On July 1 (wow 11 days ago?) I went on a road trip. It was actually a planned meetup with family in Idaho, but I made it a road trip.

Grand Canyon

First stop,  the Grand Canyon, snapped some pictures on my Nikon D50. This was my second or third visit to the Grand Canyon, my previous visits were in my childhood. Unfortunately, being alone, it was just me, my camera, my tripod, and my embarrassment as I kept going up and down the stairs to the rail where there were 20 or 30 other people. I kept having camera adjustments and kept being indecisive about whether and where to set up the tripod.

I stuck with one viewing area then left, only after grabbing one more shot from my iPhone.

Las Vegas

Then I headed over to Las Vegas and got a hotel for just $32, it had a sitting room, a full-size fridge and stove, a dining table, and more, all just $32. It happened to be on the far south end of the main strip. I got my room and got back in my car and discovered the amazement that is the main Las Vegas strip. WOW. Now I get it. I’d always seen mention of Vegas on TV and saw glimpses of it (Hollywood-produced), but being there in person I realized that you really do have to be there to understand it. See, they cram all the big and amazing stuff in such a small space of about a mile on one street. You could take a one week vacation and spend it all there and have no end of things you could do, yet never drive anywhere, just do it all on foot. And by “do” I don’t mean gambling or drinking (or porn). It’s an entertainment hotspot, there are all kinds of other things to do there, like watch shows.

I took no good pictures in Vegas because I just drove up the strip, got some fast food, and drove back down back to my hotel. The traffic conditions are very tight and slow-moving—impossible to sneak a clear picture. But believe me, it’s photo-worthy, if only you can get on foot. That said, I did take a few pictures, but they were all blurry and, well, crap.

Before I got to Vegas, though, I crossed over the Hoover Dam. I’d never been to Vegas or to the Hoover Dam before, so this was a big deal, too. Not only for reasons of newness, but also because they are building a bypass, and very soon (I believe within the next two or three years) there will be no more “thru” traffic over the Dam as traffic will be directed over the bypass bridge. The bypass bridge is apparently a huge, huge bridge that avoids the dam altogether. I took these photos while approaching the dam, it shows the ongoing construction of the bypass bridge in the background.

Hoover Dam

So anyway, Vegas. I spent the night, and then hit the road, up towards Idaho where family is.

Nevada Roads

The Nevada back road highways going from Vegas to Idaho are lonely. There aren’t many cars, there aren’t many stops, and there’s no cellular phone service for most of the drive (imagine no cell phone service for eight hours except at one or two stops). But since there was no traffic, I had no problems with picture-taking while driving at 80 miles per hour.

Twin Falls

Before I got to Boise, I passed through Twin Falls, and suddenly realized I needed to do a U-turn and get out of the car with my camera.

The ride further towards Boise had some amazing sunset skies.

Family

I finally reached my parents’ home in Nampa, after getting my hotel in Meridian. The next day, more relatives arrived and we had a BBQ in my parents’ back yard.

(And that ends my Photoshop enhancements. The home and garden photos above without people in them are also non-enhanced.)

And of course we had to get a family pic.

Big Eddy

The next day, we made it up to the Shaw cabin. Near the cabin is Big Eddy, which we visited immediately after reaching the cabin.

The Shaw Cabin

The Shaw Cabin a cabin that was built by my grandmother (my mother’s mother) and grandfather decades ago and was improved upon by my my uncles thereafter. It frequently gets visited by relatives, and understandably so.

At The End Of It All …

It’s pretty obvious from these photos that I had a sweet vacation. At the end of it all, though, I came home pretty beat. In fact, I only really enjoyed it about half as much as the pictures make them all out to be. The kids are truly adorable, but they are also tiresome and annoying when I’m trying to enjoy tranquility. Plus I just didn’t get a chance to settle down and enjoy it all. For example, conversations among my relatives are always around church politics, national politics, or dealing with people I will never know and cannot empathize with—conversations I’m not able to contribute to. And, while everyone was wading in Big Eddy, my mother and I drove out to buy ice and similar supplies, then when we returned I only had time to take some additional pictures. (I didn’t bring swimming trunks anyway.) The cabin experience wore me out (I’m out of shape, we had a lot of stuff to unload and re-load) and was miserably hot. I was too beat to go on a walk with everyone else. I didn’t do anything except take photos and share my dad’s burden of tolerating the children. It’s also a constant annoyance to feel it necessary to hand over all the fun experiences of managing utilities, starting the fire, and strumming my own guitar to a relative who is already used to being in charge of everything back at home, and really there was no possible option, that person was more able than I, hence either more demanding and not worth the fight or else just plain someone I didn’t want to compete with or subject myself to opinion. (I had opinions of my own that weren’t compatible anyway.)

Sometimes despite being thirty-two my family still sees me as a teenager. Such a distorted view was pretty obvious several years ago (in my mid-twenties) when I was treated literally by these family members as a youth member at church. That in turn made me completely lose it back then; I suddenly found myself playing the part of a youth, because I was treated as one to begin with (because I was always the family runt, they always knew me as the kid in the family when I was indeed a kid). I only “lost it” in a couple instances during this trip as the pattern continued, thanks to the whole experience being so short-lived. But my drive home with my own haunting thoughts and nothing to distract my mind with brought back years-old grievances that I’d all but forgotten and abandoned until this trip brought it all back again. It all made me realize, again, that I am really not compatible with my family. Which is quite sad, because I’m really not compatible with anyone else, either, in fact family’s all I have. Fortunately, I love my parents and my blood siblings, and I will never burn those bridges.

Ah well. I got to walk away with these photos. That’s what I got that Nikon D50 camera for a few years ago anyway—to capture and savor experiences that I’m unable to actually enjoy when they happen.