I don’t know why I’m posting this. When we went to Utah we bought a bag of potato chips at the airport, I think. Somehow we ended up bringing them back. And they were sitting on our kitchen table all this time. I was feeling hungry so I ate our Utah chips. However they did expire it seems on June 3rd. That’s it, end of story.

My memories of our vacation go more and more out of focus and transform into a beautiful bright cloud of warmth as time passes by.

The desire to keep at least some details sharp propels me to write this post about our Salt Lake City experience.

Salt Lake City was the last stop in our wonderful journey. The city itself has a rather small population of less than 200,000 people, but its metropolitan area is inhabited with a substantially larger population of over a million. Read more…

The stay in Ruby’s Inn at Bryce Canyon was the only 3 night, 2 day stop during our trip. We assigned the first day to the exploration of Bryce Canyon National Park and the use of the second day was to be decided upon the arrival of the said day.

At first I (and others seemed to agree) thought that maybe we should have spent that extra day in Moab, but when the evening rolled around and the day was behind us we knew that we did the right thing. In the morning it was decided that Zion National Park was too close for us not to explore it. Read more…

Tuesday (April 22nd) night we arrived at the Bryce Canyon. Hotel we stayed in, Ruby’s Inn, is located right near the entrance to the park. We quickly checked in into our pretty decent room with two king-size beds, and drove to the canyon to see the sunset. The park is open 24 hours a day, and the fee per car is $25. We don’t really care about fees to national parks though, because Danya’s dad bought a senior national park pass for just $10 (you have to be at least 62 and an American citizen at that), and it is valid indefinitely at any national park. Anyway, after a certain time there are no rangers at the entrance to the Canyon, so anybody can enter the park for free.

I saw Bryce Canyon on the pictures before, but to see it with my own eyes was still truly amazing. Tall columns of rocks, called hoodoos, are carved by water and wind. They look nothing like any rock formations I’ve seen before. It seemed as if I accidentally found a magic city built with red, white and orange Read more…

В Моабе мы были две ночи. В первый вечер, голодные и уставшие после дороги, мы поели супа, попили пива в местном баре-пивоварне, и рано пошли спать.

На следующее утро мы отправились в Arches National Park. Пожалуй, этот парк произвёл на меня наибольшее впечатление из всей поездки. Красота там ну просто необыкновенная. Красные причудливые горы возвышаются над такой же кирпично-красной землёй. Земля же покрыта кактусами и скромными растениями пустыни, стыдливо раскрывшими свои незамысловатые соцветия навстречу слепящему солнцу.

Даниным родителям очень понравились три скалы, которые д. Боря величал тремя гангстерами (потом мы узнали, что эти горные образования носят название “три сестры”). Произвёл впечатление и огромный каменюга, непонятно каким образом балансирующий на высокой каменной подставке. Но, конечно, самого большого внимания заслуживают сами арки. Read more…

This was the first day when we didn’t have to pack and move out to the next stop. Today was dedicated for local sight seeing and there was a lot to see.

Our first destination was Arches National Park. This is probably one of the most popular parks out there as the number of people here was much greater then at the previous parks that we visited. And there is a reason for that. I don’t think any words or pictures will do it justice.

We spent around 5 hours admiring the beauty of this park. First it starts off with huge vertical walls which are mountains. There is a point which is called Park Avenue, because it looks like the mountains are like a row of huge skyscrapers. Read more…

We have booked our mega road trip two days ago. It took us approximately 3 hours to do. If somebody will want to repeat this in the future below is a full plan¹ of action.

On the morning of Friday, April 18th, we fly² out to Albuquerque, New Mexico. We rent a car³ and proceed to drive to Santa Fe, New Mexico. We return to Albuquerque the same day and spend a night⁴ there.

In the morning we drive to Cortez, Colorado, making a stop at Four Corners — can’t pass up an opportunity to Read more…

Another vacation time is nearing and we starting thinking about our possibilities. One of the best ones we had was a trip in October of 2005, when we drove from Phoenix to Sedona to Grand Canyon and to Las Vegas. Road trip seems like a good idea this time around too.

First we considered where we could go from New York without repeating something that we’ve done before. Cincinnati, Indianapolis maybe? Then we remembered that we’re not Read more…