Vegas and the Misadventure that was Utah

Chilling in Vegas for a few days and "recuperating" before we head to Wyoming. Utah was a mess. We finally got the roof rack key in the mail today but we haven't been able to get at any of the stuff up there for over a week now. I lost my tent. We got 2 flat tires within a week and had to blow $600 to get a new set of tires. We spent 2 entire days driving just to solve the problems listed above. We couldn't get to our trailhead in the maze because we encountered a sandstone cliff of sorts that we didn't think we would be able to get the car back up. We paid over face value for a crappy hotel on priceline and when we tried to cancel they called the hotel and told them we thought the place looked trashy and run down. Subsequently the hotel manager bitched me out when we checked in, and accosted me again in the parking lot the next morning.

We did see a ton of gorgeous areas. All 3 districts of Canyonlands NP, Arches NP, Capitol Reef NP, drove through Escalante NM, and hiked the "best 3 mile hike in the world" in Bryce Canyon NP, and climbed a 12k foot mountain.

All in all I am so tired of tourist crap, and am really excited to get back to the mountains and do hard things again. In the desert nothing is "hard", it is just too hot to do that much. And I stopped appreciating the scenery after the first 4 national parks. Which is too bad because Bryce Canyon was really spectacular, but I was completely over it at the time.

I'm going to be uploading mass quantities of photos tomorrow and hopefully getting flickr setup so I can have full quality images online (and as a backup in case anything happens to my laptop).