VACATIONS!
I couldn’t wait to take vacations and go to the beach! Sun, sea, the cool breeze on your face, cold beer and some grilled shrimp. This is the most perfect vacation plan for the hot and scorching summer in the United States, but no! In the middle of a hot and scorching summer in the United States, we decided to go to the Death Valley desert. Yes, desert in the summer. An extremely dry place, with temperatures around 122 ºF (50ºC) and its landscape is pretty much rocks, salt and sand. The Death Valley desert is pretty close to Las Vegas – less than 2 hours driving. And this whole trip to Las Vegas, in my mind, happened because I wanted to cross the desert which once had the highest temperatures ever recorded on Earth. Unfortunately, we couldn’t spend an entire week in the desert, so we took the opportunity to visit other famous places in that region, such as the Grand Canyon and obviously the city of Las Vegas itself, which we never really considered as a main vacation plan, to be honest.
Poor Lucas, always into (not always actually) the most outlandish ideas I come up with. Unfortunately, he just doesn’t agree with the most amazing ideas I have, such as spending an entire week in the tornado alley for some tornado hunting, but I’ll still try to convince him of it. Anyway, he was a bit grumpy when I came up with the idea of this trip, as he was thinking that this whole thing of going to the desert in the summer was completely stupid. But as we were planning and preparing things for our trip, he started getting so excited that not surprisingly he became way more excited than me. It took us about 10 days to have everything prepared. We bought clothes to withstand the heat and block the sun radiation (believe me, long pants and long sleeves), a wide-brimmed hat, sunscreen, a super resistant cooler (best purchase ever), 15 liters of water and the largest possible package of mixed nuts with salt, raisins and M&M’s. It was a five-day car trip, being, one full day at the Death Valley, another at the Grand Canyon, two days in Vegas and two days to go from Denver to Vegas and come back home.
I’m not sure if someone will be willing to drive between Denver and Las Vegas (or the other way around), but I’d like to make a few comments. We crossed the Rocky Mountains from end to end in the I-70 (Interstate 70), and it took us about 8 hours to reach the city of Grand Junction, last city in the I-70 in Colorado. My first advice for Grand Junction is: tank up, go to the bathroom and buy water and food, as the next 210 miles (340 km) are in a completely remote area with no service whatsoever – including cell phone service. Another advice is, make sure if you’d like to drive 12 hours (or more) in one shot. After leaving Grand Junction, there aren’t many places to sleep it might be a good idea to sleep in Grand Junction. Lucas and I chose to go all the way at once, taking turns of 3 hours each driving so we wouldn’t be too tired. The downside of doing it all at once was missing out on the natural beauty that is unique to the state of Utah. If you choose to spend the night in Grand Junction, another piece of advice is trying to visit the Arches National Park, which is a very unique place with wonderful landscape. Also, try to stop at the scenic view areas along the road. We stopped at the scenic view area of Black Dragon Canyon, and it is gorgeous!
The first place you’ll be able to get some service after Grand Junction is Salina in Utah, about 210 miles from Grand Junction. We finally were able to tank up again, switch who was driving and continuing our journey. This section of trip can be very boring, especially for those who are driving. On the other hand, the speed limit on most of the road is not terrible – 80 mph, or 130 km/h.
After crossing 210 without any service on the road (including phone service), we finally arrived in Salina.
We still had daylight when we arrived in Vegas, and were able to walk around a bit to get to know it. The first two nights we stayed in a hotel two blocks from the Main Strip (the main avenue – Las Vegas Boulevard). At this trip we stayed in two different hotels, the first was the Candlewood Suites Las Vegas, which had no casino and nothing that could resemble a resort. The advantage of doing this: you don’t pay for many of the extra fees charged by the hotels at Vegas. Don’t be fooled, the prices look amazing when you’re booking the hotels, but the final price adds several fees, such as the resort fees, which make your daily rate way more expensive than the initial price offered. I’ll explain a little more about this in the part where I write about the city of Vegas itself. We chose to stay in a simpler hotel for the first few days as we were going to spend the first two days outside, one in Death Valley and the other in the Grand Canyon, which are the topics of the next posts.
See you soon!
by Lalá.
Trips & Guac 