Test

Well, probably I'll delete this post, but I really wanted to get an idea about how Voicethread works.

Manimals

For those of you who enjoyed pictures of our animals (or us, really), we thought we'd provide a recap.

What's next?

Today we fly back to Boston. We will be updating our site with panoramic pictures once we have time to stitch them together (or once Sedwick does since he seems to have software that will do it). Hopefully, we'll get to some of those during the week.

We have someone to come and paint for us starting tomorrow morning at 9am (that's 7am to us, currently, which seems kinda early, but we really really really want to have th house painted).

Nancy will go to Iceland in July. No idea whether she intends to have a small blog for that trip, as I can't ask her since she's currently sleeping away.

We will be going to Canada in late July/early August. We think we'll have a new blog for that trip, as this experience was fun.

Bonus Park!!!!

Today, as you all know from our updated itinerary, we visited our tenth national park of the trip - Great Basin National Park, in Nevada. In the entire state of Nevada, this is the one area that the state saw fit to put forth as a national park. In case you haven't looked at a map of Nevada lately, there's a lot of nothing there -- in other words, a lot of prime space that could have been turned into a national park. Since Great Basin was the only area that made the cut, our expectations were somewhat high. (Well, we'd read the description of the park in our national parks book, so they weren't super high).

We started our visit to the park by trying to get a spot on a 90 minute cave tour. It turns out that the only available slot was on a 90 minute tour at 3 (which was 4 in our eyes, since the time apparently changes between Utah and Nevada) or on a 60 minute tour. So, with a mix of sadness (at having 1/3 less cave to see) and happiness (at seeing a cave) in our hearts, we committed to the 60 minute tour.

This cave - Lehman Cave - was quite different than the cave we saw at Wind Cave. However, the two did have a similarity in origin, in that they were both first publicized by enterprising sorts of folks. The person who publicized Lehman Cave initially apparently charged people for admission, despite the fact that the cave entrance was actually just outside his property lines.

Once we were inside the cave, though, we saw the differences between Lehman Cave and Wind Cave. Lehman Cave was gothic-looking, filled with stalactites and stalagmites (which gave us a chance to test our memory of the saying we'd learned from Ice Cave about which is which). Lehman Cave also has mitey-tites, where stalactites and stalagmites meet up with each other.



After the cave, we drove up to the top of the mountain in Great Basin, had lunch, and drove back down. We stopped at a few spots along the way for scenery, and then went on a short hike, where we were on the hunt for flowering cacti.



Our experience at Great Basin taught us that Nevadians have a sense of humor. On our way into the park, we were greeted by a random statue-sort of person, and another statue sort of thing that we didn't quite get, with legs sticking out of the ground. Also, jarringly, nearby there was a (fake) skull. On our way out of the park, there was a ranch exhibit, that explained that, while on their way out to CA to look for gold, people dismissed Nevada as an uninhabitable wasteland. On their way back from CA after unsuccessfully trying to find gold, they stopped in Nevada to ranch. Until we thought about them having to cross over the Badlands again to get back east, we were a bit puzzled by this. However, even after remembering this, when we looked around Nevada, we were still a little puzzled by this decision.

We also had 8 comments about Bearable Bear, Mischievous Monkey, and Not-Tigger Tiger. The paparazzi took 4 photographs of them, and we had 12 comments about the Red Sox. And only the Animal Gods know how many animal butts we've seen on this journey.

Now, we're at an airport hotel in Salt Lake City, nearly all packed up after our over 3000+ mile trek to see 10 parks, 4 national monuments, 1 national reserve, countless national forests, nine brew pubs, nine states, several random sites, and ready to head home.

Forgotten Roadside Attractions

For whatever reason, we forgot to upload several roadside attractions from Pueblo, CO, where we stopped for lunch at a brew pub that didn't have any brew (really, they were out of everything we even remotely wanted to try). As we were driving to and fro, we encountered these guys.

Admiring the paths of people who climbed cliffs and built dwellings using toeholds

Today we headed to Mesa Verde. While there, before we even saw any cliff dwellings, we learned: (a) we should keep wild life wild, (b) we should both bring water and not bring drinks on our walk to the first cliff dwelling we went to, and (c) there's something called Mormon Tea that grows in the area (we thought 2L might enjoy the sign).

Next, we hiked down to Spruce House, and were able to walk around parts of that cliff dwelling. We were tired having walked down a paved path, so we were really impressed with the Anasazi, who apparently got to their houses (and built them, we guessed) by climbing the cliffs using toe-holds that they carved into the mountain. (You can see these in one of the pictures, which has two cliff dwellings with one sort of on top of the other.) We wondered how many Anasazi might have inadvertently gone BASE jumping without a parachute during the process of either building the dwellings or living in them.

In addition to seeing Spruce House up-close, we were also able to see Cliff Palace (the largest cliff dwelling) from a number of vantage points along a drive through the park. We also got to see several other cliff dwellings from afar, and we were amazed at how many there were.




We were less impressed (apologies to the Anasazi who created them) by the pit dwellings that we saw throughout the park. Due, in part, to a sense of bitterness at having walked a trail that took about 20 minutes that lead us just to a pit house (rather than another cliff dwelling view, as we'd expected), we haven't posted any pictures of pit houses. To get an idea of what you're missing, picture a relatively round hole in the ground (which was used for ceremonies, it's speculated by those in the know), next to some small square rooms (with no doors between -- apparently the Anasazi were big enough fans of climbing that they did it even when they weren't living in a cliff dwelling).

In addition to these kinds of dwellings, we saw several funky wild flowers. We have no idea of what these were. In particular, there's a long leafed thing with yellow flowers and pods in the middle. (We have a picture of it with the yellow flowers, and another with the pods.) Anyone who knows what these are, please let us know.



Tonight, we're in Delta, UT, which, according to the front desk guy at the motel here, is in the middle of nowhere. Tomorrow we venture to our bonus park of the trip: Great Basin. (This also gives us our ninth, we think, national park of the trip.)

Updated To the Tour

Well. In the event that everyone reading this blog has not yet figured out that we are on a mission to see every national park in the United States (well, everyone that is accessible by road - either flying to said place or nearby to rent a car or just driving from whatever place we happen to call home at the time cause really, some of those parks in Alaska are kinda hard to access), we thought we'd make that clear. As a result of our mission, we decided that we needed to tack on an additional park to this trip, simply because it would be out of the way to get to on another national park trip. So, we changed the order of some of the parks in CO and added Great Basin National Park in Nevada. So, here's our updated map.


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