So, I got back yesterday from my spontaneous trip with my old roommates! It was a lot of fun! Definitely worth skipping the last couple of days of classes! However, I can’t figure out how to upload pictures to this particular blog–I’m sure there’s a way to do it, I’m just not all that proficient at wordpress. Shoot. Well, you can check out my photoblog for pictures, since I’ll probably be posting most of them up there in the next few days. And if you bug me enough, I might just put them all in a pdf or a word file and upload it to this post. So there you go. But here’s basically what we did:
My old roommates are really awesome. I’m really glad that I got the chance to get to know them. They are just a lot of fun to hang out and do stuff with. I drop by every once and a while (you can do stuff like that when you have a car 🙂 ) and Sunday night, I dropped by to find them getting ready to leave for Zion National Monument! And they wanted me to come with them! Well, I’m the kind of guy who takes a long time and a lot of working up to finally decide to do something, so it took me a couple of really strenuous hours of convincing myself, but I finally went! And it was a ton of fun!
We drove until about four in the morning, listening to music and having a general good time, and sticking our heads out to look at all the stars, because HOLY COW you can see a TON of stars in Southern Utah, especially when you’re out in the road in the middle of nowhere! We passed through Hurricane and started looking for a park. Yeah, we’re all pretty cheap–we didn’t want to pay money to go camping at an official campground! Besides, it was 4:30 am. We ended up crashing on the lawn of a local church there–it was kind of funny! I was expecting that we’d stop at a campground, but instead I ended up feeling like I was homeless! But the weather was warm, and it was good. My friends told me that the bishopric stopped by and just kind of watched us for a while, but I was asleep and they were pretending to be asleep, so they didn’t bother us.
Then, after grabbing some breakfast from the grocery store, we went up to Zion’s! And it was awesome! The mountains there are vertical, red, and beautiful. We climbed up Angel’s Landing, which was rather short but fairly strenuous. There were all kinds of switchbacks and stuff, and I think we climbed up over a thousand feet above our starting location. It was kind of funny, because I noticed these signs that said “warning, falls have resulted in death,” but I didn’t realize what that actually meant until we got to the trailhead and on to the part where the trail runs parallel to a sheer cliff. They had these chains attached into the rock, and without those chains, holy cow! every other person to go up that trail would be dying!
I didn’t think much of the chains until I looked over my side and saw how sheer of a cliff it was, and then my legs started to get weak and I found myself gripping that chain very tightly! I guess I’m afraid of heights or something. And, as much as I would like to say that I conquered my fear and went ahead…I didn’t. Yeah. We got to the part with the bridge, and then I saw where the trail was REALLY headed, and holy cow! I just kind of stopped there. Man, it made me feel so…terrestial! Like I was falling short or something! But yeah, it was still something of an accomplishment. And I really didn’t have the shoes for it (I was wearing Birkenstocks, with REALLY sandy socks). And it was still very awesome. So I came back and read for an hour or so on the top of the mountain, it was very peaceful and nice. Read some more of that Madeleine L’Engle quotebook.
So then, on the way down, we spontaneously decided to go to Las Vegas and get a hotel there, instead of spending another night under the stars. Also, it would be kind of cool to experience Las Vegas. I thought that it would be interesting–I’ve heard a lot of things about that place and how evil it is, but never actually been there, so it would be a good experience.
We drove down there, had a good time (man, I love road trips!), and pulled in. The hotels there are really cheap! We got ours for maybe $40 or so. And the parking is free as well! But the way these places really make their money is in the Casinos and nightclubs. We went out and spent the night walking around the strip, and holy cow! I really got to see why they call it “sin city!” I won’t go into details (and don’t worry, I observed from a safe distance–and refrained from observing some of the more immoral stuff altogether!), but it was really crazy! Man, when you legalize prostitution, you get all kinds of evil stuff going on! We had so many people offer to take us to these sleazy places, or give us pornographic business cards for whores (little Mexican women were handing out those cards! Holy cow! How much more evil can you get than that?!), or try to talk with us, and man, it was pretty crazy! My friends had this competition going, where they wanted to get as many girls’ phone numbers as they could (girls who were not hookers). It was pretty funny when they tried to walk into a nightclub with their tattered jeans and ripped t-shirts! The doorkeepers would look them up and down and tell them “sorry, you’re not dressed for this place!” They eventually teamed up and succeeded in getting a couple of legit girls’ numbers, and they were pretty dang happy about it! But by then, it was ridiculously late, and we crashed pretty hard at our apartment. It was hard to get up in the morning, but we did it, and had a groggy but quick drive back to Provo.
The highlight of the trip was definitely Zion’s. It was a beautiful day, and a wonderful climb. As we were driving away from there, I was trying to sleep, but all I could see in my mind was the car driving off of one of those cliffs! It took a while to finally get the immediate impression of them out of my mind, but I must say that it was quite awesome, and I’d definitely recommend heading over there! And as for Vegas, it was quite an interesting experience to see that place. Now I know why the stuff that happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. And what was really interesting was that it wasn’t tempting and it wasn’t scary. It was just there, and just wrong. The casinos didn’t really entice me, and all those crazy pictures and skanky people were more jarring than arousing. I’ve already figured out that I don’t want that in my life, so it’s really not an issue at all for me.
One thing really got me riled up, though. My friend Steve told me that he knows of a professor at BYU who did a study on the sex workers in Las Vegas–the ones who work the brothels. He said that 45% of them are Mormon, and that most of those come from dual income households where the wife lost her job–and they both decided together for her to go into the sex industry. HOLY FREAKING COW. Most of those people are probably inactive anyway, but that just boggled my mind. I would amputate my right arm RIGHT THIS VERY MOMENT if it was necessary to keep my future wife from working the sex industry–and I’m sure that once I’m finally married and in a deep relationship with my future wife, I would be willing to sacrifice my life to keep her from going into that line of work! Yikes! THAT got me riled up quite a bit!
So, yeah, sorry there aren’t any pictures here. I have tons, I just don’t know how to post them! If you would like to see them, either bug me or check out my photoblog over the next few days.
