Day 1: Phoenix to Great Basin National Park
July 7th, 2007
Today was a very long day for us. As usual, despite all our best intentions, we went to bed sometime after 3am and got up at 5:20am. Needless to say we were very tired as we started our three week trip. To commemorate the beginning of our trip we took a picture of the two of us standing outside the car after we went through McDonald’s drive thru to get two bags of ice. That’s right- we went to McDonald’s for ice! For future reference, having two bags of ice on your lap is not a nice feelings, especially with rivulets of water running into your lap. As we transferred the ice to our cooler, we decided to go through Las Vegas instead of St George on our way to Great Basin. The main factor in this was the fact that Scott had a work issue to take care of and would need to utilize a Kinko’s. This led to Kim driving from around Circle City, Az to Vegas while Scott finished up his work. In case anyone was wondering, yes there is a Nothing, Az and the population is 4. Scott has pictures to prove it.
As we drove into Nevada from Bullhead City and passed the “welcome to Nevada” sign, we decided to take pictures of the state welcome signs to document the progress of our trip. We also decided to take photos of every time we complete a 1000 miles on our trip.
Prior to entering Vegas, we made a little side trip into Henderson so Scott could see the Simpson house that, while no longer painted in Simpson colors, still has the Simpson door. We almost got killed during this endeavor, as while we were in a construction zone, cars coming towards us failed to obey all the “keep right” signs and instead decided to drive in the lane we were rightfully supposed to be in. There was a lot of honking and Kim had a death grip on the steering wheel, hoping no one would actually hit us. We made it safely to the Simpson house and the rest is history.
We had lunch at Denny’s in Vegas, giving Scott the time to finalize his work before he went to Kinko’s to email it out. While Scott took care of his work business at Kinko’s Kim made the reservations for the Lehman Caves tour at Great Basin National Park for the next day.
Finally we make our way into Great Basin. Just outside the park we believe we saw a red fox run across the road which was pretty cool. In the coarse of the evening as we tried to find a campsite we would see approximately 10 rabbits who thought it would be fun to play chicken with the tires on our car. Why do they wait until you start to pass them to run across the road?! Don’t worry, we did not hit any animals. Due to our long ride today, we decided that cooking at camp was out so we checked out the local dining options and settled on T and D’s restaurant. The pizza was decent but it took forever for someone to come take the order. There was another couple eating dinner next to us form which Scott received helpful information on what hikes to do int he park.
It was dark when we finished dinner which made it difficult to see what kind of campsites we were looking at. The sign at the entrance to the park indicated there were vacancies in all the campgrounds so we made our way up to the Wheeler Peak campground only to find that the campground is actually full. So we made our way back down and ended up finding a site in the Baker Creek Campground. It was midnight by the time we got the campsite set up and were int he tent.
This was a ridiculously long day and we hope that the rest of the trip is not like this!!