Still drivin'

West Virginia...


Pennsylvania...


By the time we reached Maryland we felt kind of home and tired of taking state welcome sign pictures, so that's where we stop. We hit DC just during rush hour, because what's better than a suburban traffic jam to celebrate the end of a cross-country trip?!

HOME!



After 9 days, 4,000 miles (6 500 km)... and 3 showers! It was time...

Drivin' more

Illinois...


Indiana...


Ohio...


There really isn't much to talk about when you spend over 10 hours a day driving, driving and driving.

On Tuesday night we do a little detour off I-70, our faithful companion throughout these days, and stop in Cincinnati to have dinner with Brian's youngest brother, Andrew.

Somehow, the idea of yet another impersonal cheap motel is not too attractive, and we find ourselves a deserted campground in the rolling hills of Ohio.

Drivin'

At which point our trips gets, ahem, a little less picturesque.

On Monday we drove across the flat, more boring part of Colorado, into Kansas



Spent the day driving and watching the fields from the car window.


We were not fast enough to catch any of the friendly anti-choice (I refuse to call it "pro-life") signs bearing slogans like "It's a baby, not a choice" or the Ten Commandments; but we did see this one early enough (it was hard to miss, really):



Kansas's huge! We reached Missouri at night (no pic) and crashed in a cheap motel. Motels are so much fun...

Sous le ciel de l'Ouest

Une note aux amateurs de Lucky Luke, d'histoire américaine, et autres westerns spaghetti (ma famille notamment :-)

L'office du tourisme du Kansas avait un poster proposant une excursion à la cache des frères Dalton. D'où je déduis, naturellement, que Lucky Luke lui-même a passé beaucoup de temps au Kansas, où se trouve aussi Abilene (et son marché au bétail - heureusement que mon frère suit). La route I-50 qui va de Sacramento (Californie) à Washington DC et que nous avons empruntée au Nevada était aussi la route suivie par le Pony Express, qui n'a été en service que 2 ans (1860-1861), jusqu'à la complétion du chemin de fer transcontinental.

Nous avons aussi vu plusieurs panneaux vantant les mérites des villes fantômes dans l'est du Colorado et au Missouri, que les immigrants ont quitté lors de la ruée vers l'or, à San Francisco bien sûr. Le Homestead Act, qui a autorisé les immigrants - souvent des soldats récemment démobilisés après la Guerre de Sécession - à planter 4 poteaux et prendre possession d'un terrain vierge, fait bien partie de l'histoire de l'Ouest américain, notamment l'Oklahoma.

Que serait ma culture ouest-américaine sans Lucky Luke ??!!

PS: fellow American friends, see the great Wikipedia entry on Lucky Luke (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_Luke) if you're wondering what on earth I'm talking about.

Colorado and the Rockies

If we were reasonable we'd have probably started driving seriously east on Sunday. But how not to stop in the Rockies?! (Les Montagnes Rocheuses) - the last (or first, depending on perspective) great natural feature of the West. And besides, after such a hard night finding rest, we deserve a break... We stop in lovely Georgetwon, Colorado, for coffee and newspaper break, and then leave the highway and head north towards Rocky Mountain National Park.



The drive is increasingly beautiful, studded with massive mountains in the background and abundant wild raw nature in the foreground. We saw moose (elan) - with a new-born calf! - elk, and eagles. The road continued up and over the spine of the Continental Divide (la ligne de partage des eaux entre l'Atlantique et le Pacifique) and yes, it's cooooooooold up there!!



and then up higher still, to over twelve thousand feet (4 000 metres d'altitude), with Brian muttering, "In my day, we had to hike for three days to get up to these kind of views..."



We wind our way down out of the park towards Nederland, home to one of Brian's favorite bluegrass bands, steal, as usual, the last spot in the local campground, and enjoy the sunset with some local brews.

Grand Staircase - Escalante and Arches!

We leave Bryce Canyon bright and early, as usual (!), and start our long drive into the Grand Staircase - Escalante National Monument (created by Bill Clinton against much local opposition by Utahians or whatever they're called). The road through the park is amazing, incredible views over canyons, gorges, mountains and so forth. Of our whole trip, this is the place that has Brian saying, "We have to come back here!" Behind Emilie, in the photo above, are Capitol Reef, Arches, spires and hoodoos, cool chasm canyons, high mountain aspens, and more picturesque pieces of the red rock American West than you can shake a stick at.



The road also takes us through Capitol Reef Park, with dark red reefs (falaises)



Until we finally reach Arches. Oh, who does not love Arches? Well, certainly Utahians are proud: they have it on every license plate!



The price to pay for such popularity is that the park is very crowded, especially, guess what, on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend... We still catch a couple of views without too many baseball-capped heads,



and opt for the quieter walk far from the main arch rather than lining up with all the tourists to have our picture taken under the arch


(yup, we love a good zoom).



We also take a glimpse of the Landscape Arch, which is in danger of crumbling any day - the beauty of arches also come from their ephemerality.


And we catch our one and only western sunset



We leave Arches and enter Colorado at night (hence no picture) and this is where our luck in finding great spots for the night stops abruptly. Between 10pm and midnight, we stop at every motel in Grand Junction (there's a championship game in town, all rooms are rented out to the teams and fans); Parachute and Rifle (no kidding, theses are real towns!) where all the rooms are booked by truckdrivers and temporary workers from the booming natural gas fields; and Glenwood Spring, a very touristy Rocky Mountain town where, on a Saturday night of a long weekend, guess what... everything is booked! We finally find a room that is not a complete ripoff and collapse around 1am, cursing our disorganization and failure to foresee that we'd have trouble after being warned so many times.

Bryce Canyon

After this airy delay, we reach Bryce Canyon in the late afternoon. Bryce is the park I found most suprising and fascinating.



These stone formations are called hoodoos, they are, as the other canyons, carved by water, creeks and metling snows.



We take a short walk into the canyon, between hoodoos and rock formations,



and a longer one along the rim (au bord de la falaise) watching the ever changing shapes as we walk around the amphitheater shape. This time the sun comes out from under the cloud, bringing out colors most beautifully.





We decide we've exhausted our bad luck of the day with the flat tire, and boldly head towards the only, small campground of the camp at 7pm, where, by some unexplained miracle, we find room for the night. We spend the evening reading by the fire.

Utah Rocks!

We reach Utah on Wednesday afternoon, driving a highway so quiet it feels like hours between seeing another car. As we're still a ways from Zion, and decide that setting up the camp by daylight would be nice, we stop in a lovely and quiet campground near Cedar Breaks National Monument, the first red rock park on our list.


(Don't mind Brian, he's screwing our new license plates onto the car)

Wde reach Zion National Park by 11, where we are politely reminded that this is Memorial Day weekend (un weekend prolonge tres populaire aux US), and we're foolishly clueless if we think we're going to find a camping stop after 10 in the morning. Foolish we are, and lucky too, as we get the one before last camping spot in the Park, with a gorgeous view on the red rocks from our airbed.



We hop on the shuttle - 'cause Zion is an advanced national park that bans cars from the "scenic drive" during summer and instead offers a very efficient shuttle (navette) system. Zion Canyon is a very narrow canyon with all kind of redish-pinkish-orangish nuances. Sadly it was cloudy that day and our pictures don't do justice to the beauty of the place.



Anyhow, we decide to go hike "the narrows", up high in the canyon where it gets so narrow that you're actually hiking up the river, by which I mean, knee-deep in the river.



Turns out this is not only fun and beautiful, but also quite exhausting (and cold!) after a while, so we drag ourselves back to the camp and enjoy the (cloudy) sunset over our cosy camp.

Our next morning's attempt to see the sunrise on the red rocks is foiled by weather and a seeming genetic inability to really get going bgfore 8 am - we end up going back to bed (oops) and sleep in until the sun reaches our tent, a couple of hours later... By then we decide we have seen enough of Zion which does, quite honestly, entertain some resemblance with Red Rock Disneyland, and take the drive out towards Bryce canyon, our next destination.

We stop on the way for a last hike that brings some pretty views



Finally done with Zion, we think, as I back out of the parking lot. Shtonk. Pssssssssssssssssss... Oh, that so distinctive sound! We find a shiny screw neatly planted in the middle of our front right tire. Pssssssssssssssssssss says the tire. We suspect some cranky teenager, probably acting out his aggression at being stuck in a minivan with his cousins, placed the screw there, as the circumstances are too specific to be mere bad luck.

But the end result is the same, and Brian got to inaugurate our jack and spare tire under the scorching midday sun. We drive, oh so slowly, the 50 miles to the nearest gas station (did I mention this was all taking place in the desert?) where a most taciturn yet friendly guy fixes our tire.

Nevada's Wranglers

We spend our first night on the road in the Nevada desert, near a wonderful hot spring in which we happily dip upon late night arrival and late morning awaking. There are a network of such springs throughout the American West, with various creative bathing tubs built and maintained by an informal corps of "desert rats" in RVs and Jeeps. And check out this campsite: just us, the infinite sky... and a feral donkey (there are huge herds of 'wild' horses and donkeys roaming the Nevada desert) that woke us up in the middle of the night braying loudly just outside the tent!



We're driving I-50, the "loneliest highway" they call it, and sure enough all we see are long stretches of very straight roads between valleys and ranges of the West. Luckily, we find a friendly town for lunch:



So friendly that all the employees in the diner/bar where we stop for lunch wear Tshirts most welcoming to us:



In case you can't read it, the T-shirt says, "WRANGLERS: Western Ranchers Against No Good Leftist Environmentalist Shitheads." Gotta love Nevada wranglers! (NB: en anglais "wranglers" est un synonyme de cowboys) We snuck quietly out of town, keeping our fuel efficient vehicle with California license inconspicuous...

Leaving San Francisco

The time has come to leave the Bay Area. Emilie has finally graduated from and Brian has already settled some in DC.



We load up our little car with all kind of camping gear, summer clothes and useless stuff, say a last goodbye to the Golden Gate bridge, and off we go!