National park trip with Doctor (of philosophy) Poy
Published:
Although Poy graduated from the Scripps-Oxford joint Ph.D. program in Biochemistry for half a year and already started working at UIUC as a post-doctoral researcher, his graduation ceremony was held way later in May 2024. His family also came from Thailand to attend his graduation ceremony in San Diego. We then spent over a week afterward traveling around the west coast, including California, Arizona, and Nevada. It was my first time (and his family’s first time) doing a road trip in the west coast. We enjoyed a huge variety of natural wonders that the west coast has to offer.
May 17:
The first few days of the trip were devoted to Poy’s Ph.D. graduation. I joined his family a day before the ceremony since I got to attend a conference in Nashville. On May 17, the ceremony started at 9 AM, his family and I grabbed some drinks and were sitting on the first row waiting for all the graduates to march down the building behind. The ceremony was quick yet touching. Each professor got one minute to give a speech about their students. I can’t imagine a big school like UIUC doing the same! We then had a 3-course meal for lunch and chatted with Poy’s advisor for a bit before heading out to Nevada!
May 18:
To tell you the truth, the outbound traffic from San Diego was horrific that day! It took us 3 hours longer than estimated due to several road constructions. We finally reached our bnb in Las Vegas at midnight. On the next day, we also had long hours of driving for us, but we got to stop at a couple spots along the way. The first one was “Hoover dam” in Nevada. Since we stayed in Las Vegas last night, it was only one hour from our bnb to the dam. The wind was blowing strongly, but the view was stunning! We were then headed out to “Grand Canyon National Park.” We enter the park from the west side and stop every 5 minutes to enjoy the phenomenal views. (The photos I took didn’t do its justice!)
May 19:
This was also a long day of driving (I might have to keep repeating this until the end of the trip). We drove from Las Vegas, NV, to Visalia, CA, through “the Death Valley National Park.” We got to see many view points an attraction along the way, including Rhyolite (which is a ghost town), Badwater basin (white salt basin), Artists Palette (colorful canyons), and Mesquite flat sand dunes. It took us good 4-5 hours to complete the route. Luckily, we didn’t waste a lot of time when visiting each spot as it was scorching that day!
Also, because of the bad traffic on May 18, we got to see city lights of Las Vegas after we got back from Grand Canyon. It was quite hard to find a good parking in Las Vegas, but we did visit most of the iconic points there. I’d say it’s nothing much but it was a cool experience!
May 20:
On the next day, we traveled to “Sequoia National Park”, where the largest tree alive is located. (It is said that the tree is no longer that tallest as they found another one in Red Wood National Park. I haven’t fact checked yet, so take it with a grain of salt.) We stopped at the tunnel log first to take some picture and then went to Moro rock. It was so unfortunate that the trail to the rock was closed for cars, so we decided not to go to the top due to our time constraint. However, we still walked to see the highlight of the park, General Sherman Tree. This park gave us a distinct vibe due to the unique color and smell of of pine trees and its cool and humid atmosphere.
May 21:
Today, we drove to Yosemite National Park, which is now one of our most favorite parks! The park was so stunning and verdant that we could stay there for several hours just sitting on the grass. A couple of spots we visited includes the tunnel view (of course), the bridalveil falls, and Yosemite falls. We really wanted to go to Mirror lake, but the park was packed that day, so we needed to skip. We also had a great lunch that Poy’s mom packed for us. The meal in Yosemite was worth more than a 5-star restaurant I would say.
May 22:
After visiting several national parks, we now got back to the city of San Francisco. We parked near Pier 39 so that we could stroll around to see chonky sea lions and Alcatraz prison. We then took a bus to the Golden Gate Bridge, one of the most iconic architecture of the world. It was my first time there so I thought it was architecturally beautiful, but the locals might have a different opinion, I don’t know. We then took a bus to Lombard Street, which is known as the crookedest street in the world. It was pretty but quite scary to drive down.
May 23:
It was almost the last day of our trip, so the plan was to get close to where we started. (Our trip was a big loop around 3 states.) At first we planned to drive along the historic California Route 1 all the way back to Santa Barbara, but that would force us to go pretty slowly. Thus we changed our mind and just stopped by Bixby Bridge Vista point. Because of the change of plan, we gained more time in the morning so we decided to vist Camel-by-the-sea, a charming small town (of rich fellas) by the sea. We also went along the scenic 17-mile drive in Pebble beach. The drive reminded me a lot of Maine.
May 24:
We were now back in LA (but not so ready to end the trip). Since the flight was around 10 PM, we took our family to visit a couple of places in LA, such as Griffith observatory and the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We had a fun time searching for Sylvester’s star in the hot weather. After that, we made a stop at our favorite Pa Ord Noodle to grab some Thai food before seeing Poy’s family off at LAX.
The trip will forever hold a special place in my heart. I love seeing people happy and it looked like Poy’s family had a memorable time here with us. Although their trip was ended on May 24, Poy and I still had a day to waste before we took a flight back to Chicago. We then decided to visit LA zoo. It was rather disappointing as many animals were sick and got taken care somewhere else. However, we still enjoyed our relaxing day in LA and ended our trip at Hachioji ramen stall in Little Tokyo.
Before this trip, I had never been to Texas or New Mexico. Initially, our plan was to visit only Big Bend National Park in southern Texas, near the border with Mexico. However, we stumbled upon a blog where the author mentioned that there are several other national parks not far from Big Bend. In fact, the area is home to four remarkable parks– Big Bend, Guadalupe Mountains, Carlsbad Caverns, and White Sands. Despite their proximity, these parks are incredibly distinct from one another. We thoroughly enjoyed exploring the unique natural beauty each had to offer.
After we found out that there are some flights from Willard (a regional airport in Champaign) that are inexpensive, we started flying out from here instaead of Chicago. We got a really good price of plane tickets to Seattle, so we decided to go to more national parks! The two parks that we visited were Mount Rainier and Olympic National Parks. We thought about going to North Cascade as well, but the time was limited so we planned to visit there next time. Visiting these two popular national parks in the fall was such a good choice–less crowd, nice weather, and fall foliage!
Midwest surprisingly offers us many national parks to visit all year round. One of the national parks near Illinois is the Mammoth Cave National Park in Cave City, Kentucky. We rented a car from Champaign and drove around 5 hours, excluding small stops in Indiana. We had never been to Kentucky before, and we believe that not many international students had been there. Plus, this was the first time we visited a cave in the US, and we start with the world’s longest known cave system!
We’d been thinking of visiting South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore and Badlands national park for almost a year. Then an opportunity came when one of our friends gave us a buy-one-get-one-free coupon from Delta. We did not hestitate even a bit in buying two tickets for a round trip from Chicago to Rapid City, SD. Although it was an impulsive trip, we had a lot of fun observing the wildlife in the great plains of South Dakota and North Dakota.