Destination: Denver 09.10.08

Plans for the trip out west are going pretty good.  My work was very cool about letting me off to go on a trip.  They’ve all heard about my usual time off is to work somewhere else, so I guess knowing that I was going somewhere for some time off made it easy for them.  We’re leaving Atlanta on the 20th and will be back on the 29th.  So going to have roughly 9 days out there.

The picture above is a photo of what my desk looked like earlier today.  A co-worker takes a trip out west every year with his family, so when I told him we were headed out that way, he came back from lunch with tons of books.  He’s been very helpful with advice too and is genuinely excited for me to get to see some of the sites out there.

So far the list of potential stops, which mostly consist of National Parks, are (in no order):

• Grand Canyon
• Mesa Verde
• Bryce Canyon
• Zion
• Petrified Forest
• Sedona
• Rocky Mountain
• Capitol Reef
• Sunset Crater Volcano
• Canyonlands
• Meteor Crater
• Arches
• Great Sand Dunes
• Hoover Dam
• Las Vegas
• Garden of the Gods
• Four Corners

We undoubtedly would run out of time to visit all of those, so we’re going to have to get together and plan out which ones are going to be skipped and get the trip narrowed down some.  I want to see as much as I can, but don’t want to cut any of them too terribly short and miss out on the highlights.  My co-worker said that you could easily spend a good full day or more at each of the parks, and even more on some of them.

The route above is showing 2496 miles.  That is alot of seat time!  Definitely expect me to post some pictures while I’m out there, as I plan to take plenty

All of the excitement that I’m feeling over going out west for a few days has got me to wondering, do you all that are from the west find the eastern states as exciting?