Goodbye Sydney, Hello Summer!

So Sydney has come and gone. The flight home was worse than expected, but what can you do. I remember vividly having a terrible time when I flew home from New Zealand five years ago, and this flight from Sydney was a very close repeat of that. Not only did I sleep very little the night before the flight, but even after taking two Advil PM's, I was only able to sleep twenty minutes...on a 13 hour flight!!

Unfortunately, I did need to pay overweight charges on one of my bags. Apparently they weigh carry on's now, so all three suitcases started over weight. After shifting things around, I ended with two a few tenths of a kilo overweight, and on at 32 kilos with a limit of 20.5.

JHG picked me up from the airport A-Okay and after a lunch with his mom, sister, and nephew at In 'n Out, we hit the road for Vandenberg Air Force Base. He had been working at Vandenberg for most of the summer and wanted to show me what work he had been doing. We then went to Jocko's in Nipomo, CA for a steak dinner. Jocko's atmosphere is no where near what one would expect for a "welcome home" dinner (and I had been forewarned about this), but the steaks were well worth the lack of atmosphere!! Not only are the steaks local, but they're cooked Santa Maria barbeque style. A "little" Top Sirloin was still 2.5" thick and bigger than my hand!!! Oh man these were good steaks and if you ever find yourself in Central California, I highly recommend going!! By the end of this night (not including my 20 minute nap on the plane), I had been awake for close to 40 hours...and then I finally slept!!

The next day we started the drive to (ultimately) Bryce Canyon. There were a few stops we wanted to make on the way,a nd we intended to stay the night in Vegas and finish the drive to Bryce Canyon in the morning. If you've never seen it before, Honda created the Honda Civic Musical Road in Lancaster, CA. It was initially designed for a commercial, but after the commercial was shot, they decided to leave it in place. The locals (of course) complained, and the road has now been moved to the middle of nowhere, near Lancaster, CA.

The road was created by cutting groves into the pavement, similar to the groves that are on the side of the road and are meant to wake you up when you're drifting off. By changing the width between the grooves, the road produces different tones to create a song. Although it's designed to be driven over by a Honda Civic at 55mph, a Volvo S40 works perfectly fine as well!!
And to make things clear, the road is only 15 seconds long and we took a route that was an hour longer than we otherwise would have driven just to see this road. And every extra minute was worth it!

After the Honda Civic musical road we drove into Vegas for the night and stayed on the north end of the strip at the Sahara. After a few games of craps, blackjack, and a few pulls on the slots, we called it a night.

The following morning, the previous guest had conveniently set a 6am alarm for us and we thus started our day. After a delicious breakfast at the slowest 1970's cafe, we set out to finish the drive to Bryce Canyon. We stopped in St. George for a bit and Cedar City, but pretty much made this drive straight through. We stayed in Cedar City for the night depsite still being two hours from Bryce Canyon.

We finally arrive at Bryce Canyon at 4pm and took the "World's Greatest Three-Mile Hike". I don't know how you determine the world's greatest hike, but they claimed it. The hike was absolutely phenomenal and I highly recommend checking out the photos! Note: it may take a few days for these photos to be posted. It seems that finding internet on our road trip is just as difficult as it was in Australia!