Shortly before leaving the U.S. in May 2013 we stopped in Los Angeles for a couple days to see friends. Our overwhelming sense then – our first visit to LA together – was that it was a city that made our friends happy. Even friends who were not known for being bright, smiling, happy people. In LA, though, they were remarkably happy. So, after our week-plus in Utah & Las Vegas, we stopped again in LA for a few days.

The good news is, our friends are still happy. Something about the weather and the people and the pace of life just agrees with them. I have to say, though, I’m not sure I get it entirely. The big drawback for us was the need for cars. While there has been some improvement in public transportation, overwhelmingly to get anywhere you need a car. And that suggests all the traffic woes you can imagine.

That’s just not typical of most great cities. Obviously our old home in Boston had pretty good public transportation, and we got by our last five years without a car. You can get by just fine in New York, Paris, London, Hong Kong and lots of other cities we’ve been in without a car, certainly as a tourist. Not so in LA, though; it’s just not realistic to spend time there without spending much of it sitting in traffic.

So there you are. Great friends who love the city, but maybe I’m just not a West Coast kind of guy. I should add that the weather didn’t help matters either. It’s supposed to be pretty much always beautiful in LA, but there was quite the little heat wave while we were there, with temperatures hitting 100 degrees or close to it mid-day. Oh yeah, and a drought. I mean, who could have predicted that when you build a major metropolitan area in a desert region?

OK, enough complaining about LA. Our big cultural excursion was a tour of the Getty Villa, a museum dedicated to the arts of ancient Greece and Rome. Our favorite part was the Mummy of Herakleides, a 1900-year-old mummy that “combines the millennia-old Egyptian tradition of mummification of the dead with the Roman tradition of individualized portraiture.” And later I learned that one of the museum’s most prominent pieces, The Victorious Youth dating from about 200 BC, is part of a serious controversy with the Italian government. They have indicted the Getty’s former curator for trafficking in stolen antiquities and Greek authorities are investigating her; she claims she’s being hung out to dry for doing things everyone on the Board knew of and condoned. Sounds like fun!

We had a great time visiting with friends, and we have the pictures to prove it. I hiked up the hill behind the big HOLLYWOOD sign and even went through the Batcave, the very cave that Batman drove the Batmobile in that classic 1960s sitcom, right there in Griffith Park by the start of the hike to the sign. I might not love cars, but I made an exception to pay my respects to the Batmobile! Oh, and we drove past Cher’s house. That’s right – a Roman-Egyptian mummy, the Batcave, Cher, and great friends all in one weekend. Who says LA ain’t grand?!?

Our journey across southern Utah has now taken us to all five of the state’s spectacular national parks. After Zion and Bryce Canyon we made an overnight stop at Capitol Reef National Park, then settled into Moab for a few days to visit the Canyonlands and Arches parks.

My mom and dad truly love these parks, and it’s been fun to spend time with them and share their enthusiasm. The natural beauty here is incredible, and each of the five parks has quite a distinct personality.

Jim and I have done some incredible hikes through these parks, concluding our visit yesterday with the toughest one of the week. We completed a 7.2 mile loop through Arches National Park, including a segment defined as a “primitive trail,” marked by signs warnings of “difficult hiking.”

Here in the litigious United States, signs like that don’t scare us too much. But we soon found ourselves in some surprisingly precarious positions. At one point we had to slide across a crazy narrow, slippery ledge with nothing to hold onto, virtually no place to put your feet, etc. For several minutes on that ledge I found myself fairly terrified to continue ahead and equally afraid to go back. I eventually gritted my teeth and got through it, but I do feel like I was one little slip away from a deathly plunge into a rocky canyon. I guess adventure can still be found, even here in lawyerly America.

While Utah is incredibly beautiful, it’s mostly not a place for epicurean pleasures. Food has largely been mediocre, and obnoxious Mormon-insired liquor regulations make it hard to get a decent cocktail. But Moab has proved to be a little oasis with a plethora of cute shops, adventure outfits, and a couple pretty decent restaurants. And to our great surprise, the town is livened up this week by colorful rainbow flags and banners proclaiming “Moab Gay Adventure Week.” Who knew?

If you were Mark and Jim and had the chance to hike the Fairyland Loop, would you pass it up? I didn’t think so, and neither did we.

Our second stop in Utah was Bryce Canyon National Park. We got to the town near the park entrance in time for lunch and, after lunch, Mark & I headed out for an afternoon hike. The good news was that at around 8,500 feet in elevation, the weather here was a huge improvement over the mid-90s we’d experienced in the afternoon in Zion. And besides just the name, the Fairyland Loop seemed perfect: a “strenuous” 8-mile loop that would take maybe four or five hours.

We didn’t really know what to expect, but discovered a world unlike anything we’d ever seen anywhere. Erosion has created thousands of “hoodoos”, spires created when relatively soft rock is topped by harder stones that protect the lower rock from erosion. While Bryce Canyon supposedly has the world’s largest concentration of hoodoos, Cappadocia in Turkey is also famous for its hoodoos so we may have to get there soon to compare them.

At any rate, it was a spectacular hike; it seemed as though every five minutes we’d turn a corner and gasp all over again at the beauty. And one of the nice things of doing a pretty challenging hike in the afternoon is that there were only a few other hikers on the trail so we had it largely to ourselves.

Oh, and one other nice little aspect of our hike: we have drop-off and pickup services. Mark’s parents drop us at the trailhead, we estimate our time of return and – after their own driving tour of the park – they’re there to pick us up. Being chauffeured after a tough hike is a good thing.

Finally, you may have noticed the lack of pictures of great food. That’s not an oversight.