Riyad and Sarah's Travels

“The most exhausting, yet rewarding, day hike in Grand Canyon punctuated with a stunning river view” read the sign describing the 12.2 mile, 6000 foot elevation change, 8-12 hour Bright Angel Trail.    Sarah and I stood alone shivering in front of the still closed Grand Canyon visitor center early in the morning haven woken up early to beat the crowds that had yet to materialize.

We had left Texas three days earlier, stopping for two nights in the picturesque city of Santa Fe, New Mexico.  There we visited the Bandalier and Pecos National Parks observing and learning about the various Native American pueblo cultures that preceeded the white man’s arrival, and touring the slightly creepy nuclear science museum in Los Alamos, home of World War 2′s Manhattan Project.  A full day’s drive from New Mexico with a detour through the Petrified Forest of Arizona took us to the edge of the Canyon.

There were other hiking options besides the Bright Angel Trail, including a Rim Walk with no elevation change, but we were prepared for a challenge.  We came sporting our hiking pants and boots and were carrying four large bottles of water and plenty of food. We both agreed to the hike and started our descent walking past snow on the ground, traveling back and forth along a narrow trail alternating between shade and sun.  Eventually we warmed up as we went lower and our jackets came off and remained off for the rest of the day.

We breezed past the aptly named 1.5 mile turnaround and then 3 mile turnaround point.  Each location had a few benches, water stations we unfortuately hadn’t known existed (although they had just been turned on for the season that day), and signs warning of dire consequences to the unprepared.  One witty sign said that to continue “Down is optional, but up was mandatory” while another showed a picture of a young fit guy and stated that most rescues were of males 18-40 years old.  My personal favorite showed a squirrel biting off the finger of someone who tried to feed it.  Another mile and a half down took us to the third turn around point, Indian Gardens, and from there we hiked for an additional 40 minutes along flat terrain to the Plateau Point overlooking the Colorado River.  Now I have to say while the top of the canyon is impressive, the views inside the canyon are a bit of a letdown until you reach this point.  Here you can really appreciate how far down you came and see and hear the river below. 

We had taken about 4 hours to descend but anticipated a longer return since the Grand Canyon is an atypical hike in that the difficulty increases when you turn around.  After eating our lunch and drinking more water we began our trek upward.  Putting our heads down and one foot in front of the other we made it back in surprisingly not much more time than it took us to go down.  At the top the crowds had clearly arrived walking around and snapping pictures with way too much energy.  Our adrenaline ebbed as we walked back to our car and we continued to hobble around very slowly for days afterward.

Billboards offering a free 72 oz. steak began to appear on the freeway 400 miles away from the Big Texas Steak Ranch. As we approached, the signs became more descriptive and we found out there was a very simple catch: The steak was free as long as you could finish it.

The Big Texas Steak Ranch in Amarillo, Texas has been offering this challenge to anyone willing to accept it since 1960. You pay in advance (over $70) and if you can down the phone book sized steak, shrimp cocktail, baked potato, salad, and dinner roll within an hour, your money will be refunded, your name will be immortalized in restaurant’s hall of fame and you will have eternal bragging rights to all your friends.

Thousands of people have tried over the years, but the vast majority had failed. Although finishing the meal in an hour is difficult enough, the speed record of 8 minutes, 52 seconds was set by Joey Chestnut, the Michael Jordan of professional eating, who has won the Coney Island Hot Dog eating championship each of the last four years, is ranked number one by the International Federation of Competitive Eating (IFOCE) and holds 17 other eating world records in a diverse selection of foods ranging from asparagus to jalapeno poppers.

Between the restaurant and adjacent motel I could not have imagined a more appropriate place to spend my first night ever in Texas. The outside of the restaurant was painted with bright colors and featured a giant cowboy, a giant steer, and a giant Texan boot. Complimentary limos idled in the parking lot to transport all dinner guests to and from nearby lodgings. The motel had a Texas shaped pool, a stable for guest’s horses, and the facade of a 19th century western town. The gift shop featured Texas shaped waffle makers, cowboy hats, and different stickers and clothing lettered with “Don’t mess with Texas.” (of course)

We were led to our table by our boyish host in full cowboy costume. The dining room was adorned with dozens of oversized deer heads and more kitch but the clear center of our attention was directed towards an empty elevated table for six with six digital timers all frozen at sixty minutes, zero seconds.

Sarah and I decided to split a 21 oz steak medium rare with the requisite side dishes. Just after we ordered, two men sat at the table to take the steak challenge. The waiter got everyone’s attention by introducting the two. A team from the kitchen brought out their food and started the timer.

We lost interest in them after our food came. The steak was delicious and indistinguishable from the midtown Manhattan steakhouses we frequent at half the cost. We ate leisurely, enjoying the atmosphere and finished stuffed. Not having anywhere else to go that evening we sat at the table taking advantage of the free wi-fi when we heard the announcement “Ladies and gentlemen we have a winner!”. The larger of the two had polished off his meal with 16 seconds to spare. We walked over to congratulate the guy who had become the first winner in almost three weeks.

The waiter was asking him what size t-shirt he wanted but he wasn’t giving the waiter much attention. “Does it still count if I throw up?” he asked. “Yes”, replied the waiter and quickly produced a trash can and directed him towards the bathroom. Sarah and I backed away with the other spectators and a waitress passing by warned us “I wouldn’t look now, this is where it gets ugly.”

She didn’t have to tell us twice.  Calling it a night, we retired to our cowboy themed room.

After Mammoth Cave, we continued south to spend two nights in Tennessee.  A day of hiking and caving left us too tired to enjoy the bustling nightlife of Nashville but the following day we were re-energized after driving west to Memphis.  We toured Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion, and then had the fortune of seeing the King himself perform a two set show downtown on Beale Street.  Elvis came out into the audience and made Sarah’s evening by serenading her, showing that he still had it at 76.

After recuperating from our late night in Memphis, we crossed the Mississippi River into Arkansas, stopping briefly in Little Rock to make our “Billgrimage” to the interesting but propaganda filled William Clinton Presidential Library (come on, he’s really taking credit for the number of new websites increasing from 130 in 1993 to 27,585,719 in 2001?). 

Our plans to make it into Oklahoma City that night were thwarted when lightning appeared just past the Oklahoma state border.  We ducked into a Motel 6 where we were holed up under a tornado watch waiting for the warning siren to chase us into the bathtub.  The thunder grew louder and lighting knocked out our internet but the siren never went off, no flying cows came crashing through our window, and after awakening to to an undamaged motel we continued on.

While I wanted to check out Oklahoma City’s Cowboy museum, Sarah suggested we see some real cowboys instead and visit the Oklahoma National Stockyards.  Just south of downtown OKC a sign welcomed us to the “world’s largest stocker and feeder cattle market”.  A flight of stairs took us onto a rickety catwalk over pens and pens of mooing cattle. 

Cattle were led into the auction house about eight at a time. We walked past the sign that said “new bidders must register” and observed the process.  Inside, bleachers with prospective buyers faced the stage bookended by entry and exit doors.  A flat screen TV listed the number of cattle in the lot and the total and average weight.  Then the cattle would be let in and quickly chased out while a flurry of back and forth bidding between the buyers and the auctioneer set the price over the course of a minute.  I didn’t see much difference between the lots but the processes repeated itself over and over again.

We then visited the Oklahoma City memorial to the 168 people killed when Timothy McVeigh exploded a truck bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995.  The memorial was very well done featuring two large bronze gates separated by a reflecting pool.  One of the gates was labeled 9:01 and the other 9:03 representing the minute before and after the bombing.  The building had been replaced with a grassy field of nine rows of empty chairs for each of the victims with smaller chairs representing children. 

Across the street was a museum describing the event and its aftermath and honoring the killed.  It had live news footage spliced with interviews from survivors pulled from the rubble and parents looking for their children plus a room filled with personal mementos of each of the killed.   Both Sarah and I felt it was one of the most powerful museums we had ever seen.

Mammoth Cave in central Kentucky is far and away the largest system of caves in the world, with close to four hundred miles of surveyed passageways.  It was formed by underground rivers and used intermittently by Native Americans for thousands of years before being rediscovered in the eighteenth century when a hunter allegedly shot a bear and chased him inside.  Initially mined for saltpeter (a mineral used to manufacture gunpowder) during the War of 1812, the caves fell into disuse afterward until local entrepreneurs realized tourists would pay to explore them.

About two hundred years later, Sarah and I drove south from Louisville to the cave’s visitor center to find a long wait for tours with several of the longer ones sold out days in advance.  We booked the highly regarded “Historic Tour” for later that afternoon and had a few hours to see the park above ground.  Hiking trails were well marked for miles through the greenery of the Kentucky spring, crossing rivers and across fields of bluegrass.  Only the occasional sinkhole or sign warning of bats gave a clue to what lay beneath.

We joined the “Historic Tour” later that afternoon along with a group of 120 with an average age of approximately eight. Our tour guide was very personal and kept both the adults and kids engaged with anecdotes and answered questions even as they were asked repeatedly.

It was a warm day, but as we walked into the cave the sunlight tapered off and the temperature dropped to a cool 53 degrees, a climate maintained year round.  Electric lighting dimly illuminated the path although it was too dark to take photos (plus both of our camera batteries coincidentally died).  Our guide killed the lights and lit a lantern to show us how tours had been conducted prior to the installation of electricity a few decades prior.  We could not see anything but a halo a foot around her.  Before anyone started to complain, the lights were turned back on and we continued our descent.

After walking about an eighth of a mile the passage became more narrow and started to angle downward steeply. We continued down a flight of stairs until we came to a corridor labeled “Fat Man’s Misery”.  I didn’t find it too narrow, just very low, and had to walk bent over. (Sarah didn’t like my suggestion to rename it Short Man’s Schadenfreude.)  None of the kids were that impressed and just strolled through until we turned the corner onto a bridge and crossed the previously uncrossable “bottomless pit”.  This pit had stopped explorers in their tracks until a mesh metal bridge was constructed over the hole 100 feet deep where we could hear, but not see, the river underneath.

Corridor after corridor miraculously led to a large room with benches for us to regroup.  At 300 feet underground we had reached the bottom of the cave.  Our guide informed us of the various animals that lived in the structure including bats and eyeless and pigment free fish.  More questions followed, and with no bat sightings or power failures to add to the excitement our two hours in the cave ended with us lumbering up the 155 stairs back to the hot and bright surface.