July 13, 2006
Red Rock Cliffs
Sunrise in Zion 1
Originally uploaded by braineater.
We flew into Vegas and then drove to Utah. It gets hot on the East Coast, but not like this: in New England and New York, it's sneaky. It doesn't seem too bad but then you notice that you're sweating just sitting there, because there is almost always humid to go with the hot and it slides around you, pressing slyly up against your skin, making you damp and cranky. In Vegas it's right up front. We are used to wind that at least feels cool on sticky skin; in Vegas the wind just throws the hot at you harder, taking whatever moisture you produce right along with it on its way to the next victim.
We did pretty well about vacation, I think. Or I guess I should say I did: I have a wee tendency to overplan, and I'm sure it was very comical in the days leading up to vacation to see me frantically researching the hotel, the national parks, the weather, the wildlife, and every casino in Vegas because! there was! so much! relaxing! to do! Must be prepared! So I arrived breathless, lists in hand, to get on with the very serious business of Vacationing.
However, all that slipped away pretty quickly. First we noticed how nice it was, out in the desert, cooler than hot hot Vegas (only 100 degrees!). Then we realized that the pool was the best thing ever, that our room was lovely, that you really can look at red rock cliffs all day and still be agog, that three nights and four days didn't have to seem so short if we just stopped trying to do so many things. All our day trips and how many casinos can we see in one days and maybe we can fit in some shoppings suddenly didn't seem very appealing.
So we touristed all week instead: poked at souvenirs, swam, ate another breakfast burrito, swam, got sneered at by the summer-job teenagers, swam, hiked, swam, went to the spa, went on the driving tour of Bryce Canyon, ate some more, swam. It was so nice I don't think either of us got that ticking-clock how-much-vacation-remains feeling until maybe the last day, when we had to pack and move out of the room and entertain ourselves until it was time to leave for the plane. That's pretty good I think.
The overnight flight back seemed to be full of cranky people; maybe they all had to come back from vacation too. We flew out at night after a day of incredibly bright, hot sun and a week where we saw maybe three clouds. We landed early on a Saturday morning to hot, gray, rain; the whole Northeast smelled mildewed and musty and tired and old. The nice plane people wouldn't let us turn around and go back, so we returned reluctantly to our real lives, which seem to consist of 95% water. Have there been more than two sunny days in a row in New England since, I don't know, March? I can't remember.
Josh and I have never been on a real vacation together, a trip for the sake of a trip, not to visit family for (nice in their own way, but always too hectic) holidays or a "take a week off so we can move! Yay!" non-vacation. We have resolved to do it more often, somehow. The next one might be the Vegas trip we opted out of this time, expanded to a long weekend so we don't have to cram too many things into one day.
I have pretty much come down from the dreamy what's-the-hurry-man? vacation state, but I still have the inadvertent tan (waterproof and sweatproof my sunscreen may be, but not Utah-sunproof), a pretty rock (there are stores that just sell rocks all over the place out there, totally for the rubes, but I went for it anyway - it's a really pretty rock), and the re-realization that swimming is the best thing ever. I had kind of lost that for the last several years. Now, however, I'm back on the bandwagon. There is a public pool near my house, and while it's not quite as nice as floating in solitude under the stars at night (clap clap! Big and bright! clap clap! Deep in the heart of Utah!), it's better than no pool at all. I don't know what I'm going to do in the winter, but there's gotta be something.
Posted by hilatron at July 13, 2006 10:38 AM | TrackBack