to Hamilton, this great show would easily loose. Since we never got to see Michael Jackson live, this is probably the next best thing. And in case they don’t make a show for every music legend out there, we already bought tickets for later in the trip to see Def Leppard, Journey & Foreigner.
We also saw two great museums: The new “Mob Museum” and the "Clark County Museum” in Henderson. This collection of historical buildings was full of interesting trivia. For example: Did you know that in the 50’s, locals went out to the Nevada desert to see the nuclear bomb tests? Nobody seemed to be aware or concerned about radiation. In fact, one article quoted people being disappointed that the blast was not as big as anticipated. They also had an evening newspaper from Dec 7, 1941. To my surprise, they already reported on the attack on Pearl Harbor. Maybe less surprising that they got some of the fact wrong. They mentioned that “many Jap planes were shot down” which is as much of an exaggeration as it is an understatement to say the “several people were believed to be killed”. But I think those "fake news” were just a lack of knowledge, I don’t think we can blame the Russians for that.
The rest of our 3 days in Vegas we spent shopping for supplies for the RV (including over 5 hours at Costco & Walmart), eating too much food (including at our favorite breakfast place, where we could not even finish one ‘regular size’ omelet, which is made with 6 eggs and enough potatoes to fill a medium size bathtub) and I think we saw about 5 of the water fountain shows at the Bellagio. After we picked the RV, wired the money and signed a few dozen papers, we were on our way. So good to be back on the open road!
Our first night we spent at the Valley of Fire State Park, where surprisingly we had not been before. Great rock formations and great colors…and already the first truly interesting people we met on this trip. Our campground neighbors had a German RV with actual German license plates. Of course I had to break the golden campground rule and disturb them to find out what that was all about. Turns out they are on a longer road trip than us and it’s not even that hard to ship your RV from Europe. We ended up talking to them for a couple of hours since obviously we had a lot in common, even though we came to this place from the opposite ends of the worlds.
Off to Utah! Since we have been in this neck of the desert before, we were able to skip the crowded, popular parks, like Zion or Bryce. Instead we went to Cedar Breaks National Monument, which I think is just as pretty and much less busy. We even got a campsite late in the afternoon without a reservation and a great sunset ranger program. We had been here 25 years ago. I am so grateful that it’s still pretty much the same and that it probably will be the same in another 25 years. Look at the pictures and tell me: Do you feel that it needs any changes or improvements?
We also got to see a National Park Service site we had not seen before: The Timpanogos Cave is one of the nicer caves we have ever been to, even the hike to the cave is spectacular and the ranger led tour was yet again inspirational and informative at the same time. Say what you want about the government, but I feel they do some things right and the National Park Service is my prime example.
We try to see the state capitol in every state we visit, even if it means having to drive the RV into a larger city. The Utah capitol building alone was worth the drive into Salt Lake City. What a palace! I just can’t get over this fact: The first Mormon pioneers arrived here around 1850 and found a very barren landscape with pretty much no infrastructure at all. Not even 50 years later, Utah is a state and only a few years after that they built this bombastic state capitol building, which is more luxurious and more impressive than any capitol building we have seen - and we have seen over a dozen of them already. Even more impressive that they did not go into debt to build it. Utah seems to be different that way, they have tried to balance their budget for most of their history. I guess if you can afford it, why not build a capitol that represents the state in a truly grand way. When they renovated the building a few years ago, they even made it earthquake safe, without waiting for a disaster to strike first. Saving before spending money and planing ahead, what a novel idea! The volunteer tour guide was certainly proud of the building and of Utah overall. I can’t blame her; Utah is currently my favorite mainland state. Sorry, Colorado, but 2nd out of 48 is still pretty good!
We also took a short stroll through downtown Salt Lake City, but spent more time in the mall than at the impressive looking sites from the Mormon Church. We were more hungry for food than for salvation. Usually, I am not shy visiting all kinds of different places. But the Mormons seem to be so nice, so efficient and so industrial, we were concerned they might convert us after all. Kind of like we are sometimes concerned we might buy a timeshare, even though we are quite convinced it’s not the right thing for us.
What is the right thing for us is surprisingly interesting places and the serendipity that gets us there. It was surprisingly easy to park next to the capitol building in Salt Lake City. For the night, we headed out of the city and into the mountains and found a lovely Walmart that let us spend the night. It just happened to be in Park City and it just happened to have a view of the Olympic Park of the 2002 Winter Games. We took the short drive up just to take a quick look and ended up staying pretty much the whole day. I used to work as a tour guide at the Olympiapark in Munich (maybe my favorite job ever!) and I love it when the Olympic sites stay alive after the games. And boy was the Utah Olympic Park here alive: They have a free museum about the Olympics, a free ski museum, and a seemingly endless buffet of activities, from zip lines, summer bob sled rides to tubing and an adventure park.
I don’t think I was a bad tour guide at the Olympic Park in Munich, but I was nothing compared to our tour guide here. Then again, I have not worked as an official announcer for the past 8 Olympic Games. He just seemed to know everything and he had that perfect announcer voice and a great olympic attitude. We got to see the future Olympic ski jumpers in action at the training pool, we saw the bob sled track and the ski jumps. In fact, we got to see those almost from the athlet’s perspective since they build a zip line right next to the ski jump.
Just for full disclosure: Of course not everything always goes smoothly on a road trip. We got pulled over by a cop within 5 minutes of test driving the RV and had an engine malfunction on the second day. In the Valley of Fire it was so hot that we did not even want to do some pretty short hikes and the very next night, surprisingly it was so cold that we missed the blanket that we thought we would not need till the fall. And today it rained for most of the day. But not to worry: The cop only talked to the sales person regarding the missing license plates and the malfunction warning light turned out to be harmless. We still got to enjoy the Valley of Fire, despite the heat and by now, we also have a warm blanket.
The first week has been so full of all different kinds of experiences that we did not mind spending the rainy day today to make some progress towards South Dakota, where we need to be by next week to register the RV. At least we got to go to a free movie today, just to take advantage of that magical MoviePass we have. If you live in the US and have not heard my sales pitch for MoviePass, let me know. I promise you won’t be converted to some weird religion.
If you also follow us on Facebook, you might have read that we were looking for nick name for our RV. We got a lot of really great suggestions. At the end we could not decide between “Henry” (since the engine is a Ford) and “Joy” (since that’s what she gives us). When a warning light came on which might indicate to “Check Engine Soon” or “Please Name the RV Soon”, we decided that we will let the RV decide: If it had been something serious, he would have been “Oh Henry”, but it was harmless and so we were happy to christen her “Joy”.
I find it mind boggling how much we have seen in just the first week on the road and we are so excited to find out where else Joy will take us in the next 25 weeks.
Until then; Aloha from Wyoming,
Chris & Sandra
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