Central Valley Sights

Now that I've finished the story of my family's cross-country move, I've been at a loss of what to talk about next. Travel-wise, we've visited Lake Tahoe, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Yosemite National Park, Sequoia National Park, Morro Bay, Pismo Beach and a bunch of other really cool places in California and nearby. I plan on talking about all of them, but right now I want to take a break from travel talk.

I've been looking for a job that will allow me to continue on my career path and will be mutually beneficial to the organization and myself. But I've also begun to explore other options. Most of the cities around here do not have a park ranger program. In fact, most of the cities that have more than a couple full-time parks and recreation staff are at least an hours drive away. The national parks in the area are about a 90 minute drive and require employees to speak conversational spanish to boot. Since I'm not willing to spend 3 hours a day commuting and I don't know spanish I've been looking toward other avenues. Right now I'm teaching part-time: I facilitate a course on base for junior enlisted personnel about personal responsibility. The course is called PREVENT. I'm also taking a few courses at the local college. So far I've taken Psychology and Sociology. I'm currently taking Nutrition and Microbiology. I may go to nursing school and work toward becoming a Nurse Practitioner. It's a variation on a plan I'd talked about in a post a year ago. I'm also waiting to hear back from the county agriculture office about the possibility of working as an Agriculture and Standards Inspector. I like the idea of this position. It combines some of my law-enforcement background as a park ranger with my biology degree. I'd still be able to continue school for nursing too because the college just started a part-time nursing program.

I'm going to end my post with a few pictures of common sights in this part of the Central Valley. It's a lot different from where I grew up! Agriculture reigns out here and the big cities are about an hour away or further. (Los Angeles and San Francisco are both 3 hours away.)

California Aqueduct System

Central Valley Orchard

Cross country trip: Las Vegas to the Central Valley

Hello! I just got back from my Lake Tahoe trip. Now it's back to work and studying, but I though I should finish my cross-country trip discussion before I moved on to something else. When I left off a few days ago I was talking about arriving in Las Vegas. The sun was strong and it was hot enough to use the street as a frying pan. The heat was pretty easy to forget if you stepped into the shade or hung out by the pool at the hotel. We had planned to stay one night and then complete our drive but one night wasn't enough. Vegas is like that I guess. My birthday was coming up and I didn't want to spend it sitting in the truck driving another 500 miles or so. I was treated to a nice dinner and a show on the Vegas strip. We took the kids up in the Stratosphere and drove around looking at all the neon lights. We watched the crowds move up and down the streets. I don't really know what else to say about our time there. There was so much to see that we gave the city an extra day of our time. We liked it there, but didn't do much of anything. My husband won a little bit of money at the slots, but any huge amounts. That's pretty much it.

After two days in Vegas we were back on the road through the Mojave desert and into California. I've seen weigh stations for trucks in every state I've been in but I had never heard about agricultural inspections until I got to California. These inspection stops are on every major road leading into California but they aren't at the state borders. I-15 has one in the middle of the desert not particularly close to anything. I-80 has one close to the Donner Pass area: a good 30 miles west of the state line. The idea of the inspections are to keep undesirable plants and pests away from the major central valley agriculture areas. As we drove up to the inspection site we were each going through a mental list of everything we had packed with us, trying to figure out if we would pass or not. Our mental lists didn't turn up anything to be worried about but there was no need to worry anyway as the stations weren't staffed that day (and haven't been staffed any days we've gone through them since.)

Our road took us past Edwards Airforce Base and up over Tehachapi Pass, where the San Bernadino Mountains meet the Sierra Nevadas. We stopped in Bakersfield for an early dinner and then continued north to our destination.

Here's some pictures of Las Vegas and one of a wind farm on Tehachapi Pass.

Cross country trip: Richfield, UT to Las Vegas!!!

We spent the night in Richfield, UT at probably the second nicest hotel we had stayed at on our trip. It had been cool the evening before but their pool was enclosed, so we took the kids in for a little bit and then sat in the hottub. Then we went back to the room and watched the kids scoot around the room on the footrest.

Our goal today was to see Zion Canyon National Park and go to Las Vegas for the night. We started out at the hotel's continental breakfast. The nicest continental breakfast I've been to so far! They had scrambled eggs, hashbrowns, and pour your own Belgian waffles in addition to the normal hotel breakfast foods (bagels, muffins and cereal.) Again, I don't remember the name of the hotel, but it had a pool in the back enclosed in a patio and it was right next to I-70 at exit 37 (I think.)

Now, if you've read my previous posts you'll know that we don't like to backtrack while we are driving so taking I-15 down to Zion Canyon wasn't going to do for us. We took I-70 until exit 23 and then got on state route 89. The road is a nice one, it's pretty wide and follows a valley. All of the towns along the way are small. The 2 hour drive to Zion Canyon went by pretty quickly. The scenery down here is completely different from what Arches looked like. One thing we didn't know about Zion Canyon is that the most popular part of the park is off limits to private vehicles. If you don't want to hike, the only way to see this part is to park at the visitor center or in the town on the west side of the park and take a tram into the canyon. Parking is very difficult to find. Most of the lots fill early. The trams are crowded but MOST people are pleasant. The experience was a bit like waiting in line at a theme park and my husband wasn't very happy with it... to be honest neither was I. The kids were cranky too. It made the trip a bit of a bummer. The scenery was nice but it didn't make up for our collective attitudes for this part of the trip. We took the tram to the Temple of Sinawava stop at the end of the road in the canyon and started the Riverside Walk. We didn't get more than a quarter mile back when our three-year-old refused to go any further so we turned back around for the tram to go back to our car.

Although we didn't get to see much of Zion Canyon National Park, it is a beautiful park! It's not a good one to visit if you are strictly a car traveler though. This park is best experienced by taking long hikes through steep terrain. More than 80% of this park is considered backcountry and requires special use permits to visit. If you enjoy the outdoors, are reasonably fit and don't have a cranky 3-year-old stopping you, then this park is worth planning a visit to.

We were only there about an hour before we left for Vegas. We to I-15 a little bit north of St. George, UT. Along the western side of the highway the ground was black from a recent fire in the area. We were out of Utah pretty quickly after leaving Zion Canyon. I-70 goes through a tiny portion of Arizona. We were in Arizona less than an hour--basically long enough to claim another state under our belt. We saw a pretty cool looking recreation area in Arizona, but we didn't have time to stop and explore. Or we didn't want to take a chance with the cranky 3-year-old. The kids were happily watching a movie on the DVD player by now.

It's only about an hour from the Arizona border to Las Vegas on I-70. There is nothing around but the desert on though. I can understand why people get excited when Las Vegas comes into view. I was having a hard time understanding why someone thought this area would be a nice place to put a town. Anyway, on the way in to town we started to think about where we wanted to stay. We'd made no reservations and didn't know the best places to go so I called Barbara. She loves Vegas! While I worked with her, it seemed she went at least twice a year after she discovered it. Barbara said that if you are in Vegas you absolutely HAVE TO stay on the strip. So we wanted to know where we could stay that wouldn't eat our entire travel budget up. She suggested Westward Ho. She said you could get rooms there for as little as $30 a night. It's definitely not the best place on the strip, but that's where we stayed. It wasn't as cheap as she said but it wasn't too bad. We checked in and then set out to explore a bit. I'll write more about exploring Las Vegas later. My daughter just came home and she's looking for attention now.

Oh, it will be a few days before I get to post again. I'm going to go to a George Strait concert tonight and then I'm heading out to explore Lake Tahoe this weekend. I'll have more for you on Tuesday... and if you are looking for other travel ideas check out the links on the right of my page. The top ones are mostly for travel oriented companies that I think are pretty cool. (And clicking on them helps me pay my bills and is very much appreciated.) Further down in the right column are links to other travel blogs. Last time I checked there was a pretty cool one about Africa and a couple about some European ex-pats living on remote islands. Sounds nice!