Author Archives: Vipa

The first thing that pops into your head when you read this is…Cross Country Tripping.

Well, that would have been true if we’d started from the other end of the Coast.

Nevertheless, we did a nice round trip(literally!) to Zion National Park.

After my last visit to Joshua, my love for National Parks has considerably increased.

It may sound like a long, arduous road trip especially when you’re doing it with just one other person. But it was NOT!

It was one of the most amazing experience.

Like “intelligent” kids would, we started out at around three in the afternoon of the July 4 weekend. So obviously we didn’t escape Bay Area traffic!

But after almost an eternity, we did get out of Bay Area and the drive came to life.

Good music, some packed food and homemade lemonade paired with scenic views of the vast Nor-Cal. The total package provided some optimism to our wary mind.

Road tripping in USA is tough for people like us who are vegetarians. You don’t come across vegetarian delis at gas stations easily. So, you are relying on fruits and sugar loaded yoghurts. These foods lack nutrition. Alternatively, you spend the prior week at home prepping food to survive the road trip.

But we had to do it anyways, and we did!

We took the longer route. The one going through North California over Tahoe National Forest and crossing Nevada to reach Utah.

Right out of Bay Area, we passed through Sonoma County hills with cattle scattered over and grazing dinner.

Further north east, we were passing over the Tahoe National Park. The mountains were covered with dark green pine trees suggesting heavy snowfall during winter. Needless to mention, the aerial view of Lake Tahoe was breathtaking. Blue waters surrounded by greenery on all four directions, aren’t we all looking for such serene landscapes?!!

With a pit stop or two at Trader Joe’s and coffee shops, we were soon transcending dense forest landscape of California to hilly desert landscape of Nevada. By sunset, which was apparently at 9.30, we reached Reno.

We skipped dinner and went directly to bed. We had an early start the next morning.

We started off from Reno at seven with bread and cheese and a lot of OJ bottles loaded into our trunk. Hilton Home-suites offers complimentary breakfast for their guests.

If things go as per our plan, the idea was to stop for lunch at Olive Garden. Then, we would be left with five more hours and reach our dwelling at Zion.

But, how can Universe be so kind as to consent to our plans. We didn’t take into consideration the July 4 parades. Obviously, because we assumed we are passing through the highway. We were detoured in multiple cities by the officials due to road closures for the celebration. New lesson learnt: check out each and every road on Google Maps.

Two interesting points throughout the day were noted. First, if you take a detour southeast, you will come across a huge sand dune. This dune is made up of white sand. Photo below.

Two, you will be traveling through the loneliest highway of the Country. They literally sell magnets for this!

The views of Nevada are dynamic. I never assumed desert landscapes to be so interesting. There were plateaus changing into winding highways through the hills. Even though the road was a two lane highway, we could easily drive at speed limits, unlike at the I-5 🥲

We didn’t stop for lunch at Olive Garden. A lot of time was occupied by the detours and diversions. We’d rather picked up some strawberries and cucumbers along the way. Subway would have been a good option, but we really cared to reach before sunset with the one hour loss.

Yes, Utah was a different timezone. We were gonna lose an hour going east.

Also, as Indians, we had never visited a more destitute landscape. So we clicked a lot a photos. Just me with my partner and our car on an empty highway, empty nothingness surrounding us.

Eventually, we crossed Nevada by seven (and now eight) and Utah was definitely a new sight. You’d spot inhabitants, farmlands and equipments, something which was missing in the barren lands on Nevada.

You had traffic on the road and exits at every mile. There was greenery with a hue of yellow. The sands had turned to a shade of red. Red sandstone is a thing of Zion National Park. Along the route, huge billboards of upcoming events were spotted in different shades. This was refreshing for me as Bay Area typically has advertising billboards for lawyers and AI companies in shades of either blue or black.

We were well in time for dinner so we dug out a decent Indian restaurant. Red fort Indian restaurant was serving vegetarian meals so we picked up some dal, rice, naan and mushroom cooked in an Indian gravy. The food was super spicy even for us. Later I connected why the name of the restaurant was so in place. In New Delhi, India, a very popular tourist attraction is the Red Fort. It is a historic Mughal fort completely made of Red Sandstone.

We stayed at the Zion White Bison resort for two nights and headed home on Sunday. My next blog is going to be all about Zion.

But for now, let’s continue.

The return journey subsequent of Nevada was tedious and horrendous. This would be an understatement. But good things before the bad ones..

We were full from the previous night’s cheese pasta so we decided to skip breakfast. The views out of the window were active. With every passing hour, we jumped from beautiful red sandstones of Utah to winding lanes through the mountains of Arizona to the barren stretches of Nevada. And equally active were the time zones. We did a brief stop at a gas station in Arizona, just before entering Nevada. It was a huge one with a lot of departments. I have never seen such magnanimous rest stops in California. Trust me, by far the best rates at gas stations were in this state. What are we even paying for in California?!!

By lunch time, the desert was speckled with casinos here and there and it was a no-brainer we were inching towards Vegas. We were passing through The Strip. The ETA to home showed 10 pm. We decided to navigate through New York New York for lunch. Alas! New York New York had nothing vegetarian to offer which was neither sugar loaded nor cheese laden. My husband picked up a chocolate shake at Hershey’s and I doled out my cucumbers and strawberries from the car.

Within an hour we were back on I-15. Post Vegas, our trip went downhill. You are on a two lane Interstate highway with post-holiday traffic to major cities like San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Obviously, the 10 pm ETA was a great facade.

According to the true story and the turn of events, the highway was subjected to multiple crashes and construction which lead us to reach Bakersfield by 10 pm instead of Bay Area. We still had four more hours to navigate, this time through I-5 ( a close cousin of I-15).

It was impossible. We switched to 101 highway even though Google listed it as a longer route. We knew better to rather take N-101 instead of I-5.

But, by Paso Robles, we were exhausted. We were driving since morning. We had crossed four states. And the traffic of I-15 had mentally drained us out. The safest choice was to rest at night and set out in the morning. And that’s what we did. We finally sat down for dinner.

Next morning, we were out early morning from the hotel and reached home just in time to log into work.

A nice hot home-cooked lunch was exactly what our bodies needed after a tiresome yet beautiful road trip.

I am already looking forward to my next on-the-road visit but this one’s good enough until next summer😋