Zion National Park ( Part Two)- April 2015

I took a few more sign pictures, even though I was mocked for my choice of photos. I gravitate towards any type of writing...

Although we didn't go on the Weeping Rock trail, our hike did include some of the hanging gardens, which are flowers and greens coming out of the canyon walls where the water seeps through. Very lush and pretty. It reminded me of Hawaii.

It took us about an hour, with plenty of stopping for photos, to walk to the start of The Narrows. The water deepens at The Narrows and most people had waders and walking sticks to go through that part of the trail. Next trip, we will come better prepared and give it a go.

Here are a few more shots from the walk back.

Here is a pretty picture of the lodge grounds when we returned from our hike. We saw deer, but no wild turkeys on this trip. Last time, there were turkeys everywhere!

We drove into town and had dinner at the Zion Pizza and Noodle Co.. The food is awesome and we were able to sit on the patio and enjoy the amazing sunset. Stunning. I don't think that there is anywhere else that I've seen so many different shades of orange, as in Zion.

Finally, there was a flamingo behind the pizza restaurant, so I had to...

2013 Travel and Adventure Show

I feel teased. Teased, excited and hopeful, all elicited from spending a Sunday afternoon at the Long Beach Convention Center, attending the 2013 Travel and Adventure Show. The show is in its eighth year in Long Beach and will be traveling to Chicago, San Francisco Bay Area and Washington D.C. in the coming months.

It's a tease, because there is no way possible to immediately travel to all of the cool destinations features at the show. While it may be possible in a life time (and I'm game for the attempt) there is a point where reality gets in the way and I realized that in my life, vacation planning is more a a year or two out and this year is already booked. I am thrilled with my upcoming trip to England, but as always, I am looking towards the next adventure to plan, now that the current one is booked. It's a vicious cycle.

We arrived at the show late in the morning to find the official convention parking lot completely jammed with a long line of cars waiting to pull in. Here's a tip, park at the structure for the adjacent dining/theater complex, but only if you are planning to eat at one of the venues. We went to the show for a few hours and had lunch, getting our ticket validated at the restaurant and parking only cost us six dollars, instead of the ten at the convention center. Of course, if you don't get your ticket validated, this isn't a cost savings option. We primarily liked it, because it saved us time and stress with parking. It was only a two minute walk to the convention center and we skipped battling it out with the crowds.

Park here!

I'm all ready to go into the convention and promote my blog with my snazzy business cards.

Don't park here!

The show covered one hall in the Long Beach Convention Center and was more or less organized by travel region. The first row was comprised of vendors from the Yosemite area. I've lived in California my entire life and have only been to the area once, when I was five, to see the sequoias with my grandparents. I remember nothing about the trip, other than I lost my first tooth and my grandparents gave me twenty-bucks. Mom was furious with my high expectations towards the tooth-fairy.

All of the vendors in this first row were great at talking to us and giving us tips. We are sold on taking a long weekend trip to the region, hopefully this year and hopefully to include White-Water Rafting! We learned that September is the ideal month, as the weather is still warm, but the crowds are low. May is also a nice time, but there is a risk for snow on the ground and the need for ice axes, if we opt to hike. Yikes.

The cutest bear cub picture ever.

A woman from Yosemite tourism was sporting bear slippers. This is one of the things that had me sold on a Yosemite trip.

A real bear skin.

As expected, the show had a glut of time share (vacation club) booths. Most of them were not too pushy, instead luring people over with the "Win a Prize" tactic. We managed to steer clear of all of them, I can spot them from a million mile away. Don't get me wrong, I don't think that they are necessarily a bad thing, just not something that we are interested in and we didn't want to be roped into a sales pitch.

Another thing to steer clear of, is the Starbucks in the center. The attendants were abnormally slow and surly and they grossly overcharged us. Two lattes, one bottle of water and one brownie came to seventeen dollars. I left without grabbing a receipt (my mistake) and couldn't contest it. Lesson learned.

What I loved about the show, was talking to the reps from the tourism boards. They were not selling a certain hotel or activity, just talking about their city. They had a passion for the place and this love spilled over and captivated us. These were the conversations that we really enjoyed, as their excitement was infectious.

Specifically, we learned all about Elko, Nevada. We had never heard of Elko and just walked up to the guy and asked him about it. Our Nevada experience begins and ends in Vegas, but Elko is just 472 miles from Vegas and it looks beautiful. Here is what had us sold on Elko, they have a ranch where you sleep in luxuriously outfitted tee-pees surrounded by wild mustangs. Cool, right? It's new and opens this spring.

Similarly, we spoke with a woman all about Prescott, Arizona and taking an old fashioned train ride with a BBQ at a dude ranch. Sold. What kills me a bit, is I've been to Vegas countless times, but have not ventured just a little bit beyond. It's time to see what's past Clark county. I discovered Zion and Bryce last year and now I want more!

There are some great deals to be had, if you are looking to book at the show or soon after. We spoke with a woman from the island of Bonaire in the Caribbean and found out for around eight hundred per person we could have seven nights hotel, car rental, breakfast and scuba lessons. Taxes included and the pictures looked gorgeous.The deal seemed a bit too good to be true, but we took the info anyway, as the woman gave a nice pitch. We left with tons of coupons for all sorts of vacation packages and activities from everywhere.

We caught one of the guest speakers, giving tips on travel centric smart phone apps. it was fairly informative and we wrote down the apps to try, which may appear in a future blog post, if I find that they are worthy of sharing.

Next year, I will make sure to plan ahead with the guest speakers. Sadly, Samantha Brown (how can I take over her job, if I don't meet her?) and Andrew Zimmern (love him), didn't come to the Long Beach show, but the roster had plenty of interesting speakers like Pauline Frommer and Jean-Michel Cousteau. The schedule is published in advance and it would be worth it to take the time to plan out the day. The convention is not overwhelmingly big, but it does have various things vying for your attention and can be distracting.

Besides enjoying the show and planning upcoming vacations, I was interested in finding fellow travel bloggers. I brought along my business cards on the off chance that I needed them, but I really didn't know what to expect. I struck gold, when I came across the booth for the International Food, Wine and Travel Writers Association.

International Food, Wine & Travel Writers Association

I spoke with two extremely helpful and supportive writers manning the booth. I am still trying to digest all of the great tips that they passed along to me. This blog is still relatively new, but it made me very excited for my future endeavors, including, but not limited to this blog. The entire show, but specifically this booth, refreshed my excitement towards travel writing. Please check out their blogs, as I very much enjoyed spending yesterday afternoon reading through them.

M'Liss travels

The Whiskeymeister

M'Liss and the Whiskeymeister pointed me to a table at the very front of the convention hall that was dedicated to authors. There, we met Sherrie Wilkolaski, author and professional blogger. She could not have been nicer and really spent a great deal of time chatting with me and giving me a wealth of knowledge and advice. I learned more about blogging, both from a technical and creative standpoint, from my conversation with her, than I have from months of shifting through advice on the internet. She left me feeling empowered to keep pursuing my dream of travel writing. Check out Sherrie's Goodreads author page.

Sherrie's Goodreads Page

Overall, I loved the Travel and Adventure Show. I wish that I had arrived more prepared to listen to the guest speakers, but my expectations were far exceeded. I felt like I really had some engaging conversations both with fellow writers and with travel professionals. We learned a lot and left with an itch to book a trip.

Our information haul from the show, it's thicker than it appears!

2012 Wrap-Up

I can't believe that New Year's Eve is here and 2012 will soon come to a close. It's been a year of really massive changes in my life, luckily, most of those changes were overwhelmingly positive.

The number one, best thing that happened to me was meeting Dan in early January. It's been an exciting whirl-wind. I know people think that things have moved too fast, but when you know something is right, I think it's time to go for it. I've decided to go for what I want and live proactively. This is by far, the best relationship that I have ever been in and I felt it immediately. I still feel it nearly a year later, only more intensely.

Meeting Dan changed my life in several fundamental ways, one of the biggest, is I am no longer living alone. I hated living alone and it has not been good for me the last four years. I love cooking, having dinner together and having a normal family life. Don't tell the cats, but they weren't cutting it. Life is much happier now.

The house has never looked better. In additional to a million little repairs, we completely re-did every aspect of the upstairs bathroom (it was gutted), repainted the house and garage and decorated the previously barren patio. We have all new windows and patio doors.There are only a couple pieces of furniture from when I lived here alone and absolutely nothing looks the same. It's feels like home now.

The Home remodel was not without a considerable amount of stress. One of the big negatives this year, was a nearly half year battle with Home Depot over a permit issue. My advice, new use Home Depot. Ever. The upside, is the issue was resolved just a few days ago, so this stress will not be carried over into the New Year.

I reconnected with friends, including a girls trip to Vegas with high school friends. I had to let go of one very close friend, after finally realizing that men and women really can't maintain a friendship if there is an attraction and that attraction is one sided. I found this particularly heartbreaking, as this is a friend whom I care a lot about and hope that sometime in the future, after the dust has settled, that we actually can be friends. It just can't happen now.

I sold my Honda and gained a Smart Car. The Smart car (both of them, Dan's got one too) led to us joining the SoCal Smarties and going on some great meet-ups and meeting a fun bunch of people. Spontaneity called and we did a less than twenty-four hour trip to Hoover Dam to help try to break a Smart Car World Record.

My sense of adventure and spontaneity was called into action several times this year and the challenges were met.

We had several of Dan's family members visit from England and they all brought delicious foreign treats with them! I am looking forward to visiting them in 2013.

I spent several days exploring a new state, Utah, which included one really mega hike in Zion. I saw the West Coast of Canada. I went on an ATV tour on both vacations. In Utah we stayed at the worst hotel in the United States and lived to warn people about it.

I spent a total of 22 days in Las Vegas, which included one night of being more drunk than I have ever been in my life, leading to my first hang over. Lesson learned = Never again! Just to drive it home, falling asleep while going pee in the bathroom at the Paris hotel is not as glamorous as it might sound. Yup, funny, but not my shining moment of 2012.

Two trips to Palm Springs, two trips to Lake Arrowhead/Big Bear and three to Santa Barbara.

I discovered local gems that I previously did not know existed - Rubel's Castle, The Gentle Barn and The LA Live Steamers, including Walt's Barn. I discovered what was at the top of Mount Wilson and what happens when you drive off of ZZYZX Road. We went to Calico Ghost town (cool) and the Salton Sea (not cool).

33 books read, which is probably the least that I have read in my adult life.

3 concerts attended ( Sugarland, Rhett Miller and the Lady Serial Killers and Old 97's) - by far the least amount of concerts attended in recent years.

We went to a ton of movies, theme parks and amazing restaurants. We went hot air ballooning, boating and spent a snowy afternoon in an outdoor day spa. I got to hold a chicken named Mrs. Chicken.

4 1/2 months were spent in Retail Hell, which wasn't so bad, because I met a lot of nice people (including a great boss), have some stellar war stories ( Some people don't like to buy an item if it has gone on sale...really..and they will want to argue about it...really.) and know way more about fashion than I ever cared to know. Much of what I learned seems ridiculous now, but hopefully it will come in handy the next time I need to dress outside of my jeans/tee-shirt comfort zone.

Also, I still have all of my toe nails, several of which turned black on one of my first shifts. My shoes were too tight. This is not really fashion advice per-se, but proper footwear is of paramount importance.

I have a lot less money than I did this time last year, but I also weigh twelve pounds less. Granted, the weight loss came from being very sick in August, but I've kept it off. Somehow, somewhere, I feel like the Universe is making everything a wash.

I started this blog. I really had no idea who would read it, but after a few months, I started noticing clicks from all over the world and then lots of clicks a day. Most of the people checking in on my adventures are people that I have never met. It's such a completely cool thing and I am both excited and humbled by it. I would love it, if you would drop me an email or comment, as I think that it is so amazing that people all around the world are reading what I am writing. In fact, it's a bit unbelievable. Thank You for being there!

I can't wait to see where both myself and this blog head in 2013.

Happy New Year!