Boy howdy, was I looking forward to this vacation I’d planned:  escape DC and my job, get out into spectacular and uncrowded nature, go places I’d never been, clear my head, and wrap it all up with a few days in the spec-tacky-ular land of Las Vegas, where I’d spend New Year’s Eve with my brother and his friends.  Things didn’t quite go according to plan:  oh, I achieved everything listed above, but one of the places I’d never been was an ambulance, and though my head was cleared, so was my entire digestive tract.  And the dizzying dazzle of Vegas somehow makes you feel sicker if you’re already ill.  But let me start at the beginning…

I flew to Las Vegas on Christmas, got in my rental car, and drove straight out of town, heading up I-15 toward Utah.  I hadn’t eaten much all day, so I stopped at the first major town after Las Vegas to try to find dinner.  This town, unfortunately, was Mesquite, NV, and I should taken my experience trying to find food as an omen of how few services this little pit of a town offers.  See, Mesquite is not so much a town as the closest place to the state line to locate casinos.  So if you want to gamble and eat a really cheap ham steak in a smoky casino buffet, Mesquite’s your kind of town.  If you want to, say, eat a decent meal, get medical care, or entertain yourself with anything besides gambling, you’re shit out of luck.  (A local would tell me later, “There’s not a lot to do in Mesquite if you don’t drink.”)

However, I just chalked it up to the holiday.  I hadn’t really remembered it was Christmas until I pulled into Mesquite to have dinner and, after trudging through the two casinos just off the exit ramp, which didn’t have anything but buffets, tried to find food elsewhere.  Even the McDonald’s was closed.  I drove down the only real street in the town till it seemed to peter out, then gave up and went back to one of the casinos, the Casablanca.  I finally found a little café hidden in a corner where I was able to get a sandwich to go (after a 30-minute wait).  Basically, it took me well over an hour to find a goddamn sandwich in this place.  (I was so giddy about being out of DC that I was still able to laugh when I got back on the interstate, drove two more miles, and found a whole slew of fast-food restaurants, as well as three more casinos, at the next exit.)

Anyway, I spent the night in Hurricane, UT, and got to Zion National Park early the next morning.  A couple of inches of snow covered the landscape, adding to the beauty without causing any travel problems.  The day was gorgeous: cold but still, and not a cloud in the sky.  I’d planned to spend a day and a half in Zion before heading up to Bryce Canyon National Park, but I thought that I should take advantage of the weather to get up to Bryce that day (Bryce is higher than Zion and tends to be colder and snowier).  And, frankly, I was underwhelmed by Zion.  I’m not sure what I was expecting—I think, more of a desert landscape.  Zion’s beautiful, but I was looking for “spectacular.”

As long as I was there, though, I decided to swing quickly through the valley and see what I might want to come back to.  I drove along the valley floor, next to the Virgin River, stopping from time to time to admire the looming cliffs and to walk through the snow to the river.  I can’t tell you how marvelous it felt just to walk through clean, powdery snow, breathe unpolluted air, and have mountains towering over me instead of buildings.

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