Michael Abernethy - The Homegrown Snob

You can learn lots of things on cross-country road trips. Here, I’d like to share some of them with you. 

Apologies first: I should have put up a note about my abnormally long absence from posting here. I’ll try to be better about leaving notice in the future.

I spent the last week in the Western U.S., trekking from Boulder, Colo., to Las Vegas, to the Grand Canyon and back again.

1. Xanax is God’s gift to skittish airline travelers.

2. You might not get to see a rattlesnake in the wilderness. Don’t be too disappointed. There are plenty of cougars around to startle you.

3. Las Vegas is not the place for me. It’s like Disney World in Hell. Too expensive. Too smoggy. Too much traffic. There are so many people you can’t move or breathe, and the air inside casinos smells like coconut ass smoke.

4. The Grand Canyon really is amazing. You can spit into it.

5. Because the Grand Canyon is so amazing, people have decided to throw their cigarette butts and Taco Bell cups and old couches into it. Litterers are awesome.

6. If you ever want to learn French through immersion, don’t spend all that money going to France. Just go to the Grand Canyon, where the official language is French but they’ll allow you to speak German if you’re really nice about it.

7. Forget what they tell you about dry heat vs. the humidity here. Sure, it doesn’t feel like you’re walking through a shower room and your clothes aren’t soaked when you finish a 2-mile uphill hike, but you can’t breathe, either.

It feels like you’re sucking fire and sand.

112 degrees is just too hot for things to live. I swear I saw a fox spontaneously burst into flames while crossing a canyon in Moab, Utah.

8. The Rocky Mountains are so huge that soil type, climate and vegetation can change from one hill to the next. Driving through Utah, you’ll see lush green pines on one side of the road and scorched desert on the other. The shape of the mountains - red and rounded, brown and wrinkled (like a sharpee’s skin), jagged and snow-covered - change nearly as quickly.

9. Micro-breweries rock my face off.

10. Squirrels in the Southwest don’t mess around. They’ll take your hand for a peanut.

11. I’m glad our speed limit isn’t 75 on the interstate. Trying to drive a Durango around mountains at 80 mph. made me pucker.

12. There’s only so much drive time the human body can take. 12 hours is my max.

13. In all honesty, Arches National Park is a little more fun than the Grand Canyon.

14. People are generally healthier out there. I don’t know if it’s because there aren’t as many buffets or that they all think it’s fun to run/bike/slolem everywhere they go. I felt like a slob.

15. Mormons are a little strange.

16. When you tell a local in Las Vegas you’re going to walk somewhere rather than take a cab or bus and their eyes go wide before exclaiming, “Are you sure?” it’s probably best to just take the cab and not try to prove that you’re cool enough to handle a mid-day stroll through Hell.

17. High school friends will always know you better than anyone else (besides maybe your parents).

18. Stars are the bomb once you actually get to places where city lights don’t drown them out.

19. Despite my cynical desire to paint all of humanity with the same self-centered, lazy, dispassionate brush - people can still surprise. Walking up a steep cliff to Utah’s Delicate Arch, it was enlightening to see a British family give one of their two shared bottles of water to a stranger struggling up the side of the mountain alone. The poor guy - obviously not from the U.S. - was in dress pants and a shirt. Thanks to their water, he made it up and back without a medical emergency.

20. Satellite radio = endless entertainment.

21. After a 2,000-mile roadtrip, one should factor in an extra day of rest before going back to the office.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.