Category: travel

Crossfire Off-Roadster

On By Rick McIn product complaints, product endorsements, travelLeave a comment

When finally forced to rent a vehicle in Moab, Utah I could have joined the mob and got a Jeep.

But where’s the challenge in that?

I asked for the car with the lowest available road clearance needing 91 Octane fuel. (Gas was at a record high price at the time.)

crossfire.jpg

The Crossfire Roadster has a soft top and an automatic spoiler that deploys depending on speed.

It has plenty of trunk space (if you are transporting several loaves of bread).

I took to the secondary highways and jeep tracks of the Colorado Plateau with the most inappropriate wheels available.

Good fun.

Crossfire review

Red Bull Air Race – Monument Valley

On By Rick McIn travel, TV1 Comment

I’d always wanted to visit Monument Valley on the Utah / Arizona border.

It’s amazing.


original – flickr

But when I drove up in May the entrance was congested with big trucks.

Monument Valley is managed by the Navajo Nation. (Red flag for me. My experience is that indigenous peoples are almost always the worst stewards of “the land”.)

They had rented the pristine landscape to Red Bull for a smoky, loud event tagged “formula 1 racing in the sky“.

I can argue this is WRONG in at least 6 different ways. …

But — like everyone else in the audience — I thought it was pretty bloody cool. See for yourself.

Details on the race:

Hungary’s Peter Besenyei, piloting a Team Red Bull Edge 540, beat 11 other air racers around a nine-gate airborne slalom course set up at Monument Valley, UT on Saturday, May 12, 2007, with a time of 59.87 seconds to win the third in the series of 2007 Red Bull Air Races. Besenyei, a former aerobatics world champion, attacked the race course by accelerating from a high perch position to the east in order to pass through the entry gate at 185+ KTAS. Passing through the second air gate, he had to pull 9.8Gs to reach the third air gate in minimum time. …

Eight additional Red Bull races are slated for 2007, including one in San Diego, CA on Saturday September 22nd, 2007. Other races will be held in Istanbul, Interlaken, London, Budapest, Porto, Acapulco and Perth. The race planes are disassembled between events and shipped by air freight to the next race venue. …

Red Bull Air Races now are carried by 97 television stations around the world, according to race executive Tino Landl. …

Red Bull Air Race sponsors Red Bull, Audi, Seat and Breitling teamed with the Navajo Nation to develop the Monument Valley race event venue. Landl estimates that the television exposure for the sponsors is worth up to $500-million annually, but the event has yet to reach the financial break-even point after the first two full years.

Aviation Week

warning – Lazy Lizard Hostel, Moab, Utah

On By Rick McIn product complaints, travel, traveloguesLeave a comment

I stayed 4 nights at the downtown Hilton in Salt Lake City …

You know the quotation I always attribute to Conrad: “The rich deserve to be fleeced for their arrogance and vanity.” It’s true. He built an empire on it.

(Too bad my message from Conrad was not passed forward to his great-granddaughter.)

Leaving the Hilton, I was looking forward to better accommodation.

Having stayed in hostels in over 30 countries worldwide, the Lazy Lizard sounded great:

At the Lazy Lizard we take pride in being not only one of the cheapest hostels anywhere, but one of the best as well.

People ask us how we do it. (almost as often as they ask us where there is a good place to eat.) We tell them that we manage to keep costs low by eliminating profit. Most people buy this answer because, well, how else could we do it?

Lazy Lizard

I do wonder how they do it.

Moab, Utah is an expensive town. Accommodation is often booked out everywhere on weekends including the Lazy Lizard.

I stayed several nights in May 2007. I found it disorganized, dirty and facilities badly in need of repair.

In fact, the only good points about this hostel are the hot showers and hot coffee.

I would have moved on and forgotten this place except for one thing — I had things stolen from “left luggage”.

When I departed to camp 2-nights in Arches National Park I asked to leave a plastic bag until my return. The desk clerk replied, “Leave it in the laundry room. It will be there when you get back.”

On my return the bag had been ripped open, several things taken, and the rest soaked with water.

Bad luck perhaps. But this is a bad hostel. One I recommend everyone avoid.

I’ll forward my experience to the major guidebook companies, tourist information Moab and a number of other organizations.

a_goffie-lizard1.gif

Scott from the hostel replied:,

I am very sorry that you had your things stolen from our laundry room. It is true that over the years we have had many people leave things there while they are away and to my knowledge you are the first one to have had things taken. Again I am sorry about this. It is not something that we can always control .

We have also been a bit understaffed lately. We have had one cleaning person and a maintenance person quit. Since May is our busiest month of the year it has been difficult to keep up. I did manage to hire one new person just yesterday.

I do know from my dealings with the guests at the hostel that the vast majority of them have a positive experience. If is very common for guests to extend their stays and stay longer than they had originally planned. Many come back year after year.

It is too bad that you had an unpleasant experience with your belongings but unfortunately sometimes things do happen which are out of our control.

I hope your loss didn’t ruin the rest of your trip.

Thanks Scott. I appreciate it. I will be back, soon, to check on improvements. In the meantime, watch for my stolen t-shirt.

47913249l.jpg

UPDATE: Scott wrote saying, “one of the staff people said that he found your T shirt mixed up in his laundry. ” How about that.

He’s mailing it to me. Now, we’re looking for my missing electric razor.

Mesa Verde cliff dwellings

On By Rick McIn travel, traveloguesLeave a comment

I’ve secretly been embarrassed to have visited the ancient Egyptians, Incas and Mayans — but not those first nations closer to home.

FINALLY I made it to Mesa Verde. It is amazing. You can sign on for a Ranger guided tour to explore the dwellings.

mesa-verde.jpg

Mesa Verde – Wikipedia

  • the name Anasazi is being phased out for the more accurate, less euphonic, “Ancestral Puebloans”
  • this is one of the 8 original World Heritage sites
  • moma bear and 3 cubs appeared this Spring
  • I also visited Hovenweep and a couple of other cultural sites. They are scattered throughout the canyon country.

    • My final thought, still, is “why did the peoples of the current USA and Canada not build great cities?”

    I took the Balcony Cliff tour which involves a 32ft (10m) ladder climb and crawling through a stone tunnel. Cool.

    balcony.jpg

    I asked if any tourists had ever fallen. The answer — “So far, only 1 Ranger.”

    balcony2.jpg

    Interesting flickr photos tagged “Mesa Verde, Colorado“.

    Even more great photos like this one.

    kiva.jpg

    HUGE panorama photos from Peru

    On By Rick McIn photos, travelLeave a comment

    George spent many hours “sewing” together photos from our 2005 travels in Peru into big panoramas.

    Software is getting better. But it still takes time to manually “correct” the seams.

    Here’s a low resolution version 500 pixels wide at Machu Picchu. (Note I’m wearing an MEC check fleece top.)

    rick-machu-picchu.jpg

    The original high resolution panorama is 1881 pixels wide!

    See all of George’s Peru panoramas here.

    quotations to live by

    On By Rick McIn philosophy, travelLeave a comment

    “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important”
    –Bertrand Russel

    “Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”
    –Oscar Wilde

    n120600846_3287.jpgThese were posted by Carmen Mathes on her Facebook page. She’s one of 3 Canadian coaches now who, over the past several years, packed up and went to New Zealand to work for my old club, the Christchurch School of Gymnastics.

    Natural Bridges world’s first Dark-Sky Park

    On By Rick McIn good news, travel, traveloguesLeave a comment

    I can confirm the night sky is inky black there. (Tonight is my 13th night in the tent.)

    … good news from the National Park Service regarding their efforts to conserve the natural dark sky.

    Natural Bridges National Monument, in the southeast corner of Utah, has been named the world’s first ever International Dark-Sky Park, as designated by the International Dark-Sky Association.

    This is a big deal. It is a designation which recognizes not only that the park has about the darkest and clearest skies in all of the United States, but also that the park has made a every effort to conserve the natural dark as a resource worthy of the fullest protection.

    The park, with the help of the little-known NPS Night Sky team working out of nearby Bryce Canyon National Park, identified every single exterior light within Natural Bridges. Based on an evaluation, each and every light was either eliminated or replaced with fully-shielded lights, some even equipped with motion sensors to reduce their light pollution even further. The Natural Bridges night sky conservation efforts include campfire interpretive programs and publications for visitor education about this seldom considered resource.

    Natural Bridges is World’s First Dark-Sky Park

    Here’s their solar panel array, the world’s largest … in 1980. They’ve been at this dark sky business for some time.

    solar-panels.jpg

    See photos of the second and third largest natural “bridges” (water carved arches) in the world: Natural Bridges – Wikipedia

    Dead Horse Point State Park, Utah

    On By Rick McIn hiking, travel, traveloguesLeave a comment

    Island in the Sky, Canyonlands National Park, is great.

    But the view is even better from Dead Horse Point State Park.

    dead-horse.jpg

    I stayed in the fantastic campground there. Blue-haired mobile home veterans told me it was the best car campground they had found in canyon country.

    The park is so named because of its use as a natural corral by horse thieves in the 19th Century. The plateau drops off with sheer cliffs several hundred meters tall on 3 sides, with only a narrow neck of land (30 yards or so) connecting the plateau to the main plateau. Thus it was easy for rustlers to simply fence off this narrow neck, and keep their horses from running away.

    Unfortunately the dry desert conditions, lack of food and water, and limited space often killed the horses.

    Dead Horse Point State Park – Wikipedia

    dead-horse-vista.jpg
    Colorado River

    Buddhist grottoes in China

    On By Rick McIn blogs, travelLeave a comment

    One of my favourite blogs over the past months is Walking the Wall, a classy, entertaining and fascinating travelogue posted by a couple hiking the Great Wall of China.

    They’ve posted great photos of astonishing works done in the name of Buddha. I enjoyed the caves of Dunhuang and Datong so much myself back in the late 1990s that I thought I’d pass this on.

    Of all the Buddhist grottoes we’ve visited – Dunhuang, Matisi, Jintasi and Shikong – we’d have to say we had the most fun at Yungang Grottoes near Datong. Not that the works were as gorgeous and beautifully preserved as at Dunhuang; they weren’t. Nor were the grottoes set against a spectacular mountain backdrop like those at Matisi and Jintasi, or a private, intimate experience like we had at Shikong.

    What was so enjoyable about Yungang, and what we hadn’t experienced before, was that we were able to wander about the caves more or less unrestricted. We weren’t required to hire a guide, we could linger as long as we liked, and we could take photographs wherever we wanted.

    Yungang Grottoes at Walking the Wall

    buddha.jpg