{"id":84,"date":"2007-11-22T00:25:36","date_gmt":"2007-11-22T06:25:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=84"},"modified":"2007-11-22T00:25:36","modified_gmt":"2007-11-22T06:25:36","slug":"zion-and-babylon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/zion-and-babylon\/","title":{"rendered":"Zion and Babylon"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, I got back yesterday from my spontaneous trip with my old roommates!\u00a0 It was a lot of fun!\u00a0 Definitely worth skipping the last couple of days of classes! However, I can’t figure out how to upload pictures to this particular blog–I’m sure there’s a way to do it, I’m just not all that proficient at wordpress.\u00a0 Shoot.\u00a0 Well, you can check out my photoblog for pictures<\/a>, since I’ll probably be posting most of them up there in the next few days.\u00a0 And if you bug me enough, I might just put them all in a pdf or a word file and upload it to this post.\u00a0 So there you go.\u00a0 But here’s basically what we did:<\/p>\n

My old roommates are really awesome.\u00a0 I’m really glad that I got the chance to get to know them.\u00a0 They are just a lot of fun to hang out and do stuff with.\u00a0 I drop by every once and a while (you can do stuff like that when you have a car \ud83d\ude42 ) and Sunday night, I dropped by to find them getting ready to leave for Zion National Monument!\u00a0 And they wanted me to come with them!\u00a0 Well, I’m the kind of guy who takes a long time and a lot of working up to finally decide to do something, so it took me a couple of really strenuous hours of convincing myself, but I finally went!\u00a0 And it was a ton of fun!<\/p>\n

We drove until about four in the morning, listening to music and having a general good time, and sticking our heads out to look at all the stars, because HOLY COW you can see a TON of stars in Southern Utah, especially when you’re out in the road in the middle of nowhere!\u00a0 We passed through Hurricane and started looking for a park.\u00a0 Yeah, we’re all pretty cheap–we didn’t want to pay money to go camping at an official campground!\u00a0 Besides, it was 4:30 am.\u00a0 We ended up crashing on the lawn of a local church there–it was kind of funny!\u00a0 I was expecting that we’d stop at a campground, but instead I ended up feeling like I was homeless!\u00a0 But the weather was warm, and it was good.\u00a0 My friends told me that the bishopric stopped by and just kind of watched us for a while, but I was asleep and they were pretending to be asleep, so they didn’t bother us.<\/p>\n

Then, after grabbing some breakfast from the grocery store, we went up to Zion’s!\u00a0 And it was awesome!\u00a0 The mountains there are vertical, red, and beautiful.\u00a0 We climbed up Angel’s Landing, which was rather short but fairly strenuous.\u00a0 There were all kinds of switchbacks and stuff, and I think we climbed up over a thousand feet above our starting location.\u00a0 It was kind of funny, because I noticed these signs that said “warning, falls have resulted in death,” but I didn’t realize what that actually meant until we got to the trailhead and on to the part where the trail runs parallel to a sheer cliff.\u00a0 They had these chains attached into the rock, and without those chains, holy cow! every other person to go up that trail would be dying!<\/p>\n

I didn’t think much of the chains until I looked over my side and saw how sheer of a cliff it was, and then my legs started to get weak and I found myself gripping that chain very tightly!\u00a0 I guess I’m afraid of heights or something.\u00a0 And, as much as I would like to say that I conquered my fear and went ahead…I didn’t.\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0 We got to the part with the bridge, and then I saw where the trail was REALLY headed, and holy cow!\u00a0 I just kind of stopped there.\u00a0 Man, it made me feel so…terrestial!\u00a0 Like I was falling short or something!\u00a0 But yeah, it was still something of an accomplishment.\u00a0 And I really didn’t have the shoes for it (I was wearing Birkenstocks, with REALLY sandy socks).\u00a0 And it was still very awesome.\u00a0 So I came back and read for an hour or so on the top of the mountain, it was very peaceful and nice.\u00a0 Read some more of that Madeleine L’Engle quotebook.<\/p>\n

So then, on the way down, we spontaneously decided to go to Las Vegas and get a hotel there, instead of spending another night under the stars.\u00a0 Also, it would be kind of cool to experience Las Vegas.\u00a0 I thought that it would be interesting–I’ve heard a lot of things about that place and how evil it is, but never actually been there, so it would be a good experience.<\/p>\n

We drove down there, had a good time (man, I love road trips!), and pulled in.\u00a0 The hotels there are really cheap!\u00a0 We got ours for maybe $40 or so.\u00a0 And the parking is free as well!\u00a0 But the way these places really make their money is in the Casinos and nightclubs.\u00a0 We went out and spent the night walking around the strip, and holy cow!\u00a0 I really got to see why they call it “sin city!” I won’t go into details (and don’t worry, I observed from a safe distance–and refrained from observing some of the more immoral stuff altogether!), but it was really crazy!\u00a0 Man, when you legalize prostitution, you get all kinds of evil stuff going on!\u00a0 We had so many people offer to take us to these sleazy places, or give us pornographic business cards for whores (little Mexican women were handing out those cards!\u00a0 Holy cow!\u00a0 How much more evil can you get than that?!), or try to talk with us, and man, it was pretty crazy!\u00a0 My friends had this competition going, where they wanted to get as many girls’ phone numbers as they could (girls who were not hookers).\u00a0 It was pretty funny when they tried to walk into a nightclub with their tattered jeans and ripped t-shirts!\u00a0 The doorkeepers would look them up and down and tell them “sorry, you’re not dressed for this place!” They eventually teamed up and succeeded in getting a couple of legit girls’ numbers, and they were pretty dang happy about it!\u00a0 But by then, it was ridiculously late, and we crashed pretty hard at our apartment.\u00a0 It was hard to get up in the morning, but we did it, and had a groggy but quick drive back to Provo.<\/p>\n

The highlight of the trip was definitely Zion’s.\u00a0 It was a beautiful day, and a wonderful climb.\u00a0 As we were driving away from there, I was trying to sleep, but all I could see in my mind was the car driving off of one of those cliffs!\u00a0 It took a while to finally get the immediate impression of them out of my mind, but I must say that it was quite awesome, and I’d definitely recommend heading over there!\u00a0 And as for Vegas, it was quite an interesting experience to see that place.\u00a0 Now I know why the stuff that happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.\u00a0 And what was really interesting was that it wasn’t tempting and it wasn’t scary.\u00a0 It was just there, and just wrong.\u00a0 The casinos didn’t really entice me, and all those crazy pictures and skanky people were more jarring than arousing.\u00a0 I’ve already figured out that I don’t want that in my life, so it’s really not an issue at all for me.<\/p>\n

One thing really got me riled up, though.\u00a0 My friend Steve told me that he knows of a professor at BYU who did a study on the sex workers in Las Vegas–the ones who work the brothels.\u00a0 He said that 45% of them are Mormon, and that most of those come from dual income households where the wife lost her job–and they both decided together for her to go into the sex industry.\u00a0 HOLY FREAKING COW.<\/strong>\u00a0 Most of those people are probably inactive anyway, but that just boggled my mind.\u00a0 I would amputate my right arm RIGHT THIS VERY MOMENT if it was necessary to keep my future wife from working the sex industry–and I’m sure that once I’m finally married and in a deep relationship with my future wife, I would be willing to sacrifice my life to keep her from going into that line of work!\u00a0 Yikes!\u00a0 THAT got me riled up quite a bit!<\/p>\n

So, yeah, sorry there aren’t any pictures here.\u00a0 I have tons, I just don’t know how to post them!\u00a0 If you would like to see them, either bug me or check out my photoblog <\/a>over the next few days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, I got back yesterday from my spontaneous trip with my old roommates!\u00a0 It was a lot of fun!\u00a0 Definitely worth skipping the last couple of days of classes! However, I can’t figure out how to upload pictures to this particular blog–I’m sure there’s a way to do it, I’m just not all that proficient… Continue reading Zion and Babylon<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-1m","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}