Road Trip

Road trip!

We had a big anniversary coming up, so we celebrated by doing one of things we love to do, which is just the two of us in a car, seeing something we've never seen before.

We flew into Las Vegas on a clear evening – we could see the lights from thirty miles away. We got our rental car and took a drive down the Las Vegas Strip, then turned around and headed out of town.

Las Vegas is undeniably spectacular, a monument to creativity, greed, and excess and we were happy to find out that we are completely unmoved by it. I wasn't really expecting that I'd pull the car to the curb and run into a casino to lose my grandchildren's inheritance playing roulette, but it was a little reassuring to find out that, of all my failings, an addiction to gambling probably isn't in the cards.

Neither is an addiction to crowds of people. It was kind of late at night, but herds of people were still milling about and I just wanted to roll down the car window right in the middle of Las Vegas Boulevard and yell, “Why don't you go home?”

The next morning, we were up early and headed to Hoover Dam. That is a spectacular example of what hard working people can do. Over 100 people died building Hoover Dam, and it gives me a few qualms wondering how they would feel knowing that because of their sacrifice about a fourth of the electricity produced goes to light up Las Vegas. I’m sure they’d feel better if the electricity was used to light up hospitals or homes for orphaned donkeys, but we live in an imperfect world.

The next stop was Zion Canyon, where it appeared that all those people in Las Vegas who I wanted to leave had done so, and they all went to Zion Canyon.

Don't get me wrong, it is a beautiful, otherworldly place, but we literally spent an hour looking for a spot to park.

Our next stop was two hours away according to GPS. That didn't seem bad, but I should have checked miles and not just time. It took us an hour to go the first fifteen miles. No crowds - just mountain goats, tunnels, and a bazillion switchbacks.

You need to understand, I grew up in a place where the roads are laid out in one-mile square grids and the land drops off one foot to the mile from here to Winnipeg. Switchbacks and road ditches a thousand feet deep are not my natural environment.

When we got to Monument Valley, I relaxed. For one thing, there were fewer actual cliffs of death, and second, I wasn't driving. Our guide was a tower of competence named Lee who showed us all the little nooks and crannies, pointing out arches and petroglyphs while telling stories about his people and the John Wayne movies that had been filmed in his backyard.

I think western Minnesota can be a tough place to earn a living, but it's the Garden of Eden compared to being a sheep herder in a place full of red sand and maybe one blade of grass every three miles.

Another new experience was waking up in Provo, Utah at 7:00 a.m. and having it be almost completely dark outside, because the sun doesn't peak over the mountains until about 10:00. The mountains are gorgeous, no doubt about it, but I'm not sure how I'd handle living in a place without sunrises or sunsets.

After that we spent a day touring Salt Lake City where our tour guide was a Ukrainian immigrant who filled us with information on geology, history, and a little bit of current affairs that were important to him. In his defense, we brought it up first.

Then we caught our plane and made the four-hour drive home, back to our farm where the population density is two per square mile, unless the grandchildren are staying over.

It was a great trip, and it was great to get home. I'm not sure how both of those can be true, but they are.

Copyright 2025 Brent Olso

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