back, more or less

[ilanarama]

Been gone a while, first to the Colorado State Democratic Convention (you can read my write-up at the Denver Post's PoliticsWest blog here - and haha, four out of our five CD3 delegates were elected from the Western Slope, including one guy from our county) and then off to Utah and Arizona for what was going to be a week but stretched into two because, mmm, Utah and Arizona.

Shakedown cruise of our shiny new-to-us Sportsmobile went A-OK! Even though it's rather painful filling the tank (30-40 gallons * $4.50-$4.90 diesel = ow ow ow) we only had to do it twice during our two weeks out; what a contrast from our old RV which got less than half the mpg and had about half the tankage. Of course gas then (2005, when we sold it) cost about half what diesel does today....

Used 4WD four times, twice on long, nasty jeep roads to and from trailheads, and twice briefly to get out of sand or mud hazards. Mostly camped in pull-outs off BLM or NFS land, but spent 1 night in free campground and 4 nights in definitely not free but still damn primitive NPS campgrounds. Hiked between 4-10 miles every day except for one day when we did a bunch of mountain biking instead; a couple of days we both biked and hiked, either because we were using the bikes to shuttle between trailheads and make a loop, or because we used the bikes to access the trailhead (in Zion, which was YAY). Oh, except for one day in the middle when we totally vegged out. Took about a bazillion pictures which I shall be putting on Flickr and annotating here.

I want to be still on vacation, damn it. I am not sleeping half so well in my own bed as I did under the van's pop-top. I suddenly have all this $%#@! work to do, and my house is a mess of dust and cat hair, and my lawn needs a haircut, and so do I. And there are all these photos that need rotating and uploading and captioning. And I want to write about our awesome trip. So I'm going to (try to) stay away from my friendslist and see if I can manufacture some spare time that way. If you have posted something I should see, point me to it.

Comments

[ilanarama.livejournal.com]

Relative importance, indeed! *ba-DING* Hugs to you and good luck negotiating the familial minefields. Oog.

What we found interesting was that probably 50% of the other tourists we saw were from outside the US, and probably 75% of them were German. (The American Southwest occupies a distinctive niche in the German psyche, due to some famous books about cowboys and Indians. Also, there have been a bunch of German TV specials and magazine articles about visiting Utah.) We saw bunches of rental RVs, mostly driven by Europeans. We figure that with the low dollar vs the Euro, and the even higher price of gas out there, an American road trip vacation looks like a bargain!

[ignazwisdom.livejournal.com]

*facepalm* My puns are getting away from me. That wasn't even intentional!

It was my experience in Europe that Germans travel a LOT, and I wouldn't be surprised if that applies to travel within the US. It is interesting to think about why this particular area would appeal to European tourists. Is that unusual for the places you've been to?

[ilanarama.livejournal.com]

Part of it is that the US southwest is a unique sort of scenery; Europe has mountains and beaches, but they don't have these vast pink and red erosion-created sandstone landscapes. Also, I don't know if you have any fannish Germans on your flist, but the Old West cowboys and indians books by Karl May (the best-selling German author of all time, who never visited the American West(!)) have this incredible mythos about them. Like, oh, the Little House series here, maybe. Everyone's read them, everyone wants to visit the American West. Finally, according to a BLM volunteer, the immense popularity of the Coyote Buttes area (and in fact the designation of one feature as "the Wave") is due to a German travel DVD that extolled it as "one of the places you must see before you die." Certainly, half the people trying to get drawn for a permit there were German.

We heard other languages too, of course. The next biggest contingent of foreign tourists were French, and then there were a smattering of Slavic (I can't distinguish the various languages) and Japanese. And of course, it's possible some of the German speakers were Austrian.

I would say that by contrast most of the tourists here in Durango are from Texas. :-)