I was chosen to drive from Las Vegas to Cedar City, Utah to the last college on our West Coast Tour. After 2 nights in Las Vegas I was rested and everyone else was exhausted from trying to make sure they didn’t miss anything. It was not one of our more scenic drives.
St George, UT – getting greener
On the other hand, we made good time. And, while there weren’t oceans of water, it got greener the further we went from Las Vegas.
We arrived at Cedar City in plenty of time for our afternoon meeting at SUU and, once again guessed wrong about where to start our search for the right place. We stumbled on a student housing tour that seemed likely so we took that first. Everything seemed right next door even
SUU Field set up for Archery
though the athletic complex was three or four blocks away and the the Open Air Shakespeare theater was three or four blocks away in a different direction.
The theater was important because both our West Coast College Evaluators are ardent Shakespeare enthusiasts. Things were going extremely well until our reviewers learned that the University was ceding control of the Cedar City Shakespeare Festival to a foundation and using the space occupied by the theater for something else. They saw this as a loss of commitment to theater arts and, somewhat precipitously, scratched Southern Utah University off their lists. It is important to note that, in no way did this unfortunate interpretation negatively impact our enjoyment of the evening’s performance of Henry IV – Part 2 or The Greenshow that preceded it.
One of the challenging aspects of having Shakespeare performances outside is being at the mercy of other outside activities. The director apologized that his actors were competing with Groovefest, and we could hear an occasional bluegrassy chorus from some other venue. If our Student College Evaluator reconsiders and chooses to attend SUU, I might have to make some hard choices.
The West Coast College Tour spent two nights in Las Vegas. We bounced out of bed after the first night like silver dollars paying off from a one armed bandit!
We had a morning appointment with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
We had an afternoon appointment with the Hoover Dam.
We had stuff to do!
The strip from Tropicana Parking Garage at UNLV
Once again we had trouble finding where the prospective students were supposed meet. So, by the time we found the meeting place, we were late. I dropped off all three ladies and started looking for parking. The most desirable parking seemed to be the parking garage called Tropicana.
Now here is a rant on getting to the prospective student meeting. I’ll pick on UNLV because they are the last big campus we visited, not because they were any worse than anyone else in providing maps and directions for getting around campus . You’d think that Admissions departments would want to make Campus Tours easy. It sure sounds easy when you are looking over things trying to figure out what you need to know. Unfortunately, as a first time visitor, you don’t know enough to recognize the shorthand that anyone who has been there before just assumes. At UNLV, they have worked very hard on their campus maps and have condensed a lot of information onto them. This results in a large number of buildings all packed together with numbers apparently assigned at random. The key is ordered alphabetically by some permutation of building name. It is impossible to quickly determine where you want to go based on where you are, even though the University has these maps posted all over campus. Sure, after you’ve been there a while the maps could be a great reference, but for the person who doesn’t know quite what they are looking for, they are a false hope.
Anyway, here’s how I would tell the family of a prospective student how to link up with the folks giving campus tours at UNLV:
The Student Services Complex (32 on those maps) is just to the east of the Thomas and Mack Center (16) which is very visible from Tropicana Boulevard. Assuming that our experience is common, the Thomas and Mack Center will not be having an event and the parking lot will be empty. Make your way to the right (east) side of the arena and take the road north of the Tropicana Parking Garage (13) and, as you are forced to curve to the left, the Student Services Complex – Building B is on your right.
If you click on the photo captioned “Student Services Complex” it will enlarge to the point that you can see “SSC B” on one of the buildings. That is UNLV speak for ‘Welcome prospective students, your tour starts here.’
You may not be able to drive any further. Although the roads are indicated on the map, there are metal gates set up to prevent traffic. The best place to park is probably the Tropicana Parking Garage, because you may be able to park below the top level and get some shade – a real plus in the summer in Las Vegas.
We also visited the Bookstore (36) and the Student Union (38). After all that, the College Tour Review Team announced that they liked the folks they talked to… but… they didn’t think they wanted to be Runnin’ Rebs – Las Vegas was too hot to keep up the pace.
Student Services Complex
UNLV Bookstore
UNLV student union
A break in the UNLV student union
On to Hoover Dam, which you really don’t have to see just because you’re in Las Vegas, but we did and we were glad. I kind of geeked out over the facts like how much concrete went into its construction and how much power is generated. It is still an awesome project. Our student tourists enjoyed walking where Percy Jackson had walked
Guest Center at Hoover Dam
We didn’t have to drive very far after Hoover Dam; we went back to Las Vegas and the Freakin’ Castle.
Oh, the irony of heading east on the West Coast College Tour. Waking up in Mammoth Lakes was fine. Heading for Las Vegas was alright. It just hurt me a little bit that the West Coast Tour was headed east. Possibly it was influenced by using an out-of-season ski town as just a place to sleep. It probably should have bothered me when we were in San Francisco, but we were still on the West Coast then. We were a little tired and didn’t do much but head for Las Vegas and the
Excalibur
Excalibur where two rooms for two nights cost the same as our accommodations in the San Francisco area.
As I overheard in the parking lot, “Oh my God! You mean we’re staying in a freakin’ castle!?”
We woke up in Fremont instead of San Francisco on this leg of the West Coast Tour. We were booked to tour the University of San Francisco – where the Jesuits have been ‘Separating Evil from Genius’ for over a hundred years. Our reviewers, who were becoming somewhat jaded in their college tours, said that they didn’t think they wanted to attend an urban campus.
So what do you do when you are in San Francisco for a very brief visit and you’ve toured the University of San Francisco and you want to make your visit even more memorable? We went to see the Golden Gate Bridge and North Beach. We left Fisherman’s Wharf for the girls to keep on their ‘To Do List’ . We ate a late lunch in North Beach at the Pier 23 Cafe and wished we’d left enough time to tour the Exploratorium.
Last Shot of Daylight on SR-108
We knew we had a long way to go before we slept and we’d stayed longer than we should have for easy driving. If only we’d known then what we know now, we might well have spent a second night in San Francisco and left fresh in the morning. We knew where our reservation was, so off we went to Mammoth Lakes. Somewhere around Pinecrest or Strawberry, not quite to Bumblebee, but well past Cold Springs, ( you’re with me, right?) we saw the last of the daylight. I knew I was going to miss it so I took a picture. Yeah, that snapshot isn’t all that special, but it’s what we had to remember the light as we pressed on over State Route 108. It wasn’t really terrible; it was dark and curvy and steep and we had to go slow and we lived. One last little complaint, where was the moon? You can see that the skies were quite clear in our’ Last Shot of Daylight’, there should have been moonlight. Sonora Pass is probably a visual banquet during the day. No one praised my driving or route selection at the end of the leg for the second day in a row.
Santa Barbara is home to Westmont College and San Francisco is home to University of San Francisco. Certainly both cities are home to other schools as well, but those are the ones on our list. The folks at Westmont sure do love the Westmont Fountain. We found that Chris and Katy enjoyed visiting this college. They’d go back if they were invited.
After leaving the college we headed for Hearst Castle en route to San Francisco. It was fascinating to hear about how the castle was built and how life was after it was built. It was at the Hearst Castle Visitors Center that I made the worst error of the trip. It looked to me as though it was much better to head north on Highway 1 than back south to where we could head east to catch 101.
Front Gate
Dining Room
Billiard Room Ceiling
Swimming Pool Windows at Hearst Castle
Swimming Pool
Animals between Guest Center and Hearst Castle
What the map didn’t say was that it would be very slow and, that through Big Sur, the road would force us to go at virtually walking speed even without traffic. It only added a couple hours to our trip. It was very pretty until the sun went down. So, once again we managed to find our way to our beds in the dark.
Los Angeles to Santa Barbara sounds like a West Coast sort of trip and there are colleges to visit on both ends. Sunday morning took us to the campus of the University of California – Los Angeles. Cool, I have wanted to visit since I was thinking about college. Since we were already expecting to be on our own, we found parking and began wandering around. UCLA is bigger than ASU and much bigger than Fort Lewis.
Royce Hall
Stairs at UCLA Campus
Royce Hall Fountain
Inverted Reflection in the Royce Hall Colonade
Reflection in the Royce Hall Colonade
After UCLA we took a little trip over to Pepperdine in Malibu. We didn’t really tour the campus, but we did drive around the loop and
Pool at Getty Villa
they have a beautiful campus with an amazing view of the ocean. Visiting Pepperdine set us up nicely for visiting the Getty Villa. Dee and the girls liked it better than I did and I rather liked it. I was probably still in a testy mood from negotiating that parking lot that Californians call Highway 1 or the Pacific Coast Highway. I should have learned then that Highway 1 would let you down.
Avoiding Highway 1 near Los Angeles was on my mind heading for Santa Barbara.We went into the hills from Malibu until we could join US101. Santa Barbara is a beach town too so it’s impossible to stay away from ‘The One’ altogether, but we were in good shape because
Carpinteria Best Western
we were further from Los Angeles. We actually had a place to stay in Carpenteria, the city east of Santa Barbara. The hotels we stayed at were mostly just nice, but I liked this one particularly well since it had an enclosed courtyard and a balcony that we enjoyed while drinking our morning coffee. That’s jumping the gun though, on Sunday evening we dumped our bags in our rooms and took the girls to the beach in Carpenteria. We took Linden Avenue until it ended in a parking lot and walked a few yards to the sand. The girls looked left and right and said goodbye so Dee and I were on our own. We hollered that they should call us when they were hungry and we went to The Palms for dinner. It’s a bit unusual in that you cook your own meat. We were almost done when the girls called, so by the time they walked the couple blocks from the beach, we were ready to go across the street to the grocery store . Chris was tired of ‘Gringo Food’ (whatever that is) and wanted to make some Guacamole dip for dinner for herself and Katy. It was more than Avocado. I had a taste the next morning and this gringo would happily call it food!
The adventure of the West Coast College Tour was still very strong when we woke up in Tempe, even though we had yet to actually reach the coast. That would happen at the end of the day. We had checked with the Admissions Department and asked what we might be able to do to learn about the University on a Saturday and were told that there were no tours, but that ‘someone will be here.’ “Everybody knew that anybody could. Somebody should, but nobody
Shade in Tempe
did.” Is that how that goes?
It was Saturday, the only reason I hang on to it at all was the promise that someone would be available. Our prospective students were disappointed more by the heat than the lack of excitement over their visit and we found our self guided tour of the campus brief but interesting.
“Someone will be here.”
The Sign Says Start Desk
Start Desk was a Non-Starter
Gammage Memorial Auditorium
From the Admissions Building you can see the Gammage – the last public commission of Frank Lloyd Wright. We walked around the Auditorium and climbed a tree or two. We found a stand of grapefruit trees planted to obscure the power transformer for the auditorium. There were fruit on the ground and fruit hanging on the trees. I reached out to touch one of the hanging fruit and it dropped into my hand so I tasted it. I promise that if all grapefruit tasted that bitter, grapefruit would only ever have been appreciated by the Borgias. It probably wasn’t ripe. ASU apparently has a tradition of treating students and staff from produce grown on campus.
The college tour stop was served its purpose. The girls agreed that they didn’t need to see anymore of ASU on the grounds that they couldn’t detect any humidity, it had to be the heat! We stopped by the college bookstore to buy proof of our visit and were on our way to Los Angeles. We kept it simple by staying on I-10 until we were in the City of Angels and then we were on any number of 3 digit divided highways.
Saguaro Cactus – or – Shade in Quartzite
We had a couple interesting things happen on the road. We went through a Burger King drive through for lunch in Quartzite, AZ (I-10 just east of California border) because we thought it would be quick. Unfortunately the police had made a traffic stop and the driver must have been known to the staff of the restaurant because they were more interested in watching the policeman issue a ticket than in filling our order. We were able to watch due process happen as well. It also gave us the opportunity to admire the saguaro cactus that was the closest thing to a tree that we had seen in miles.
San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm
The other thing that stuck in my memory of that drive was the wind farm that was on both sides of the highway. about halfway between the California border and Los Angeles. I don’t suppose I’d like it if it were in my backyard, but it was pretty cool to see all those white blades spinning in the wind.
Wind Farm2
For the first time on our trip we arrived at our destination before dark. We wanted to visit UCLA on Sunday morning. Saturday evening was open. Our hotel was in Manhattan Beach so we went to find the ocean.
It was wonderful to smell the salt air; to see crowds of people walking and talking. having spent hours seeing people whose goal, like ours, was to drive to their destination as quickly as possible it was tremendous see people just getting their feet wet. It was great to do things that had to do with the ocean.
Chris, Katy and Dee
“This is the Ocean!”
“It’s wet!”
Manhattan Beach Peir toward the shore
Ships at Sea
We were at the beach so we thought it would be good to eat right here. We found the Manhattan Beach Post. We don’t usually eat at
Duck Prosciutto
places that are so impressed with themselves, but it was fun and the fact that it was packed made it very high energy. One thing on the menu was Duck Prosciutto which confused me, I thought Prosciutto was dried ham. It was delicious. I once heard Prosciutto described as what happened to bacon when it went to heaven — that has to be a bizarre concept if you eat kosher. Probably doesn’t do much to make the pig feel better either.
Before we headed to the West Coast, and Tempe, we had to justify stopping in Durango. Fort Lewis College was the attraction. It proved to be well worth the stop. We finally got to bed about 2:30am on June 19th and had a scheduled campus visit at 9:30am on the 20th. That appointment was very hard to keep. Not only was it hard to get out of bed,
Fort Lewis Campus Tour Group
we had a hard time finding where we were supposed to go. It might be a personal problem because it happened at almost every campus. Either that or the directions are written by people who go there every day and don’t notice the inconsistency of the names they use for places and the names of those places on campus maps and buildings. I prefer the second interpretation.
The campus seemed warm and welcoming, and in a beautiful place, and the folks talking to us made a compelling case for applying to Fort Lewis College.
Durango from Fort Lewis College campus
While the the prospective college students pondered, the superfluous parents, Dee and I, went looking for coffee to soften the blow of the short night. We found Durango Joe’s and passed an hour and a half coaxing ourselves into the day. We asked the kind folks at the East College Drive location where to eat lunch and they enthusiastically recommended that we try Zia’s Tacaria. They must have recommended it to everyone in town cuz it was busy.
Lunch in Durango
One thing that every man fears is his wife saying, “The car is making a funny noise.” We pulled into the second tire shop in two days and asked how they did at supporting guys who couldn’t hear the noise. Big shout out to the guys at the tire shop for finding that noise and making it go away. They laughed at me and showed me the little broken plastic part that was responsible. They made the low air pressure warning light go out too! Two issues, both related to yesterday’s flat tire. We paid the man and hopped back on US-160 and got on the road to Tempe, Az.
Oddly, we don’t have many pictures of the drive from Durango to Phoenix and Tempe. Or maybe it’s not so odd; nothing waved and said, “Look at me, Look at me!” The landscape is forbiddingly dry and while it has a stark beauty all its own, it doesn’t lend itself to snapshots. We ran out of daylight in Flagstaff during dinner and once again reached our destination in the dark. We consoled ourselves with the knowledge that we were going to bed on the same day we got up.
Ever seen a more auspicious beginning to a vacation?
We had planned to leave Denver around 3pm and drive US285 through South Park to US160 with a little corner cutting on Colorado 112 from Center to Del Norte. Instead, when we actually headed out of town around 6pm, Google said that, with rush hour, I-25 south past Pueblo to Walsenburg and then west on US160 would save us an hour. Hope that was true, but we’d have been on Wolf Creek Pass after dark either way and I’m sure the pass is more fun in the daytime. Just sayin’.
