Nothing Mundane

September 3, 2016 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 46.1: Salt Lake City

In mid-may we traveled southeast from Twin Falls, headed for Salt Lake City. It was a long day’s drive, but for once, we didn’t mind the distance. We were finally in Utah! The Promised Land of our road trip, mountainous Utah is home to five national parks, numerous state parks and national monuments, and – indisputably, in our opinion – the most beautiful scenery in the continental United States.

We spent a month in Utah, beginning in mid-May, and we took a lot of photos – a whopping 8,633, to be exact.* It’s a mind-blowing place, and we are pretty excited to finally get to share it with all of you. In fact, 11 of our next 13 blog posts are about national parks – so stay tuned.

* Heather deals with all the photos for our blogs (Jake does the writing), so… sorry, dear.

Mountain Temples

The drive to Salt Lake City is absolutely stunning, in every direction. The city sits on a broad plain, but it’s surrounded by mountains, especially to the east. Of course, being Utah rookies, that’s exactly where we had made reservations to stay. We didn’t realize it when we booked our site, but our campground – located in nearby Park City – was at more than 6,100 feet! Salt Lake City is only at about 4,000 feet, and there was a LOT of vertical climbing to get up to our spot. Luckily, our RV made it just fine, and we got to enjoy staying in a beautiful Utah state park, one of the nicest we had seen since Elephant Butte Lake in New Mexico.

We took a day trip down from the mountains to visit Salt Lake City, the last large city we would see for two months, and we actually came away pretty impressed. The city itself is clean and pretty, with lots of trees for shade and intentionally wide streets. There were a lot of people on bicycles – always a good sign – and even some hipster types, with piercings and tattoos and beards. That was a little surprising to us, because Salt Lake City is the center of the Mormon world, and they are a particularly clean-cut group. If you didn’t know, Utah is something like 98% Mormon – primarily because nobody else wanted to live in what used to be an unforgiving desert.

As the headquarters of Mormondom, there is a lot of work and money put into the city. It’s particularly concentrated in and around the Mormon Temple, a beautiful series of structures with exquisite landscaping. Some areas were off-limits to us heathens, but frankly, the outside was pretty enough to satisfy. And we weren’t the only ones who liked it – we counted at least six wedding photo shoots in the half-hour we were there.

We had planned to tour inside the Tabernacle, a round dome with perfect acoustics. Jake visited as a child, and vividly remembers sitting in the back seats and hearing a pin drop on the altar. However, we got a little scared off, and never went in. See, every tour comes with a recruitment pitch, and, well… Heather isn’t great at saying “no.”

We’re happy with our current religious status (and we like alcohol and caffeine), so we skipped out on the tour. With some time to kill, we instead headed out to the beach. The Great Salt Lake isn’t the ocean, but it’s as close as you’re likely to find in the interior of the country – big, blue, and briny.

There wasn’t a lot to do there, though, so we headed back into the mountains. We spent a few hours touring Park City, a classic ski town. This is where the 2002 Olympics were held, and while the Olympic Village is now just big box stores and coffee shops, many of the athletic facilities still exist. Unfortunately, the Olympic Park was still closed for the season – we were there one day early! – so we didn’t get to try out any of the attractions, like the zip line that runs down along the ski jump ramps (!!). D’oh!

Stymied, we drove over to the older part of Park City. It was actually quite cool – or, in what we can only assume is the local parlance, “chill, brah.” There were lots of charming little shops, and the whole area reminded us of a Swiss ski town named Zermatt we visited a few years ago. There weren’t a lot of people around yet, but we found something better than people: a brewery serving real beer!

If you’ve never been to Utah, you might not realize how exciting this is – even in bars, beer sold in Utah is typically 4.2% alcohol (or lower) by law. Drinking a glass of the good (read: strong) stuff while relaxing on a mountain patio was a rather nice way to finish the afternoon.

As a bonus, as we walked back to our car, we found some street art, courtesy of the one and only Banksy! We were amused (but unsurprised) to find it protected by glass and a metal frame.

Planet Utah

That was pretty much it for our first visit, but our tour of Utah was a big loop, and we returned through Salt Lake City a month later. We had originally planned to go back to the Olympic Park, but the vagaries of RV campsite reservations left us north of SLC, in Ogden. We took advantage of our new location to visit Antelope Island State Park, a large island in the Great Salt Lake connected by a causeway.

The island was beautiful. It’s surprisingly mountainous, and many locations offered striking views of the water and Salt Lake City. We intended to hike up to the peak at the center, but… it was hot. Really, really hot.

So, we cut our hike short to go wildlife watching. A herd of bison roams free on the island, and they are fun to photograph.

While we were watching and taking photos with our zoom lens, we got to see a real Planet Earth moment. A coyote came out of the brush and approached one of the young bison, obviously hoping for a snack. However, a full-grown bison noticed and charged full-steam at the coyote, which wisely retreated back into the brush. You can see this below – the coyote is the blotchy grey spot in the lower left.

The coyote wasn’t going home empty-mouthed, though, and it trotted over to a different part of the herd, prowling around while two bison eyed it. It was hard to see what happened next, but the coyote must have found a bird’s nest in the tall grass, because suddenly some birds started swooping at the coyote aggressively! Unfortunately for the birds, the coyote didn’t seem too bothered, and we’re guessing it ended up with some eggs or chicks for dinner.

Good for the bison, good for the coyote, bad for the birds. Nature can be rough.

Roadtrip Time Travel

Roadtrip Status

Still alive? Check.

Where are you now? Pittsburgh, PA, seeing some friends and family and living in denial about the end of our road trip.

Next location? TBD as always. Upstate NY, maybe?

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February 12, 2016 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 16: Adult Distractions in Austin

After much fun in San Antonio, we departed to spend a few days checking out Austin – a city high on our pre-trip list of “places we might live.” We certainly found a lot to like there, and in some ways, the city was really cool. Unfortunately, it was less cool in other, more literal ways. Austin was brutally hot while we were there, with record temperatures for mid-October in the mid-90’s (and humid).

Weather aside, we had a great time exploring Austin, and it’s definitely on our list of places to visit again.

Straight and Narrow Sprawl

Since we’ve been driving everywhere, we’ve come to notice and appreciate (usually) the little quirks in the roadways in different areas. Vermont had endless rolling hills, while Louisiana’s highways were built on incredibly long, flat, straight bridges through the bayou. The West Texas desert had beautiful, perfectly-maintained roads, while the roads in Southern California are in such bad shape they sometimes seem closer to gravel. In New Mexico, you can sometimes go 20 miles at a time without a curve in the road. You get the idea.

Well, one Texas quirk is that the highways leading in and out of the cities tend to be lined with businesses for miles and miles, long past where people actually live. They are typically clustered right by the highway on frontage roads (another Texas quirk – they love frontage roads), with giant billboards every few feet, but there’s nothing at all behind them. A mile wide and an inch deep, you might say, and nowhere was it more apparent than on the drive between Austin and San Antonio.

The drive between the cities is relatively short, about an hour and a half in our RV, but it’s pretty empty, population-wise, by the time you get to the midpoint. Except… the businesses never really stopped. There were no towns, not even really houses, but still, we drove past an endless row of billboards and fast food joints and mechanics and car dealerships and gas stations and everything else you can think of. It was definitely a unique experience for us, since we grew up where trees cover everything and the towns have gaps between them. But hey – seeing new things is why we’re on this trip!

We Missed You, Nature

We met up with friends in Houston and San Antonio, and although we were excited to show our RV off to them, the RV parks we were staying in at the time weren’t ideal. They were cramped, with neighbors parked as close as possible to each other, and very little in the way of trees or shade. Unfortunately, this is a fairly common occurrence, especially close to big cities, where space is at a premium. Houston was particularly bad, since there was almost nothing by way of nature around to see.

That’s why we’re happy to say that our campground near Austin was awesome. Like all of our favorite spots, it was located in a park, not a commercial RV campground, and it was gorgeous. We had a spacious, shady spot underneath the trees, completely surrounded by vegetation so it was utterly private. (First picture in the slideshow below.) Plus, we were still quite close to Austin! We have stayed in all sorts of places on our trip so far, but McKinney Falls State Park remains one of our favorites, even if the falls were non-existent when we were there.

Going Downtown With Burt Reynolds

Austin is known as a very fun city, and it definitely lived up to its reputation. On our first day in town, our friend Brian was visiting as well, so we wandered around downtown and stopped in at a random local bar, called HandleBar. It turned out to be a wise choice, as we got to enjoy a friendly bartender, great beers, many mustache-related decorations, and a rooftop full of “adult distractions,” like a see-saw and giant Jenga blocks. Drinking and toys? Sign us up.

After a while, we headed downstairs and checked out the back room. There were pinball machines, a vending machine selling fake mustaches, and best and weirdest of all, a giant picture of Burt Reynolds lying naked on a bearskin rug. Crazily enough, that was the second time we had seen that picture in a bar in about three days. At our friend’s wedding afterparty in a swanky nightclub just a few days before, the ladies’ room also featured a giant picture of Burt Reynolds lying naked on a bearskin rug, except that one was backlit!

Burt Reynolds – still going strong in central Texas.

There are a lot of other cool things to do in the city as well, but we didn’t have time for much. The live music scene is famous, and we are happy to report that it was going strong when we visited. Nearly every bar featured a band of some kind, even on a Thursday night.

We stopped for some tacos at the original Torchy’s Tacos, which started as a food truck before becoming a successful (and insanely delicious) local chain. Note the jugs of water in the photo below – they were giving it out to people standing in line so nobody died from the heat!

Mmmm, Red Planet

We also caught a film at the Alamo Drafthouse, another local Austin business that has hit it big. The Drafthouse is a pretty awesome place to see a movie, with unique promos they create and show in place of previews; we saw The Martian, and they showed very entertaining parts of so-bad-its-good Mars-themed B-movies. This was followed by an amazing montage of people chowing down in competitive eating contests, with the audio track replaced by soaring speeches about going to space and achieving human greatness. 5 stars for the juxtaposition alone!

Speaking of eating, the Alamo Drafthouse serves food and drinks, including beer, delivered at any time during the movie. You simply place a note in a little stand in front of your own personal table, and black-clad ushers quickly quietly bring whatever you ordered without disturbing the other patrons. So while Matt Damon was almost starving to death on Mars, we were sipping some frosty, freshly-made peanut butter-chocolate milkshakes. How’s THAT for a juxtaposition?

via GIPHY

Texas Cave Country

Our final destination in Texas was the Longhorn Caverns, a series of gorgeous caves in Texas Hill Country with an interesting backstory. This area is beautiful, by the way, with endless rolling hills, more greenery than you’d expect, and interesting scenery around every turn. The Longhorn Caverns themselves have seen many uses, serving variously as a Native American meeting place, a hideout for bandits, and a tourism destination – sometimes at the same time.

Later, during Prohibition, a stage was built in the largest cavern, and it housed a popular speakeasy and restaurant. That ended with Prohibition, but, in the 1930s, the caverns were renovated by the Civilian Conservation Corps into their present form. As we understand it, this “renovation” was primarily about “removing a million boulders by hand,” so we’re grateful as always to the formerly-young men of the CCC. (If you’re not familiar with the program, it’s worth reading about. Probably half of the parks we’ve visited were improved by the CCC!)

Nowadays, you can tour the caves, have dinner and get married on the stage, and maybe even hide out from law enforcement. We opted for the first one (with a little bit of the third), and the Longhorn Caverns were quite a spectacle, although they paled in comparison to our next stop. It didn’t hurt that we had a fantastic tour guide, a former drill sergeant whose love of showing off the features of the cave was second only to his love of intensely bad puns.

He really rocked.



			
			
			
				 				 
				
					

					One of the buildings constructed by the CCC, made out of rock quarried from the park.


	
	

				
				
					

					Modern entrance to the caverns. During the prohibition, smaller entrances through the "ceiling" were used.


	
	

				
				
					

					 


	
	

				
				
					

					The walls are covered with quartz crystals.


	
	

				
				
					

					A non-blurry photo of the quartz crystals.


	
	

				
				
					

					 


	
	

				
				
					

					"Waterfall" rock formation.


	
	

				
				
					

					This is not a sculpture of a dog. This is supposedly a naturally formed rock formation!


	
	

				
				
					

					The main room, where they got their party on during the prohibition. Today, concerts and weddings are held here. There are great acoustics in this room.


	
	

				
				
					

					These smooth limestone walls were carved millions of years ago by underground streams.

RECENT NEWS

What’s now: We immediately extended our stay in San Diego because weather.

What’s next: Heather is still trying to make us leave San Diego to try to catch the wildflowers blooming in Death Valley.

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Next Post: Week 16.5: Down Under at the Caverns of Sonora

December 15, 2015 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 12.5: Drinking & Driving in Charlotte & Asheville… Respectively.

Welcome back friends! If you didn’t see it, we just posted a… post… about our RV renovations, where you can get a glimpse of our high-ambition, low-skill interior remodeling. The renovation was certainly a learning experience, and as the days go by, and our memories fade, it’s something that we might take up again in the new year. The bedroom won’t renovate itself! [Ed. note: Heather added those last two sentences unilaterally. They do not represent the opinions of all Nothing Mundane affiliates.]

Returning to our road trip, we traveled from Richmond, Virginia to North Carolina, “Ol’ Northy,” and the metropolitan regions of Charlotte and Asheville. Our mission: have fun and mooch off our friends.

Charlotte

We’ve been to a lot of places on this road trip, and sometimes it can be difficult to find a good place to eat or fun things to do. Well, we stayed in Charlotte with our friends the Casses, and one of the great things about visiting people is that they already know the cool things to do. For example, we had dinner at a pretty sweet bar and grill called Lebowski’s, where the food was good and the excuse to run a picture of Jake’s “The Dude” Halloween costume was made plausible.

A surprising favorite stop in Charlotte was the Lost Duffer mini-golf course, which we tried on a whim. The first half was hilariously easy, each cup placed at the bottom of a hole resembling a giant funnel, but hey – you don’t play mini-golf to feel humiliated. The second half of the course then went underground, into an “abandoned mine” that was definitely not “the basement of the building.” It was dark enough that we sometimes had to play by phone flashlight, and the holes were humiliatingly challenging, but hey – you don’t play mini-golf to feel successful.

The whole experience was charmingly insane, and we would definitely go back.

We also toured the hip areas of Charlotte, stopping in for some iced coffee (served in a mason jar) which we foolishly ordered “to stay.” Have you ever just sat around in a stylish coffee shop, drinking delicious coffee out of a mason jar, with nothing to do but talk to your good friends you haven’t seen in ages? So boring. We quickly pivoted to a game of 2-player reactor.

Let’s face it, human interaction is overrated, and if we’re being honest, we drank and/or gamed our way across the city. We had great German beers at a local beer hall, combined with the first of many games of Carcassonne (a Nothing Mundane favorite and a great addition to any board game collection). One highlight of this beer hall: there was a corporate event being held there, and although almost everyone was dressed normally, one guy showed up in full German mountain-man regalia.

Dress for the job you want, not the job you have!

One thing we’ve found on this trip is that, thanks to the craft brewing revolution, you can get fantastic beer anywhere these days. (The tiny grocery store in Marfa, Texas – population 2,000 – had an entire refrigerator devoted to microbrews.) And in a big city like Charlotte, the options are endless – we visited several great breweries just within a few blocks of each other. Not a bad time to be alive!

Also, there were donuts.

Mmm, doughnuts #donuts

A photo posted by Jake and Heather (@nothingmundane) on Sep 19, 2015 at 9:38am PDT

We made one final sightseeing stop in Charlotte, heading to the Wing Haven Garden and Bird Sanctuary to make some avian friends. The founders of Wing Haven were a husband and wife who gardened extensively, nursed baby birds back to health, and did many other do-gooder type things. This resulted in a bird sanctuary that was overflowing with beautiful birds, right in the middle of the city.

At least, that was the impression given by the mandatory 15 minute introductory video, which looked suspiciously like it was shot in the 1970s.

Here in the 2010s, the founders passed away many, many years ago, and in the course of a half-hour walk around the property, we did not see a single bird. We didn’t see any wildlife at all, actually, not even a squirrel. We can’t complain too much, since the garden was pretty, and admission was free. But would it be too much to ask for them to tie a bird to a tree or something, just to keep up appearances?

Is that a bird on the ground? Oh… no, just a rock.

Asheville

We hung out with the Casses for a few days, but before we left North Carolina for good, we took a day trip west to visit Asheville. Asheville is a quirky, fun mountain town with fantastic 1920’s style art deco architecture, thanks to a decades-long economic depression that prevented any new buildings from being constructed. Nothing preserves like bankruptcy!

Those days are long gone, and Asheville today is pretty trendy. The brunch spots were jammed, but we persevered, and ended up having the best fried chicken biscuit of our lives at Southern Kitchen. There were loads of cool shops, too – we wandered into a quirky gift store that had a display on RV living. (We are trendy by association!) It’s also extremely liberal, and it strongly reminded us of Ithaca, New York, where we lived for three years – particularly when we wandered by a streetside hippie peace festival, which aimed to stem the power of corporations via tambourine.

However, there’s certainly still a bit of Appalachia present. Outside of one restaurant, we saw a guy in a bluegrass band playing an actual washboard, which is all it takes to make our day.

Blue Ridge Parkway

Our final adventure in North Carolina was on the way back from Asheville, as we drove along the Blue Ridge Parkway. We only saw about 35 miles of the Parkway’s 470 mile length, but what we saw was insanely beautiful. The scenery is gorgeous, with pristine rivers, lakes, and forests in front of endless mountains ridges.

We can’t possibly recommend this one enough, with one caveat: the Asheville-to-Charlotte leg doesn’t have a clearly defined end point, so be careful where you exit. We left the Parkway at a random point, and found ourselves more or less on top of a mountain in the deep wilderness, driving down the most switchback-y road in the history of switchbacks. It was cool! But it also took us an hour to go about 3 miles.

Photographing the photographer. #blueridge #blueridgeparkway #asheville #northcarolina

A photo posted by Jake and Heather (@nothingmundane) on Sep 20, 2015 at 4:01pm PDT

Dammit, Joseph!

LAST BITS

What’s next: Currently, we are in Phoenix, Arizona, “Ol’ Phoenie,” which is surprisingly pretty but disappointingly cold. Tomorrow, we’re ditching the RV for a month and beginning a 5-day, several-thousand-mile drive back to the Northeast for the holidays. We’re planning to stop in El Paso, Roswell, Oklahoma City, Memphis, Nashville, and who knows where else. Wish us luck!

Shamefully missed a prior post? We made a list of the most recent ones, just for you.

Next Post: Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!