Lesson One: Packing.

Camping-after-flying is a weird, hybrid beast.  You have all of the convenience of car camping, but only once you’ve crammed all of your camping equipment into the smallest possible space to get it on the airplane. Sure, you can always rent stuff at your destination, but the cost of doing that for over a week can be significant enough to make it worth your while to bring your own. We’d also be bringing a bunch of layer-able clothes, since we’d be spending our time in temperatures between 25 and 100 degrees F.  In this case, too, Pete and I were going to a wedding at the end of the trip, which meant that we’d need an extra suitcase for civilization- and occasion-appropriate clothing.  And did you know that airlines’ lessened fees for baggage on international flights doesn’t include flights between the U.S. and Canada?  Canada: totally a separate country.  Except when it’s inconvenient to treat it as such.

At any rate, compression bags — along with my husband’s widely-recognized packing prowess — were our best friends.

Along with the insulated, inflatable mattress pads pictured at the bottom center, which were perhaps the only thing ensuring that I wasn’t a hollow-eyed sleepless zombie after a week of camping.  But I digress.

At any rate, camping stuff proved to be one of the biggest costs of our trip, but mostly because we saw fit to invest in lightweight, neatly-nesting cooking kit, Technical Pants ™, and boots.  The Technical Pants were totally the best purchase ever: they were comfortable through a range of conditions, super-durable, and looked and smelled surprisingly okay at the end of the week. Comfy boots were also a splurge, but worked better for me than my All-Stars would have.  They, however, did not smell okay by the end of the week.

Lesson Two: American-Style Consumerism.

American-style consumer orgies are thrilling, you guys. Even after an early morning and a cross-country flight, it was exhilarating to cruise the wide, clean, plentiful aisles of the local super-mega-center, picking up what seemed to be obscenely cheap food and supplies being sold at half the price that you’d find them in Canada. I mean, two cheap flashlights, plus batteries, for $3! (It’s one flashlight for $7 at the Jean Coutu here.) The same Neutrogena facial sunscreen that’s $16 at the local Montreal Pharmaprix for $6! Insane!

They also sell Zero bars.

Moreover, we had the perfect excuse to go to Trader Joe’s: it’s the best for camping snacks.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to enjoy their many frozen / chocolate-coated offerings (black car, desert, no cooler), but they’re still pretty great for dried fruits, nuts, and canned stuff like soups and chilis.

We were even near an In-N-Out Burger.  This is a photo taken at the moment that Pete, unprompted, started to exclaim, “That’s a good burger!”.  I don’t even eat In-N-Out Burgers, but the whole afternoon of benign suburban shopping was still enough to rile up the blood of an nth-generation Californian that runs in my veins.  I thought that I wouldn’t like Vegas because it would be sad and tacky, and kitschy it most certainly is.  But most of the city — dry, rocky, blindingly sunny, distant mountains, wide roads of seemingly innumerable lanes speckled with Botts’ dots, stucco — was enough to spawn some fierce nostalgia.  It seems silly to attribute such a formative influence to my first eight years of life, but it’s the truth.  (Or, like I said, the heritage.)

Lesson Three: Relaxation.

I did a bunch of research about the potential hotels that I could’ve gotten on Priceline, and eventually we ended up with a large, clean room at the South Point for something like $35 a night.

This is the “Before” picture, taken the next morning before heading out to Zion.

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