As part of our Tauck tour, we drove to Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. They are adjacent to each other but became national parks at different times so have different names. They have been jointly managed since 1943. Sequoias grow in both parks. Giant sequoias grow on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, between 4,000 and 8,000 feet in elevation. They are closely related to the coast redwoods we saw at Muir Woods, but there are differences….
San Francisco would be the start of our Tauck tour, John Muir’s California. We’ve been to San Francisco several times, but did go back to one of our favorite spots, Fisherman’s Wharf. We walked the piers, checked out a restaurant and took pictures of Bay Bridge which connects San Francisco and Oakland. While in San Francisco, we stayed at the St. Francis Westin. They had a picture gallery documenting some of the hotel’s history. The picture below shows the hotel’s…
While in Seattle, we visited the Amazon Spheres. They are actually office space for Amazon employees. We were fortunate they were open to the public on the weekend we were in Seattle. It was difficult to secure a reservation, but persistence paid off! The Spheres are a result of innovative thinking about the design of workspaces. Researchers working with Amazon found that connecting the environment to nature can increase creativity and brain function. So that is what they set out…
Seattle has beautiful scenery. We were in Seattle in early September and during our time there, made day trips to Snoqualmie Falls, Olympic National Park and Mt. Rainier National Park. We visited Snoqualmie Falls as part of a wine-tasting tour. The falls are one of the most popular scenic attractions in Washington and they certainly were impressive. We viewed them from an upper observation deck and then hiked down to a lower area where we could also view the falls….
We planned to travel to Western Australia a few years ago, but the itinerary for our tour was drastically changed due to devastating wildfires in the country. We ultimately cancelled the trip. Just recently, we took a Canadian Maritimes tour that would take us into Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. A few weeks before our trip, we weren’t sure it would even happen. There were wildfires in Nova Scotia resulting in evacuations, including ones near Halifax. But…
I want to start this post with a bit of an overview of the three national parks we visited on our America’s Canyonland tour. Each of these parks are part of the “Grand Staircase,” an area beginning at the Grand Canyon, going on to Zion and ending at Bryce. Our itinerary was a bit out of order as we ended our trip in Zion. The Grand Staircase is a sequence of sedimentary rocks that ascend from the Grand Canyon to…
We traveled next to Bryce Canyon National Park, another highlight of our trip. On our way, we made a quick photo stop to see Balanced Rock. It is near Lee’s Ferry in Marble Canyon. The National Park Service explains how it came to be: Thousands of years ago a huge rock boulder broke from the cliff above and tumbled to a stop here. The hard conglomerate boulder compressed the softer dirt directly beneath, making it resistant to erosion. The boulder…
After leaving the Grand Canyon, we drove to the Glen Canyon and Lake Powell area, where we had a half hour flightseeing experience. We were on a small plane holding about 12 passengers, each of us with a window seat. The afternoon before, we had visited the Carl Hayden Visitor Center adjacent to the Glen Canyon Dam. The Visitors’ Center was named for Senator Carl Hayden who at the time was the longest serving member of Congress – in fact,…
We left Scottsdale and began driving to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. On the way, we made a lunch stop in Sedona, Arizona. Sedona is famous for its red rocks. I found this explanation of how these beautiful formations came to be. Before the red rock was turned into rock, it was all soft mud and sand. Over a 320 million year period changes in nature helped transform the sand and mud into something more beautiful than we…
We took Tauck’s America’s Canyonlands tour in October of 2022. On this tour we would visit the Grand Canyon, Glen Canyon, Lake Powell, and both Bryce and Zion National Parks. We arrived a day early for our tour and booked an independent, half-day tour that introduced us to the Scottsdale/Tempe/Phoenix area. We first visited Papago Park and the Sonoran Desert where we saw the iconic Saguaro Cactus. The Saguaro is a tree-like cactus that can grow up to 40 feet…