Stateside With Images/Audio: Rosalea's Roadtrip

In the spirit of Charlie Sheen's character in Two and a Half Men, who so famously said, "What better place to celebrate the birth of our Lord than at Caesar's Palace?", I went on a four-day bus tour over Christmas. Here are some pix, and a soundbite.

Bad Water, Death Valley, is 282 feet below sea level. Hottest, driest, lowest—that’s Death Valley for you.

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Not far from there, also in Death Valley, is famed Zabriski Point. This is not the view I remember from the movie, but heck that was way back in the ’70s!

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The hub of our tour was Las Vegas, and if there's one good thing about that city, it's the leaving of it. Perhaps because this fool needs not a whole industry to separate her from her money, she didn't enjoy "the meadows" one bit. Here is a sample of the fakery that is available on The Strip: a re-creation of St Mark's Square in the Venetian Hotel.

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On Christmas Day we visited what has been variously called an upside-down mountain (attributed to Native Americans) and a landscape you'd see after death, on another world (attributed to the conservationist John Muir). Ladies and gentlemen: the Grand Canyon!

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On the bus tour, if you were late you had to sing a song. Here's a snippet of a Taiwanese song our latecomer said was called Silence.

AUDIO LINK: http://img.scoop.co.nz/media/audio/0612/Silence.mp3

Because we went separate ways, I didn't get the chance to ask him any more about the song, but it may be from a TV series of the same name, which was a big hit in Taiwan at the beginning of 2006. In the story, the star-crossed lovers pledged to meet on Christmas Day, 2006, just like the couple in the photo above.

• Silence website
  http://www.spcnet.tv/reviews/review.php?rID=1330


• Lassen Tours website
  http://www.lassentours.com/


• National Parks Service
  http://www.nps.gov/findapark/index.htm

Happy holidays!

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

--PEACE--

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