RV Vacation of 2016: last leg, Headed home

So as we were heading out California, towards Vegas, I noticed that we are headed east on a 3 lane highway and it seems we have the whole thing to ourselves.  But the perplexing thing is that the other side of the highway is also 3 lanes, but it looks like a parking lot! And as we drove and drove, for hours, it still looked like a parking lot!  Why is east bound empty, and west bound crammed completely full of cars barely moving???  Finally, I think I figured it out... It was Sunday afternoon.  The end of the weekend.  All these cars were coming home from Vegas!! It was dumbfounding to me the volume of cars.  I obviously have no real concept of how many people there really are in CA, because if that many people left Kansas for a weekend, you would just have shut Kansas down, because there wouldn't be anybody left to run it...

Anyway, we blew through Vegas as fast as we could, camped at lake Mead, drove to the Hoover dam to see it, and they wouldn't let us through the inspection/checkpoint to go across it because I had a firearm in the vehicle.  I was so bummed and disappointed!  This has been a life long dream and goal of mine; I've always been fascinated by the Hoover dam and wanted to see it. In retrospect, I should have ejected the magazine, and chucked my handgun out the window and into the ditch.  It would be a lot cheaper than buying two tickets back to Vegas just to see the Hoover Dam! Which is what will eventually happen.

But we soldiered on; we went Northeast on Highway 15 up through Utuh.  I was pretty impressed with Utah; 15 goes for a significant way up in between what appears to be two mountain ranges.  We were driving in a large valley, green grass, cattle grazing, hay country.  It was quite rainy, and once we got up to interstate 70, our elevation was around 7-8000 feet. The rain clouds seemed impossibly close.  But the real shocker for the whole trip was that part of Utah!  Sooo beautiful!  I guess it may have been just the unexpectedness of it, but I was so taken with all the buttes and mesas.  The freshness of the rain I suppose, really brought out all the coloration, but I loved seeing the heavy, dark clouds just barely scoot across the tops of the mesas, sometimes scraping off a little puff of clouds from the underside of it.  Then it just gets stuck there alongside the mesa, like a pouty little fat kid who can't quite make it over the fence like his friends just did...

As I was driving this great big RV through these canyons and valleys in between the mesas and buttes, I felt totally dwarfed by them.  I would come around a corner and see this massive, miles long butte that would split the highway and I had a sense of being a little tiny rowboat at sea, just about to be plowed over by this massy Battleship that was three-quarters of a mile high and miles long.  The whole time I was driving this, I kept thinking: "I never knew this was here; why didn't anyone tell me??!!" So now I am telling you: Utah Rocks!

This is at a scenic look out along the highway 70

So we went to our last National Park of our trip in Utah: Arches National Park.  It was well worth seeing!  Very impressive.  We drove most of it, but stopped at one place and did some hiking and climbing.

This is called "the three gossips"

 

Cathedral Rock

Then? We jumped back in the RV and drove all the way home!  We stopped twice in Colorado for gas, and once in Kansas, but we made it home by 1:00 AM.  I drove 16 hours that day. The best part of going away is coming home!!!