A brief stop in civilization

A quick update from Midvale, Utah, just south of Salt Lake City. The trip is going fantastically so far. From Yosemite we stopped briefly in Benton Hot Springs (lovely!), then crossed Nevada in a day to arrive in Zion, and on to Bryce from there. Both of these southern Utah parks are outstanding, but Bryce is definitely my favorite so far (I have yet to visit Capitol Reef or Arches, not to mention the many smaller parks in this whole amazing region).

So we've been camping and without much in the way of Internet access (or power) since Monday of last week. I had hoped to be able to put up some photos and do a bit of posting here more frequently, but so far that has proved difficult. I've been keeping mental notes though and I still intend to go back and write a post about each day. So far there has been more than enough of interest in almost every day that passes.

Look for those blog posts to begin in a week or less, depending on whether we find Internet access in any of our upcoming stops - The Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, The Badlands, Devil's Tower. If nothing else, I'll get it all up here once we reach Chicago around the 8th or 9th of September. I'll begin on "Day 5", our trip in to Yosemite, since that's when things really kicked-off.

Here in Midvale we're staying in an Extended Stay hotel that we booked for $25/night ($35 with taxes and fees) through Priceline (awesome!), and I have to say I'm impressed. Unlike a regular hotel, this is setup as an "efficiency", so it actually has a small kitchen with 2 electric burners, a fridge, microwave, even a toaster oven. It also has 2 small desks, along with the usual recliner, bed, etc. Not to mention tons of electrical outlets - heaven for someone like me. The bed is a bit smaller than other hotels, but it's fine for 2 people (we were nearly lost in the bed of the room we stayed at in Fresno). In every other way it is comparable to or better than other cheap hotels I've stayed at recently, and at $35/night all told, it's hard to argue. There's even on-site laundry! Now I'm not about to start schilling for a hotel chain, but I'll definitely be looking for these the next time I want an inexpensive place to stay, and maybe other budget travelers might find the recommendation useful.

Anyway now that I've got access to all the power I need, I finally have a chance to offload all the pictures I've taken on the trip thus far to the external hard drive I have for the purpose. Anticipating a lot of photos, I brought along a 2TB USB drive, that also includes a bunch of music. Since the trip began I've already taken nearly 2400 photos, and I've realized that doing photo posts just on my photoblog will be somewhat limiting if I hope to maintain anything close to its original purpose (1 photo per day). So I will be putting my single favorite photo from each day/location there, and then putting a wider range of shots in my Picasa Gallery. I'm going to try to get one photo up tonight before I crash, just to give you something to tide you over. I ought to be able to do a full update around the time the rest of the blog post backlog is taken care of.

I also have a bunch of videos from the last week or so of travel, including some of a fun little rodeo we went to at Bryce Canyon, along with cute animals and lots more fun. I'll be posting those on YouTube as time (and bandwidth!) allow.

Links to all of these different posts are in the new section for "My Other Sites" to the right.

For now I'll wrap things up and try to get a decent photo posted. I hope to be back soon with lots more! Feel free to email me or comment below, I'd love to hear from you if you're following our travels.