Yeah.

I’m used to seeing the little cards in the hotel room’s bathroom saying that if you leave your towel on the floor (like a slob) they’ll replace it but if you hang it up (like a good guest) they’ll leave it for you. The little card usually says how much water and detergent waste you can save by reusing your towel. Never before has my towel on the hook (or bar) been left alone. This was the first time I’ve been able to reuse my towel -and they left the used soap and shampoo in the shower!

I know I shouldn’t be so excited about this, but despite what the cards say the housekeeping always seems to give me new towels regardless of my wishes.

Kudos Hotel Allegro!

PS- it is now cold here in Chicago. Cold and windy.

Technorati Tags: Travel

Anyhow, using my Garmin eTrex HCx to navigate our way to and back from The Wave, I was able to use the excellent HoudahGeo to geocode my images. I then used some of those images to build a photographic journal of our hike.

To take the virtual hike yourself, download this KMZ file and open it in Google Earth.

I love technology.

Actually I can’t say much for the city as I only saw enough of it to get me to the Tropicana but I did see plenty of the Tropicana. Let me just say that the Tropicana is a great place for a fun, never-have-to-leave-the-casino weekend. It has a great night life, fun casino, and good food. I wouldn’t take kids there (they can’t gamble anyway) but if you’re over 21 and Vegas is too far away I heartily recommend spending some time at the Trop.

Maybe next time I’ll get to see whether the rest of the city is how I remembered it.

Technorati Tags: Atlantic City, Casino, Tropicana, Travel

The GPS isn’t without its problems and issues, however.

Even modern GPS units can lose signal in canyons and cities (man-made canyons without the charm) and their maps may not be up to date. Even when the maps are up to date, you have to be very careful about what the GPS thinks a road’s name is versus what the people responsible for hanging signs think a road’s name is. Our road is Green Briar Drive- Google thinks it is Briar Drive. US Route 30 is near here, but my Garmins always call it Lincoln Highway in certain areas. It is never signed as the Lincoln Highway.

Therefore all GPS-based navigation needs to be done with a certain amount of flexibility and oversight. It is best if you have a navigator in the car who can help find signs and the like when you are in the middle of interstate construction near Denver (for example). Always be willing to override what your GPS tells you to do.

The real point of this article, however is to remind you of something you may never have actually heard: navigators never have just 1 navigation tool. If you’re on the road with just a GPS then you are at the mercy of technology (and the US government). What happens if you are on the Big Island of Hawaii and your GPS unit’s power adapter breaks (for example)?

Always have a real map on hand and someone who can read it handy. You can read a map, can’t you?

AAA offers excellent traveller services such as the probably trademarked TripTik. It has your route highlighted on a very nice map and they also mark construction areas. That is an excellent backup tool.

You can also print out your route through Google Maps.

I recommend that you use Google Maps to plan your trip from the very beginning. With Google Maps you can easily alter your route. I always recommend going around metro areas where possible. Most large cities have an interstate going through their middle and a beltway (designated by an even numbered hundreds digit) encircling them. I have found that the beltway is generally a better option.

Technorati Tags: GPS, Travel

Here are my thoughts on hiking The Wave.

We’ve never really hiked in the real desert before. I did some northern New Mexico hiking at the Philmont Scout Rance about a billion years ago but that wasn’t a very rough desert. It was mostly a forest. Coyote Buttes is very different. It is the desert. It is not a forest.

The Bureau of Land Management (the custodians of Coyote Buttes) recommend a gallon of water per person for the hike. We figured we’d rather be safe than sorry so we planned to try to have about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 gallons of water each. For a day hike, that may sound like a lot but when you’re sweating in the desert it doesn’t feel like nearly enough.

Besides water, we have the maps from BLM and a compass (no map is complete without a compass) and my new Garmin GPS. I’m a technophile but I will not trust my life to a GPS alone. Sunblock and bug repellent are two necessities and we also packed food for a light trail lunch/snack.

To try to keep cool, we packed big brimmed hats (love my big brimmed hat) and Kafka Kool Ties that I found at REI. These are like bandanas but have some kind of water absorbing hard things sewn into them that swell when wet. They were an impulse buy when I was getting some other essentials (pack towels and NPS/BLM Interagency Pass) and they proved to be a very good buy.

I never hike anywhere without good solid boots. I have a pair of hiking shoes, but they’re not for serious hiking (for me at least). My ankles like being encased in leather. Good, tough leather.

We stayed in Page, Arizona. Specifically at the Courtyard in Page which is an excellent hotel. The in-hotel restaurant was very good and there is a Denny’s down the hill (more on the joys of Denny’s sometime later). We had about 40 miles of Arizona/Utah road to drive before 9 miles of dirt road back to the trailhead.

The paved roads are excellent and fast with a 65 MPH speed limit. We like those roads.

The dirt road back to the trailhead was another story.

I’m glad we got up at 2am to try to start the hike at dawn. We had a minor stupidity issue (all mine) but ended up getting to the dirt road without much incident. The 9 miles back to the trailhead took us about an hour. Yes. An hour. The road was washboard the whole way. Since we were driving Gina’s beloved CR-V we weren’t about to try to skim the tops of the ridges. To be honest even if we were in a rental I wouldn’t as a flat is a flat and I did not want to deal with that out in the middle of nowhere.

A more rugged off-road vehicle with very large, low pressure tires would probably have been much better.

Next time.

Let me say that the hike itself isn’t too bad. There are some slickrock scrambles and more deep sand than I like (which is exactly none) but it isn’t too difficult if you’re in some form of shape. It is over 3 miles from the parking lot (which is better maintained than the road with lots of nice gravel) with quite a few hills in between.

When you get your permit to hike to The Wave you are given a topo map of the area and very detailed instructions in full color with pictures. Use these instructions. Do not lose them. The instructions give you a half dozen waypoints that you can plug into your GPS to aid you in your navigation. These waypoints are in some weird format that I couldn’t get into my GPS correctly so we were always about 150 feet off. We used the directions and just kept the GPS on for gross navigation.

One word of advice: keep looking behind you. The directions are for getting you to The Wave they do not help get you back to your car.

There are cairns all along the route. They are made from piled red sandstone and can be nearly invisible. On our way back out we found ourselves stopping and hunting for way too many long, hot, minutes looking for the elusive red piles. That’s where the GPS’ tracklog helped. I could at least look at the screen and feel confident that we were headed in the right direction.

I was very glad I wore my hiking boots. The Vibram soles had great traciton on the slickrock and the leather uppers kept the sand out. There was quite a bit of sandy walking. It is unpleasant. We found the best way to ford our way through was to shorten our strides. That really helped. Snowshoes may have also been helpful.

Be very careful on the hike as there is a lot of fragile rock out there. Some of the sandstone sticks out edge-up which leaves very thin flakes of stone sticking up. They are easy to break and certainly irreplaceable. After I heard my boots make a crunching sound I was much more careful where I trod.

Still, sand sucks to hike through.

The Wave itself is pretty small. It is probably less than an acre in size which is good because if it were larger we would have needed more time to photograph it. As it was, we spent almost two hours there and took lots of pictures. I think that if we go back out I’ll spend more time taking closeups.

If you get out there, hike all around and be sure to look everywhere. Take lots of pictures. Use a wide angle lens and take some closeups.

On the way out we had some shade in a few places, but the way back was another story. When we left the car at 5:30 the temperature was about 56 degrees. When we got back to the car around 11:30 it was 102. That’s quite a swing.

We got a little bit lost on the way out. We thought we were following the cairns but somehow we ended up off track. My GPS showed us that we were off but we couldn’t find any confirmatory stone piles. Eventually Gina got us back on track as she recognized part of a dune (I have no idea how). As I said, keep an idea behind you as you hike out and watch those stone piles.

Much to my surprise I had some water left over. I only drank about 4 of the 5 quarts I’d taken. I should have drank more. Later that day I had a terrible headache (think bad hangover) from dehydration. It took more than a full day before I felt like myself again. Drink more water than you think you can.

If you go:

• Don’t go in the summer
• Take a GPS
• Keep watching behind you
• Drink lots of water
• Hike smart

We went with Antelope Canyon Tours and took their photographer’s package. If you are considering a visit to Antelope Canyon (in Page, AZ) then I heartily encourage you to do the same. Our guide, Rosie, was great!

Oops.

The photos were gone as far as Finder could tell, but thankfully I had a copy of Data Rescue II handy (I’ll not get into why I bought a license almost a year ago…).

Data Rescue II was able to successfully recover all of the deleted images even thought they were all RAW files which Data Rescue II identified as TIFFs.

I’d have to say that I consider Data Rescue II to be an essential part of my digital workflow.

Technorati Tags: Aperture, Apple, Photography

When I did my solo vacation a few years ago I realized that I really like at least 1 hot meal a day. There is something about hot food that just feels good. That meal can be a fast food lunch or a sit down dinner (or Denny’s breakfast) but it should exist.

On the road food needs to be simple and quick. It is better if it doesn’t need any accessories or cooling. Keeping food cold on the road can be difficult. Buying ice every day and emptying out the water from the cooler is a pain.

With that in mind, we have what we consider a decent menu for on the road eating:

• Single-serving applesauce
• Pudding cups
• Crackers
• Granola bars
• Bagels with peanut butter
• Pop Tarts
• Beef jerkey
• Wheat thins

The new item we added to this list for our last trip are US military MREs (meal ready to eat). They’re great. They need no refrigeration or utensils and come with heating things. They work fine at room temperature, though. While the gum may be terrible, the actual food is pretty good. We tried 4 different menus and I am looking forward to heading to the army navy store soon to get some more.

Sure, dehydrated food may be better and possibly better for you (MREs are high in fat and carbs) but you need water and preparation.

I think that we’ll be using MREs on all of our future camping and road trips. They’re probably also just good things to have around in the event of an emergency.

Happy eating!

Technorati Tags: Travel