Date Archives July 2016

Sunburn and Bugs 2016: Medium Roar, Lightly Salted

There’s no drive as long or as tense as the one to a gas station of indeterminate distance when your gas light has just ticked on. Even though you know in your heart that you have at least a gallon left, every song on the radio might as well be the score to an action movie. The worst action movie ever, mind you, because the only action is scanning the horizon for any sign of an upcoming pump, which probably still makes it better than Fantastic Four. As you’re probably biting your nails right now from empathetic anxiety, I’ll save your manicure and let you know we made it to a station with gas to spare, which unfortunately takes this from a potentially interesting story to a boring one. So sorry for that, but not all of my stories can end with being towed illegally on the top of a flat bed truck, and if I didn’t resolve the (non) cliffhanger from the last post that’d be poor storytelling. Yes, there is a lot of poor storytelling around here, but I didn’t want to engage in poor storytelling this time. Shut up.

Our next stop was the George S. Eccles Dinosaur Park in Ogden, because while my motto is not “If there’s a dinosaur I want to see it”, it may as well be*. The drive there was filled with a lot of conversation about the effect of the great salt lake on the surrounding environment. Does it make the rain salty? Do they have to salt the roads in winter? Do local vegetables have to be seasoned when they’re cooked or do they come pre-seasoned? Is the salt the reason the landscape and all the vegetation looks a little frosted or is that just the way it looks? Does dead stuff naturally mummify here rather than decompose? If you just went out and licked the grass, would it be salty? Can you pull over so I can get out and lick the grass?

Aside from the last question, the answers were all “I don’t know”. The answer to the last one was “No, Mellzah, and stop asking.”

Once we were at the park, I strode up to the admissions desk, whipped out my credit card, and informed them that I’d like three tickets for adults who act like children, and is there any discount for the young at heart? Again, the answer was no. I was getting shut down left and right that day. Evidently no one finds me as charming as I’d like to think.

The indoor portion of the park closes earlier than the outside, so we made our way through the inside first, starting with the animatronic dinosaurs upstairs. I feel like the quality of these sorts of dinosaurs has improved drastically, and if I saw one out of the museum context, say, if I was just walking down the street and happened to catch a glimpse of one moving in the bushes, I would absolutely poop my pants.

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Outside of the animatronics section (is it a section if there are only two of them?) is a room of fossils and minerals. My favorites were the minerals that looked like foods. The vast majority were labeled with what they actually were in addition to the item they were masquerading as, with the exception of the snickers bar, which may well mean it’s simply a petrified snickers bar, possibly due to the aforementioned salt mummification process. I do know that if they weren’t behind glass, I would have definitely tried to put one of those jelly beans in my mouth as I have a weakness for chewy candy or rocks that look like chewy candy, which is a fact to which my dentist will attest.

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Downstairs were the larger, showier fossils, as well as an area where you can see paleontologists at work. Or could, if they weren’t already done for the day. Lazy scientists.

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Before going outside to check out their large, exciting dinosaur displays, I popped into their gift shop before it closed for the day and was sorely disappointed. I never would have guessed that a park with this many large displays would have such a crappy gift shop–I’ve seen better wares on offer at gas stations. Did you know that some of those have thong underwear that folds up into a rose, for a charming gift? And that the tube they come in can be turned into a charming crack pipe?  Most of this gift shop was empty, with a few sad magnets and posters hanging around to let you know you weren’t in the wrong place. Blech.

The outdoor portion of the park was wonderful, though. Everywhere I turned, there was another huge dinosaur making a menacing pose or engaging in deathsports, and I couldn’t help but think that as a teenager, this would be the absolute coolest place to hang out after they closed for the day. And I definitely wasn’t even that kind of teenager–I opted for the annoying, goody-two-shoes end of the spectrum. In case the teens who hang out behind my house are reading this, I definitely encourage you** to drop everything and drive to Utah and hang out there.

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sunburn and bugs day two (79 of 94)The orthodontiasaurus

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sunburn and bugs day two (72 of 94)“Look at that sad, gross thing.” “It’s not very nice to talk about our ancestor that way, Emily.”

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sunburn and bugs day two (54 of 94)The spirit of the 80s is alive in this dinosaur.

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sunburn and bugs day two (77 of 94)Mandatory.

sunburn and bugs day two (64 of 94)And then there was this guy.

 

It had been threatening to rain the whole time we were at the park, and just as we were getting ready to leave, it started to sprinkle. I stopped to snap a few more pics, turned around, and saw that Rachel and Emily were already out of the gate and heading toward the car. Given my behavior of the past few hours (the loud singing and the incessant questions and the rocket dong and the gas thing which may or may not have been my fault for not speaking up when I saw a “last services for ___ miles” sign), I decided that I’d better book it to the car so as not to be left behind, shambling and crying out “Don’t leave me, I’ll be better!” in the manner of the truly unathletic and uncool. After all, I didn’t want to have to try to take shelter in the cave of a fake cave bear.

We dropped off Rachel at a friend’s house for the night and then made our way to our hotel in Salt Lake City. Finally, I’d know if the rumors were true: if this really was the greatest city in the country in which to dress immodestly and get crunk. Emily was pretty tired from the day’s drive and was definitely looking forward to having a cocktail and meeting up with her brother, who lives in the area. I was excited, too. We had been using the Hotel Tonight app each morning to prebook that night’s hotel–this made it so we didn’t have to plan where we were going to be every single night in advance and allowed for some spontaneity while making sure we didn’t end up sleeping in the car (because you know, summertime, peak travel season, etc). Another advantage to going that route was that since it’s last minute, the rates can be lower, unless there’s really low availability everywhere. For our night in Salt Lake City, we were staying at the Hotel Monaco, which is a flipping nice hotel, for a pretty damn low price.  Since Rachel was going to be with her friends and Emily was going to be with her brother, I was going soak in some hotel alone time–maybe have a bath, eat some pizza, finally watch that week’s episode of Game of Thrones, feed the loaner goldfish some pizza crust, and just generally relax.

We pulled into the hotel, gave the valet the keys, and hauled all of our stuff to the front desk to check in. Emily gave the hotel clerk her name, and he tapped and looked a bit perplexed and then said he regretted to inform us that we didn’t have a reservation and that the hotel was fully booked. Noooooooo! Emily checked the app, and sure as shit, she had accidentally booked us at a different hotel a few blocks away. So everything got hauled back out to the car, where the confused valet helped load us up and got a pretty sizeable tip for not laughing at us.

We checked in at this new hotel, and I asked the desk clerk about my options for food delivery that wouldn’t also fill me with regret, and according to the clerk, delivery regret is one of the few Salt Lake City specialties, so my hopes for the evening dropped by a few notches. Emily was distraught about this change of venue and kept apologizing to me about the turn of events, and I kept telling her it was fine (because it was fine, I’m not fancy).

Not as distraught as she was, however, when she saw the room, which I promptly dubbed “The Love Bunker” when I saw the enormous jetted hot tub in the middle of the living room. Hot tub shower combo, I should say, as there was no shower in the bathroom proper, which meant we’d have to be a lot more careful in the morning to not accidentally ogle one another’s goodies, because we haven’t reached that full nudity state of comfort with one another yet. Yet.

Also in the bathroom? A giant mirror that took up the entire wall facing the toilet that affords you the opportunity to become way more familiar with your own goodies whether you wanted to or not. Complete with a phone, in case you needed to order some delivery-based regret while on the can.

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When we saw the room and I saw Emily contemplating throwing herself over the balcony***, I knew my plans for the evening had to be set aside, and I went into Full Clown Mode. Basically, when someone is feeling badly but there’s not really anything I can do about it, I just act like a bigger and bigger jackass in the hopes of jollying them out of it. Because what’s a lack of self respect for if I can’t make it useful once in a while? I popped into the bathroom, called Emily from the vagina phone, and told her we were going out and getting her the largest drink Salt Lake City had to offer. Or rather, a number of small ones because Salt Lake City doesn’t allow large ones. And a vodka penne. And a boozy salad. I then popped into the shower while she was taking photos of the room to show her husband just how ridiculous it was, because that’s what friends do.

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oh my goodness

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On our way out of the hotel, we spotted this astronaut, who looked as if he had flung himself from our hotel room and was totally fine with that.

Because we’re gluttons for punishment, we had dinner at Bambara, one of the restaurants inside the Hotel Monaco. I breezed past the same confused valet and informed him that since I’d seen our real room, I needed a drink, and then made my way to the restaurant, where we met up with Emily’s brother. Although it wasn’t what I had planned for my evening, I ended up having a really good time. After we finished eating and boxed up our leftovers, we went next door to The Red Door to have another drink. I tried to abstain as one drink gets me plenty tipsy these days, but first I got peer pressured by Emily and her brother to just order one and let it sit there and then I got drink shamed by the bartender for not drinking it because I was “talking too much to drink” so two it was. I may not have dressed immodestly but I definitely got a little bit crunk that night.

sunburn and bugs day two (91 of 94)“What’s the deal with that monkey?” I asked. Evidently the owner of the bar has a friend who works on animatronics for Disney and asked him to make something for the bar, and one day this showed up, tiny skull staff and all.

I knew that the Mormon UFO I wanted to see was in the general area, so I asked Emily’s brother if he’d seen it. He hadn’t heard of it, so they had me ask the bartender. He hadn’t heard about it, either, and when I pulled up a picture to show that it exists, they both immediately said that the bar it was in front of was right down the street and the UFO was definitely not there or if it was, it was so tiny as to be unnoticeable.

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IT WAS NEITHER. I may talk too much and drink too little, but I was vindicated, and that’s what was important. To me, anyway.

Also important: I got to ask Emily’s brother all of the questions I’d had about the area’s general saltiness and was able to get some answers, namely that nothing but the lake is salty and that they do need to salt the roads in winter, which made me feel a little salty. I also informed Emily that I’d be eating the rest of my steak and fries in the giant tub, just because I could. She didn’t believe me.

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It was medium rare and lightly salted and just what I needed.

 

*Depending on which day you ask me, my motto is “Eh, why not?”, “Can I get extra cheese on that?”, or a string of curse words. So I don’t really have a motto exactly, I just say some predictable things.

**I do NOT assume any of the legal consequences for this or any other act you may do.

***If you’re looking at the Love Bunker and saying “that’s really not so bad,” you’re right, it was more a combination of factors that I’m not going to get into. Let’s just say the room was the icing on the cake, or the salt on the steak, as it were.

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Sunburn and Bugs 2016: Idaho? No, You Da Ho

Anxious to hit the road again, we had just enough time to grab some hotel breakfast and coffee next door, where I learned that while Virginia may be for lovers, Boise is for gangsters.

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I should have known. Forget about the potatoes. Boise, Idaho has a longstanding reputation for being home to some of the hardest people on Earth. For instance, a quick visit to the idahogangs.com website shows that the area is routinely terrorized by members of the so-called “Insane Clown Posse,” a group which is well known for guzzling large (dare I say insane?) amounts of Faygo brand soda, smearing themselves with paint, and talking about how they’d kill people with hatchets if they weren’t so stoned they can’t get off the couch. The moose gang isn’t mentioned, but I have to assume they’re relatively new if they have to make up swag stickers to get people interested and build up their rep as true badasses and terrors in the night.

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Owing to all that coffee consumption, we stopped at nearly every rest stop along the way, and I marveled at how much the scenery had changed over the course of our trip so far–from green mountains with dazzling blue lakes to desert hills to scrubby plains with silver bushes dotting the landscape like pills on your favorite sweater. One rest stop we visited was full of nesting swallows who scolded us as we tried to get a peep of their young. When we were able to tear ourselves away from the birds and convenient restrooms, we hit the road and continued to Twin Falls, home of “Niagara Falls of the West”–though not as wide and also taller, so not really like Niagara Falls at all. I’ve never understood that naming trend. Is it for people who can’t go and see the original? Is it for people who want to take a trip but want the familiar comforts of something they’ve already seen? Is it for the namers, who have an inferiority complex about the actual goodness of the thing they’re naming? My house is at the Everglades of Washington state, only with mostly ducks and frogs and way fewer (no) alligators and 0.00001% of the size! Come meet my dog, he’s the Lassie of jack russell terriers, except if you’re on the floor weeping in pain instead of going for help he tries to cram his tongue down your throat! I’m the Jennifer Lawrence of untalented regular people!

On our way there, we passed the spot where Evel Knievel attempted his Snake River Canyon jump in 1974, which had me pondering: in a post Evel Knievel world, who is our flamboyant daredevil? Must our canyons remain unjumped? Our gorges’ airspaces undisturbed? Our predators with slightly fewer chances to grab and eat a passing man off of a motorcycle? Our leather jumpsuit and cape artisans’ workload remain empty? The answer is no: Eddie Braun is making another attempt at the Snake River Canyon this September.

A mere three miles down the road is Twin Falls, aka Shoshone Falls, aka Niagara West, aka America’s Icelandic Toilet (no doubt as the popularity of this blog surges, that last one will catch on).   Again, it’s 29 feet taller than Niagara and significantly less wide. It also can dry up over the summer, but we hit it around peak season and were suitably impressed. As is usual with the Harpies, we quickly made friends with other people in the viewing area, one of which was on another ladies’ trip to Kentucky–theirs probably involved fewer filthy jokes, but that’s just a wild guess. I tried to go a bit further down the path to see if I could find a better, quieter viewpoint, but it got extremely narrow and overgrown almost immediately with just a bare chain link fence preventing me from falling off the cliff should a snake or some other critter appear while I’m tramping down in an area with no other people, so I quickly reconsidered my plan and turned back, not wanting this excursion to turn into one of those “Mellzah stories” wherein I do something foolish and am surprised by consequences. (Somewhere out there a reader is whispering “She can learn!”)

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 After lunch and some more coffee (#jitteringdowntheroad #secretbackseatnaptime) we crossed over into Utah, and the landscape turned into some shit from the Sound of Music, which I helpfully sang from the backseat to make sure everyone else was feeling the vibe. For some reason, the music in the front kept getting cranked up, but luckily, I know a thing or two about singing from the diaphragm.

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Our destination was Promontory Summit, which is where the USA’s first transcontinental railroad met, with the hammering of a golden spike. On the way there, though, there were signs indicating there was a “rocket display” of sorts coming up. While I appreciate that they had a sign to let me know about its existence, it was somewhat superfluous as there was absolutely no way we could have accidentally driven past this rocket display without seeing it. And even though there was a sign letting us know the rocket display was there, and there were informational signs in front of each piece, it still felt like we were walking around somewhere we probably shouldn’t be. Emily wouldn’t let me climb aboard one to do my best impression of Major Kong, so you have her to blame for that. And also all of those “don’t climb on the rockets” signs. Killjoys.

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One thing is for certain: they definitely didn’t dumb their signs down for your average rocket-viewer. Some sample text: “The integral booster chamber then becomes the ramburner for the ducted rocket, and the end-burning, fuel-rich grain completes combustion in the ramburner.” Hmmm. You don’t say.

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As employees started to leave the building, we stopped snapping photos of me posing with a rocket as if it were a giant dong which is a wholly unique thing that I’m sure no one has ever done before but I still wasn’t keen on the idea of having rocket scientists see me do it for some reason. Maybe because then they’d be less inclined to believe that I understood their signage and also because we were now in Modest Utah and I wasn’t certain if that was the sort of thing you could be arrested for, like wearing leggings that show your butt and drinking boozy coffee.

We started running low on gas as we approached Promontory Summit, which is always pretty exciting–would we make it to a gas station in time or would we be making use of the car’s exciting roadside assistance button and get to explain to a dispatcher that we were too busy making dick jokes to notice the gas gauge? But since there were no stations between us and the summit, we pushed on to the summit first.

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Would you believe that I dinked up my camera settings and all the photos I took inside of the building are completely black, including the golden spike? Believe it.  They don’t even have the real golden spike there, it’s just a replica–the real one is at Stanford University. The golden spike wasn’t the last spike driven, regardless–it was wholly for ceremony and immediately pulled up, along with the final tie, to thwart treasure hunters and souvenir seekers, who would have torn it apart within seconds of being laid. It was replaced with a normal tie and a regular iron spike. I don’t know when that tie was replaced with the varnished tie they have in place now. The tag on it says 1869 but frankly, I think that’s a load of hot steamy railroad smoke. Even so, it was cool to be standing at the spot that changed the way America traveled while in the middle of an excursion across a sizeable swath of it.

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sunburn and bugs day two (20 of 94)No, car, you’re doing it wrong.

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Will our intrepid explorers make it to a gas station? Or am I blogging this from a Utahan jail after being mistaken for a prostitute? FIND OUT NEXT TIME on Sunburn and Bugs: No Really None Of Us Are Hos!

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Sunburn and Bugs 2016: IT BEGINS

It all started as an offhand remark in a facebook post. “Perhaps of interest?” attached to a link about the Meow Wolf art collective’s newest project, The House of Eternal Return.  “I totally want to go!” I replied. Another friend chimed in that she, too, would like to go, and we started tentatively, jokingly, talking about taking a group road trip.

Only I wasn’t joking.

A few weeks later I sent a text message, saying I was serious about taking this trip and asking when we could embark, and then we began planning in earnest. Because you see, taking a road trip with three adult women is nothing like the easy-breezy depictions of road trips you see in movies about teenagers setting across America to discover themselves and their burgeoning sexuality. It’s not just a matter of deciding to go, hopping in the car, and going, perhaps flipping off your parents as a trail of dust kicks up in the wake of your passage. For instance,  who would have thought that among three people, we would have three different preferences for the types of establishments we’d sleep in each night, running the gamut from camping to your finer hotels? To avoid potential conflict on the road, we had to discuss it all in advance. This meant figuring out work and school schedules, finding a range of dates when we were all available*, hammering out a budget, making sure our insurance covered all of the stuff we assumed it did, actually deciding whose car we were taking, packing and repacking and repacking again, looking at potential routes and things to do along the way, and then just flipping someone off randomly as we peeled out of the neighborhood because we ran out of time to properly research who most deserved a righteous flipping-off.

We decided on an eight day road trip from Seattle to Santa Fe and back with the option for a ninth day if one of the long drive days we had planned on the way back proved to be unbearable and we needed to take a break from the road. Collectively, we determined the most awkward and unwieldy name for the trip would be: Sunburn and Bugs 2016: The Harpies Take Santa Fe (#harpiestakesantafe #feminism) . The  brand new car with all the bells and whistles remained unnamed for the time being. Even with all the planning, up until the day we left, I still wasn’t 100 percent convinced we were actually going. I kept waiting for someone to call the whole thing off, saying it was a joke that got out of hand, and I got the sense that everyone else felt similarly and we were all waiting for someone else to call off the dare, and when no one did, we were bound and determined to go through with it. The darker doubt lingering at the back of everyone’s brain remained: could a powerlifting animal rights activist, a driven psychology student, and a loudmouthed fart machine** spend eight days and nights together in close quarters and remain friends? Or at least not intentionally drive off a cliff to end all of the farting and inappropriate jokes?

We set off around noon on a Sunday with high spirits and music blasting. We made it three miles before we stopped for coffee.

Properly caffeinated, we started putting some solid mileage between  ourselves and home, tentatively starting to play my two favorite road trip games:  (Anal) RV names and Name That Landmark***.  It always feels a little strange playing road trip games when you’re still in spitting distance of home, but the sooner you get started, the more enthusiastically everyone plays eventually.

I ended up being behind the wheel as we approached the town of Granger, and since I’d been there before, I knew of the delights that lay within, so I suggested we take a short detour. I also knew that it would likely be our only stop of interest between home and Boise since we’d gotten a late start, and I was anxious to get off on the right foot while we were still in “let’s call the whole thing off and turn around” distance.

My plan worked.

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We stayed in high spirits the rest of the way to Boise, stopping at a scenic overlook in, uh Somewhere****, Oregon, though road fatigue began to hit around the time we hit the Idaho border and we suddenly started clucking along to the songs on Road Trip Radio like chickens.

To this day, I cannot hear Collective Soul’s “Shine” without clucking to it. I live in fear of the day that it plays on the overhead speakers at the grocery store.

 

 

*This is much harder than you’d think, considering none of us have children and two of us don’t have jobs. In any given period of time, at least one of us would have one or more other obligation that would preclude galavanting about the country like howling wine-chugging banshees, and we basically had to sacrifice a goat to the moon gods to temporally align our schedules to make this trip happen. I also had to postpone a dental appointment for a crown and promptly chipped that same tooth, because evidently the goat wasn’t all the moon gods wanted in repayment.

**Guess which one I am.  

***Essentially, if someone asks about a landmark and you don’t know what it is, you get to rename it whatever you’d like. The faster and more authoritatively you Name That Landmark, the more likely it is that someone in the car will believe you. Alternately, if you think of something that tickles your funny bone, it will make that landmark more memorable and you’ll have a better idea of where you are the next time you see, say, Bitch Tit Mountain rising over the horizon.

****I knew not writing ACTUAL place names down would come back to bite me.

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