Wellllllll it looks like I’m off again! Soon I will be making my 4th trip to Europe. It’ll be much like my trip there two years ago in that I’ll be meeting up with the same friends – except this time in different countries! To be honest, the particular countries I’m visiting are not at the top of my must-see travel list, but this just happens to be where my friends are right now. I’m sure I’ll love it anyway!

Here’s an outline of my trip:

Sept 10-12 | Stockholm
I arrive in Stockholm very early on the 10th and have a full 3 days to wander around. I hear it’s a beautiful city and has a few excellent museums. Aside from that, I may take a boat trip around the archipelago – and yes, I am equipped with bonine!

Sept 13-15 | Gotland
Getting to this Baltic island is not exactly convenient, but I want so badly to just be able to bike around for a couple days and not worry about traffic and be assured of seeing beautiful things. I think I read that there are about 94 medieval churches on Gotland! The coast is supposed to be gorgeous too, and I reckon that Pippi Longstocking is supposed to be set here as well? This might be the place I’m most looking forward to seeing, so I hope it doesn’t disappoint!

Sept 16-17 | Copenhagen
I arrive very early on the 16th via an overnight train from Stockholm. I’m not too sure what’s in Copenhagen, so I’ll probably just wander around. I think Christiania is worth checking out, and there are supposed to be some nice parks and gardens around.

Sept 18-22 | Denmark
Then I’ll be staying with a bunch of Swiss kids in a rented house in the town of Juelsminde, on the eastern coast of Denmark. I don’t think there is too much to do in the area, and these friends are not the planning type, so I haven’t a clue what we’ll be doing. I know the first night is going to be Jasmin’s (Danish girl) big birthday party. I also want to do some biking on at least one day while I’m there. Aside from that, it’ll be pretty spontaneous.

Sept 23-25 | The Netherlands
I arrive in Amsterdam the morning of the 23rd via an overnight train from Odense, Denmark and meet up with Melvin, a good friend of mine from my year in Sydney and one of my favorite people ever. His birthday is also in September, so it’ll be another celebration of sorts. We’re staying one night in Amsterdam, then going back to his home in Hoogeveen to hang out. Not sure what we’ll do there other than meet his family and see his village, but I’m looking forward to it!

Sept 26-27 | Belgium
I’ve got a day or two around Brussels, but I think I may spend a day in Bruges since it’s barely an hour away and probably 456353596x more gorgeous than Brussels. Besides, I’ve gotta compare it to the movie ‘In Bruges’, right? I will also probably end up taking home ridiculous amounts of Belgian chocolate with me as gifts I fly out of Brussels the morning of the 28th.

I have every intention of completing my write-up of the remainder of the roadrip – I even jotted down notes every day to help me recount the details!

However, I spent the bulk of the trip feeling under the weather. Dehydration is a bitch. Motion sickness exacerbates the symptoms. I was not a happy camper, to say the least.

So eventually, those entries will get posted, and when they do I will remove this placeholder post.

I woke up on Saturday morning (4/3) pretty much dead to the world. Lauren was feeling a bit groggy from the night before as well, and we couldn’t even bring ourselves to get out of bed. The front office let us check out an hour late, thank god – and we spent that extra hour laying in bed, watching Nickelodeon in the dark. It doesn’t get any more pathetic than that! Whatever, let me tell you that Big Time Rush is quite an amusing show.

I ever-so-gingerly dragged myself to the car when it was time to check out, fortunately Lauren was feeling better and ready to drive. I couldn’t stomach any actual food, but I felt like I could handle fluids; so when we stopped at a cafe down the street for breakfast, I ordered a smoothie and sat at a picnic table with my head on my hand. And of course, at this very opportune time, some guy who goes by ‘Hippie’ kept trying to talk to us. How awesome.

After a night fraught with vomiting and a history of motion sickness, you can imagine how psyched I was to embark on a day-long drive across Arizona. I had my seat reclined as far back as it would go, and actually felt alright for most of the ride – more blah than sick, which I’ll take for sure. The scenery was gorgeous – so much orange! I’d have had my camera out the window the whole time if I’d been feeling ok. Even though I wasn’t well enough to fully enjoy it, I’d like to think that it helped make the long car ride a bit more bearable in my state. We did pull over a few times to snap some photos, and I was ok enough for that.

But, uh, once we approached Monument Valley (our final destination for the day), I started to feel it. I ended up dry heaving at a Navajo gas station just outside of the area. Thus, I wasn’t able to witness the pathetic little quickmart inside the gas station, with all its empty shelves and random scatterings of crappy junk food. It’s remarkable how different life must be for the people living on these Indian reservations.

The drive into Monument Valley was pretty neat. We could see these huge rock formations from a distance getting larger and larger by the minute. We entered the park, parked the car, and went into the museum to get our bearings and take in the view. All I could do was sit and attempt to keep my head up. I wanted SO BADLY to just snap my fingers and be better so I could enjoy this trip. For a lot of things in life, I’m easily able to just flip the metaphorical switch and make things right. I jokingly refer to myself as a robot for this, uh, blessing of mine. But I just could not shake the nausea. It’s been my achilles heel my whole life.

Since I’m writing this several months later, I now think that the cause of this particular bout of sickness is dehydration. Something similar happened to me at home a few weeks before this trip (as well as a few weeks after), where I did a lot of exercise during a day and drank barely anything. Just like on our very demanding hike in Zion Canyon, where I only consumed a bottle’s worth of water the whole day. The dehydration initially makes me feel nauseous, and then is followed by a slew of symptoms that has me knocked out for a few days. Since these 3 scary episodes, I’ve made a huge effort to drink more water on a daily basis (something I’ve never been good about). So, I guess the moral of the story is: STAY HYDRATED!!

/ end preaching

Not surprisingly, about 30 seconds after embarking on the loop road that would take us all around Monument Valley, I go ‘ok, I can’t do this’, and we immediately turned around and left the bumpy gravel road. It would have ended very badly had we continued, that I’m sure of. I felt so terrible for making Lauren put up with my crap, but I couldn’t do a damned thing by sleep it off. We left the park and crashed at the Weatheril inn down the street, where I layed in bed watching ‘Father of the Bride’ and waited for sleep to heal me.

The next day (Sunday 4/4), I woke up feeling pretty darn close to normal, and for that I was THRILLED. The weather was glorious, so we began the day with a redo of the Monument Valley loop drive. I am SO GLAD we went back because it’s a pretty incredible place to see in person. All of the rock formations have silly names like butte or mittens, so we poked some fun at that. We stopped every so often to pose for pictures, check out a little farm in the valley, and browse a jewelry stand (where we both bought necklaces with pretty blue stone). We could see people horseback riding down in the valley, which looked like fun but definitely not something I was interested in doing ever again (not after the traumatic experience I had in Italy, where my horse decided to go for a swim in the river and almost drowned my camera).

Being Easter Sunday, there was pretty much nothing open in town for lunch. Just a few fast food joints, really. I saw it as the perfect opportunity to experience a Sonic drive-in for the first time Their java chill drink was pretty delicious, I must say, though their chicken sandwich left much to be desired (blech). I really despise the concept of drive-thru windows – I know, I’m a shameful American. It just promotes laziness, which I am not at all about. But it was pretty funny having an employee skate out to our car with our order.

From there, we headed south toward the Grand Canyon!

When I travel, I ordinarily like to outline my entire trip so that I have an idea of where I’ll be on any given day. But that’s about as far as my planning reaches. As far as the details go, I like to fill in the blanks as I go.

But occasionally, I’ll have a very specific thing I want to do while on the trip. And sometimes I fall victim to the “I’m invincible!” mentality and don’t realize how overambitious (or just plain insensible) the idea is.

Case in point: I wanted to hike to ‘The Subway’ in Zion National Park. I knew that we had to obtain a permit beforehand (that should have been a clue that maybe this wasn’t the best idea if we had to register to enter the trail). I knew exactly where to go outside the park to rent these special hiking boots that would give us more traction in slippery rocks while crossing the river. I knew that we had to leave and re-enter the park on the other side to get to the trail head. And I knew that we wouldn’t see much of the actual park if we were to spend the entire day hiking down into the canyon, since this was our one and only day at Zion.

But this was something I had to get out of my system. After seeing several jaw-dropping images of this hike online from fellow photographers, it was the thing I was most looking forward to on this trip. Besides, good hiking is virtually nonexistent around NYC. I really just wanted to throw myself into a grueling hike and see what happened.

So we got our permit and left our contact info in case of an emergency (i.e. if we never emerged form the trail), grabbed a map, rented our boots, and set off for The Subway. All according to plan. It was a beautiful day out, and a longggg hike down into the canyon. The hike wasn’t as difficult as it was confusing – once we got to flat(ish) terrain, the path was unclear and we traversed the river back and forth countless times trying to stay on it. I’m pretty sure we hiked off the path for some of it. It didn’t really matter though, since all we had to do was follow the river in one direction. I have to say, the special boots we rented made it so much fun to cross the river! The whole point in getting them was to prevent ourselves from slipping and falling – and in my case, mainly to avoid getting my camera gear damaged in case of a fall. They were sturdy, croc-like shoes with holes to quickly drain the water out, and extra traction on the bottom. I felt like I could leap my way across the rocks and be ok.

The hike itself was fine. It was pretty cool being down in the canyon, but all I wanted was to get to The Subway. Yeah I know, enjoy the journey not just the destination, blah blah blah. Sometimes I just can’t contain my excitement for the destination!

We finally got to a point where the river started going uphill, with tiers of thin rock over which the water flowed. We tromped up the rocky steps – it was all very pretty, but I wanted my Subway, dammit! Soon we arrived at a clearing where it seemed like we stepped into a partial cave. I am so terrible at explaining what it looked like, but picture yourself standing in a river with the tiered rock ahead of you, and then on one side of the river is this concave rock wall. Pretty cool stuff.

We trudged further up the river and around the corner we found more of the concave rock wall – this time it appeared as if there really was a cave at the end. We figured this was the end of the road since the cave area looked steep and slippery and deeper (in terms of water coverage). I couldn’t help but feel dreadfully underwhelmed here. I had vague images of more colorful scenery and rock pools and this scene just didn’t move me like the photos I saw before the trip did. I didn’t think there was much beyond the cave, plus it was slippery and Lauren was chilly and waiting for me to finish up so we could head back. Not to mention we’d be losing light if we stayed much longer. So I left, disappointed, unsure of what exactly those pictures had looked like (it had been awhile since I saw them, and we didn’t have internet the night before so I couldn’t verify beforehand). But I knew it wasn’t what we saw there.

The hike back was long. My feet hurt so much after awhile that they went numb. And climbing back out of the canyon was less than comfortable. One water bottle’s worth of water for this hike was a mere fraction of what I actually needed to hydrate myself. I was tired, hungry, extremely thirsty, and forming blisters by the minute. We pretty much sang hallelujah and praised Jesus once we got back to the car (or did the equivalent non-religious version of that). Oh, my poor swollen toes! So unbelievably disgusting.

We were thrilled to get back into town. Lauren had already picked out a restaurant for us to have dinner at, a place called Bit & Spur. Awesome decor, awesome Mexican food. I had some delicious chicken and cheese concoction and we split a creamy dessert. It’s all a blur to me now, but I remember it being pretty stellar.

Until it went terribly, terribly wrong.

Immediately after dessert, Lauren started to feel a little queasy. Blame it on the cream-based dessert and lactose intolerance. I navigated us to an overpriced motel down the street, where we checked in and promptly flopped down on a ginormous bed. She pretty much passed out for the night. I did what I normally do each night: sit on my laptop and watch tv. No big deal. Talked to my mom, chatted online, nothing too crazy.

Next thing I know, I’m feeling queasy, too. A few minutes later, I’m running to the bathroom and the toilet is soon filled with remnants of my last meal. It all happened so suddenly, so immediately afterwards my first thought was ‘what the crap?!’. I sort of wrote it off as some random incident and figured I’d just sleep it off. Wrong! I woke up a few times during the night to vomit again. I couldn’t help but wonder if it was connected to Lauren’s bout of sickness…

I woke up at 8am to see snow everywhere. The sun was still low in the sky, but the sky was clear and the grounds were silent. It was quite magical ☺ I couldn’t help but grab my camera and snap a few shots of this winter wonderland.

Afterwards, I went back to bed for a bit until around 10am. I made my way down the ridiculously muddy road to the main office to officially check in. I happened to be right behind a lady in line who mentioned that she had arrived late last night in an RV and had gotten stuck in the park trying to find her campsite in the snow, and that she had seen two girls from Florida who were also stuck, and were wearing flip flops! So I laughed and told her that that had been us, and that we were actually from NY but our rental car had a FL license plate. Too funny!

Driving out of the park, it was as if it had never snowed last night. The roads were clear, the sky was blue – it was a pretty ideal day for hiking. But first, we had to fuel up both our car and ourselves, calling for gas and lunch in town. We ate at the Golden Hills restaurant, which quite unfortunately was overtaken by Asian tourists at the time of our visit. Oh, but this establishment redeemed itself by stocking each table with baskets of books with titles such as “Geezerhood” and “The Fine Art of Worrying”, and topics like mountain men and miners. And my meal was surprisingly tasty!

The drive up to Bryce Canyon was gorgeously scenic, and I spent most of it with my mega-zoom lens sticking out the window. We saw plenty of cows and horses along the way, and remnants of snow on the mountains we passed by. Such a nice change from the city, that’s for sure.

Just outside of the park, we stopped at a general store for snacks. I mean, there was a sign outside in the parking lot that advertised for “touristy stuff”, so how could we NOT stop? And oh, it did not disappoint: inside they sold the Book of Mormon, as well as a local beer called Polygamy. Utah, you are too cool.

It was a bright but chilly day at Bryce Canyon. We hiked the Navajo/Queens Garden loop trail wearing hats, gloves, and sunglasses, looking more than a little bit ridiculous. According to the map, it seemed to be about a 3mi trek, but it took us awhile and seemed longer than that. Not that we minded – this ended up being one of the most enjoyable hikes I’ve ever done. It began at a 8000-ft elevation and wasn’t too difficult (but at the same time, wasn’t quite a piece of cake), and everything was just so beautiful. I couldn’t get over the contrast between the bright blue sky, orange rock, white snow, and greenery. We pretty much had the trail to ourselves once we finished the descent into the canyon… though on the way down, we kept running into this foreigner who was hiking alone and kept asking us to take his picture on the trail. Once is fine, twice is ok… but every 5-10 minutes, really? That’s not how we do here in the US of A!

After the hike, we drove to the end of the park road to Rainbow Point (elevation: 9115 ft), but it was SO DAMN COLD that we pretty much ran to the lookout, took a few photos, and ran back to the car. It was pretty similar to where we’d hike, so no biggie.

 
By late afternoon we were absolutely ravenous for a good meal, and soon found ourselves at Café Adobe in Hatch. I think the selling point was that it was right across the street from an antique store called Mugwumps, which we just HAD to stop at afterwards. We had massive plates of food and our entire bill was only $20, which is pretty absurd. AND it was delicious. Talk about great value!

When we got back to the ranch, we immediately showered and promptly froze our butts off. We had hoped and prayed for the hot tub to be open, but they were doing work on it and preparing to open it the following week. Figures.