RT- Album

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RT Journal - Day 3 - Antelope Canyon + Monument Valley

We took the Antelope Canyon Tour in the morning, [you can't access the canyons without a tour guide since it is on Navajo land], it was about a 30 min truck ride to the canyons. The reason behind wanting to see this place was because while watching Britney Spear's video for "i am not a girl not yet a woman" in 2001 I fell in love with the back drop and actually searched for this place by looking for the video. It was worth it! There are 2 canyons, upper and lower. We went into the upper since it is more widely visited but definitely want to see the lower one day. Water and wind have worn the sandstone down and sculpted this canyon into a museum for light. It's really hard to take pictures without a tripod but Amrit managed to get a few good ones with his steady hands!
After the canyon we had some indecision about weather to stay in Page cause there was so much more to do there or drive 2.5 hours out to monument valley and stay the course of our itinerary.....we took the drive.
Monument Valley blows your mind! Amrit says it looks like the land where the road runner lives. You can either take a tour guided drive through the 17 miles it or drive your self, we drove ourselves. The valley isn't really a valley it is a wide flat landscape but then it gets interrupted by these formations that are 100's of feet tall, called buttes which came about due to erosion and uplift. This is also on Navajo land so there were some native Americans selling jewelry and crafts as we drove through. We bought a the Navajo wedding vase, ours is white with horse hair in it, you'll have to come over if you want to see it! After our drive we had some massive confusion on what time it was! We had JIN [john, the internet nuvi, another track off the album] figure out what the heck was going on....so here it is - Arizona is in the Mountain Time Zone but doesn't observe Daylight-Saving Time the Navajo Nation observes Daylight-Saving Time but we picked up our car in Las Vegas which is on Pacific Standard Time Zone. Therefore in Las vegas it will be 3pm PST, in Arizona it will be 3pm MST w/out Daylight-Saving, in Navajo Nation MST in Arizona it will be 4pm with Daylight-Saving. All kinds of crazy time situation! After monument valley we drove to Flagstaff to spend the night.

RT Journal - Day 2 - Hoover Dam + Grand Canyon

When leaving Vegas in morning we stopped at a Whole Foods and tried to get a cooler but ended up with a cool/warm bag which we put ice in and filled with cheese, meat and fruit for lunch..we also got bread and snacks for the drive.

Hoover dam was about 1 hour away and it wasn't the dam that blew us away, it was a bridge they are building to help with traffic in that area. The arch was almost done, the keystone piece was left to put in place so it looked amazing, just hovering over the Colorado river.

The Dam is pretty impressive for the time it was done, we took the power plant tour cause the other tour that actually takes you to better places in the Dam wasn't available for the time we wanted to go. Of course I got all kinds of confused with all the technicalities they were throwing at me and not having a drawing in front of me to assess the situation I irritated John (brother in law) and Amrit till I fully understood.

We then drove 4 hours to get to the Grand Canyon. These 4 hours were boring for a bit, until we decided to play the movie game. To play the game you say an actor and a movie they were in with another actor [Hugh Grant was in Holiday with Cameron Diaz]. The next person has to take the last actor and do the same [Cameron Diaz was in Vanilla Sky with Tom Cruise] so on and so on. John basically sucks at this game so he had to be hinted all the time, Amrit on the other hand needed a few rounds to access that part of his brain that stores this information. My sister and I kicked ass. Once Amrit found this part of his brain, he basically wanted to play by himself which we let him do because it was so entertaining.......and if you recall my previous post one of our tracks was penne bingbanger....this came from Amrit not being able to remember Renee Zellweger.

The Canyon was unreal, it is so vast it just seemed endless. We walked around the south rim and got to a point where you could climb down a bit, then John and Amrit climbed down further to a point that wasn't easy to get to due to the fact that you could fall into the canyon, nothing dangerous or anything.... Rekha (sister) is freaking out as they make their way down, I wanted to join them but I was too scarred to die so I just sat at the edge and watched them, Rekha stood further away and watched me. After that craziness we got to a point where we could watch the sunset, unfortunately it was spoiled by the family that was fighting behind us.

We then left for the 2.5 hour ride to Page, it was dark and little did we know that part of the road hugged the south rim and was curvy with no lights. We almost hit a moose. We got to Page really late, had a horrible dinner at Denny's, couldn't find our hotel, didn't know what time it was and had a bit of a water leakage from the cool/warm bag filled with ice. Our hotel..turned out to be a motel, america's best value inn, another track off the album.....it was said that I should never book our hotel rooms.

RT Journal - Day 1 - Vegas

We picked up our ride for the trip = PT Cruiser

The best thing about Vegas was the Cirque Du Soleil show KA! It was a "visual orgasmic experience" according to Amrit. The stage was beyond anything that you can wrap your mind around. If you take everything you know about a stage, lighting, music, human ability, horizontal planes and throw it out the window, that is KA. It has a story to it which makes it more involved than just doing acrobatics to music. It was bad ass, you just have to go see it to understand, I can't give any details without spoiling the show so just GO SEE IT.

Besides KA I think we were all a bit uninterested in Vegas.

We stayed off the strip and took the tram everywhere. That day we had been up for 24 hours due to the time change, needless to say we were exhausted!

RT Journal - "the band"

Santa Monica Pier /
Monument Valley

Okay so I was going to start today with writing about Vegas but this was more fun.

Somewhere around the time we were at monument valley, we decided we'd take "band" pictures that would turn into our selection of album covers for our made up band, "The Sa-pa-the's" [this word which has NO meaning is what Amrit (husband) was saying as we traveled to Vegas, he was drunk [that story to come later].


Flagstaff /
Bridge in Santa Monica

Our debut album will be entitled "Grungreg Karma"[this came from a sign posted at a movie shoot that Ashwairya Rai was shooting while we were riding the street car in S.F.,or so the street car driver told us she was there]

Some tracks on the album include [these all came out of incidents in the trip]
1.OTC addiction
2.bugga digga
3.JIN [john, the internet nuvi]
4.lost wadges
5.chicha de mammi
6.penne bingbanger
7.american's next best value inn
8.ophra's vortex
9.the painted whores
10.boochan
11.it's good, right?

Road Trip

My husband, my sister, my brother in law and I went on a road trip to the west coast. We had an amazing time and discovered things we could have never imagined about nature and all her unexpected gifts to us. We wanted to spend more time in most places but we had 8 days to get to S.F. from Vegas we had to make a list of things we'd do "next time". Given the vastness of the little portion of the USA that we saw, I think I'd rather skip our "next time" list and start a list on another little portion of the USA. Everyone should do a little road trip.

Stats [all costs are per person]
8 days
2062 miles
$63 gas
$274 food
$237 fees.fun.transportation
$364 airfare
$206 hotel
$113 car rental

Itinerary
6.6.09
Flight to Vegas
Vegas

6.7.09
Hoover Dam
Grand Canyon

6.8.09
Antelope Canyon (page)
Monument Valley (Utah/Arizona)

6.9.09
Snow bowl (flagstaff)
Walnut Canyon (flagstaff)
Sedona

6.10.09
Taliesin (scottsdale)
Palm Springs
L.A.

6.11.09
Drive up to SF on Route 1

6.12.09
S.F.

6.13.09
Napa
S.F.

6.14.09
Flight to Richmond

I am going to do a little blurb of each of the places we went along with photographs of course and I'll make an album on picassa of all the images and post the link here so keep checking back on the blog!