Wednesday July 24, 2002 – Today was a day for early rising, we got up at 5:30 to make sure we could head out by seven. We ate a continental breakfast in the hotel, packed the car and were on the road just after seven. The traffic around LA was surprisingly good and within a reasonable amount of time we were headed towards Las Vegas. We exited the freeway in Vegas and drove down the strip and through the older downtown sections of the city. Western California was desert landscape; the land was dry but covered in a variety of low shrubs that resist drought. While driving through western California and Nevada Anna watched Harry Potter. In my continued defiance of this marketing blitz I listened to music and read my CWNA study guide which is a certification I hope to have by the end of the summer. After the movie was done we continued to listen to a tape we had started earlier in the day which is a book on tape about the building of the transcontinental railroad, I found this a very interesting tape. We stopped in Mesquite, NV, just before the Arizona border, for lunch and having yet to try a Jack in the Box restaurant we decided to stop there for lunch. I think we found it about the same as any other fast food restaurant. After lunch I took over driving and took us through just the northwest corner of Arizona and then into southern Utah. Southern Utah is very different than northern Utah was. The landscape covered by rock here, but not the kind of desolate land southern Wyoming had. Here the rocks vary in color and there is a variety of low shrubs covering the hillsides that aren’t sheer. Many of the colors in the canyons, passes, and rock outcroppings here are beautiful. As I drove through the mountain passes in this part of Utah I was continually amazed by the beauty that this desert could hold. We made our way to Green River, UT near the Colorado border where we stopped for dinner at a truck stop; the food was welcome after our travels across nearly 700 miles of the country. We decided that we should press on to Grand Junction, CO where there are a number of hotels where we could try and find lodging for the night. After checking a few hotels we were able to find some rooms where we’re spending the night, tomorrow we don’t have a set destination yet but we plan to be on the road by nine so I should probably be getting to sleep because we lost an hour today as well.
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