Tag: summer

West Coast College Tour – Las Vegas

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
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.

Rifle Falls – Vacation Ends

Rifle Falls State Park was our last camping destination. The bad thing about vacations is that you have to go home. Well, may-be that’s just a bad thing about short vacations, but if it is, then we’ve never been on a long vacation. Heading home means your vacation is over and we were in heading home mode.

After overnighting at Flaming Gorge, we had to drop south to Vernal, Utah before heading east and once we got into Colorado there were all sorts of little roads we had to take before we made our way to Rifle.  I think you could say that we wended, we wended our way to Rifle, CO. The falls are really pretty, the state park staff was very friendly and we decided that this was the nicest campsite of the trip.

Carts for tents, bags and food
An empty campsite
Just below the falls
Our Campsite
From the side
Through the falls
The cliff underneath the falls
Rifle Falls one more time

 

Flaming Gorge

The Flaming Gorge  sprawls across the Wyoming-Utah border and is primarily a place for land locked water lovers to soak up a little hydro-therapy. After a few days in Yellowstone National Park it was time to head home. We headed home by going south to the Gorge. The bad thing about road trips is that occasionally, you have to spend hours on the road. About six hours driving, I think, between Bridge Bay in Yellowstone and Buckboard Marina in Flaming Gorge. (Add looking at the Grand Teton National Park,  a late lunch in Jackson, and some road construction and  I’m no longer puzzled about why we cooked dinner in the dark.) Oops, I jumped ahead…

We slowly worked our way out of the south gate of Yellowstone Park which put us, almost immediately, into Grand Teton National Park. Colter Bay is well worth the stop. We saw another amazing lake, spectacular mountain peaks and a perfectly wonderful town, called Jackson on the southern end. We broke for lunch in Jackson (oh, I said that). Then, a couple hours of lonely, high, dry plains until we hit the I-80 town of Green River. If you go straight south of there you hit a reservoir caused by damming the Green River in the Flaming Gorge which is very pretty on the southern end. We spent the night at a place called Buckboard Marina. There were showers at the campground! Hot showers! We walked!

Sunrise on Yellowstone Lake From Bridge Bay
Jay copes with hours of seat time
Kay copes with hours of seat time
Jackson Lake in Grand Teton National Park
Grand Tetons
Zoom the peak
Grand Tetons wide angle just because …
Elk antlers in Jackson, Wy.
Lunch in Jackson, Wy.
There’s a prevailing persistant wind at the Buckboard Marina.
After Yellowstone, the campground at Buckboard Marina felt a little empty
We saw this at the Marina, the layers became more strinking as we approached the south end

 

Small Things

Smilin' and Dancin'
Smilin’ and Dancin’

There are some beautiful things that you can miss simply by being a bit early or late, looking to high or having a different target in mind. Most of these shots are of little flowers on plants somewhere between ankle and knee level that waited quietly and posed quite patiently.  The chipmunk understood the busker ethos and was quite a performer for us with pauses that were rarely longer than a blink. Here are some of the less splashy stars of Yellowstone.

 

Geysers

photo of Old Faithful
Kay and Jay at the sign with the Old Faithful geyser still gasping in the background

It’s why you go to Yellowstone isn’t it? Geysers? Old Faithful?

So we went south, clockwise around the Great Loop road from Bridge Bay Campground at 45 mph maximum, often reduced to 35 mph and occasionally to 25 miles per hour. We kept telling ourselves, “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.” and “We’re here to see the animals, it’s their park.” Unfortunately, we didn’t see any animals bigger than Ravens and they were staying way up high, way out of our way.

We got to Old Faithful and found parking about 10 minutes before  she blew and that was barely enough time to find it behind the Visitor Center – which does dominate the area. However, most of our fellow spectators clearly had no trouble finding it. I had trouble with the zoom on my camera too, so you might think we were a little disappointed, but we weren’t. DSCN8733Check out the girls’ smiles as they posed in front of Old Faithful while it calmed back down and the power of the eruption was waning. Really, it took us longer to find and order ice cream.

Kepler Cascades
Kepler Cascades
Kepler Cascades
DSCN8761photo of West Thumb Geyser Basin
Kay and Jay study the interpretive signs in the West Thumb Geyser Basin right on the edge of Yellowstone Lake

We retraced our path around the Great Loop, counter-clockwise this time, stopping at the Keppler Cascades before working our way back over the Continental Divide and stopping at the West Thumb Geyser Basin which doesn’t seem to have any eruptions that reach for the sky, but has fiercely hot pools of fantastic colors that change as the water overflows its cauldron’s edge and trickles toward the lake. There were mud pots where the thick bubbles popped and stunk with disolved sulfer.

West Thumb Geyser Basin
photo showing a gravel spit separating Yellowstone Lake on the left from a small oxbow pool on the right
Gravel spit separating Yellowstone Lake on the left from a small oxbow pool on the right

Our last stop was at the edge of Yellowstone Lake and we proved first hand that the water in the lake was as numbingly cold as the water in the pools was scalding hot. The little spit of land that separated the lake from a smaller pool was made of granite gravel and was extremely cruel to bare city feet. The heat of the day which inspired that dip was quickly forgotten.

Dee, Jay and Kay
Kay regretting bare feet
Jay and Kay knee deep in the pool
Dee, Jay and Kay and Lake Yellowstone

 

Bridge Bay

Just around the corner of Yellowstone Lake from no-Fishing Bridge is Bridge Bay where there is a marina and campground. We stayed there – at the campground – but the marina is pretty and we went by it a few times.

In fact we felt like we won the lottery when we pulled up to our campsite. The tent only campsites were all taken and we settled for an RV/tent site. We were assigned a site on the far end of the “B” loop from the access road which turned out to be in the trees and above what we thought of as the valley of 10,000 smokes because of all the campfires we could see.

Bridge Bay is actually named for a near-by natural bridge. Near-by means an easy 2 – 3 mile round trip hike. Natural Bridge was carved out of the stone by something called freeze-thaw plucking. Say that five times fast! It can be done – but why?

 

The Bozeman Junket

We spent the first night of our trip at a Kamping Kabin at the KOA in Cody, Wy. The next day we drove to the Bridge Bay Campground, took care of registration and pitched our tents and took off to Bozeman to see Andrew.

We took the circle counter-clockwise, via Canyon and Tower, which proved to be a mistake because the road was filled with construction projects that guaranteed that we would go at an average speed of 25 miles per hour instead of the posted 45 mph. Still, there were highlights: we saw a little bear, the really large Bison above (ever see that bumper sticker that says, “As a matter of fact, I do own the whole road”? Well this Bison did.), Mammoth Springs, and Andrew.

Visiting Andrew was too brief, but very fun. He took us on a whirlwind tour of Montana State University and then down Main Street. We ended up at Burger Bob’s for dinner. We talked about college and friends and work and living arrangements. We sure hope he gets those living arrangements worked out before school starts.

We also got to spend the night in Livingston,MT at the Rodeway Inn because we picked up a couple nails and one of our tires was leaking air faster than we could get back to camp. No one knew of anyone in town who would repair a tire on Friday night. The town was almost full up and they only had a smoking room left – with a broken air conditioner at that. The staff was very nice, but they couldn’t overcome the negatives. We had our least favorite night of the trip. Tire-Rama fixed us up the next morning.