It’s finally here – time for our annual pilgrimage to the Hollywood Fringe Festival. This year we decided to take a slow and easy path down from Montana, and spent three days traveling and sightseeing along the way.
We left Missoula at 3:33 p.m. on Tuesday, June 13. The drive was wet, as we had rain through most of Montana. We stopped for gas in Idaho Falls, plus a pit stop (or two) along the way, before hitting the outskirts of Salt Lake City just before 10 p.m. As promised we stopped in Centerville at the northernmost In-n-Out Burgers and had dinner, before driving the final 30 minutes or so to our Airbnb for the night in Sandy.
We got up early on Wednesday and drove down to Zion National Park in southern Utah. Words cannot describe the beauty we saw as we toured Kolob Canyon in the northern part of the park, before headed to the main area of the park further south. It was a popular destination, as we had to park in the town of Springdale before catching a shuttle into the park. Once inside the park, we took the shuttle up to the Grotto and hiked back down to Zion Lodge, about two miles. It was a popular destination, and the pay-off for the hike came about 1.5 miles in when we reached to western rim where the temperature dropped about 20 degrees and we could walk under the small waterfalls.
After grabbing some dinner in St. George, we continued our journey to Vegas, where we spent the night at the Four Queens hotel on Fremont Street. The hotel was nice enough to give us earplugs, so we got a decent night’s sleep after exploring the Fremont Street Experience, and of course, losing a few dollars in the slot machines.
Thursday morning we got up and had breakfast in one of the hotel restaurants before striking out on the final leg of our journey. We made good time until we hit the 210 freeway, where traffic was heavy all the way to Pasadena. We got to Burbank about an hour before we could check into our Airbnb, so we stopped at In-n-Out for dinner. The house is lovely and the hosts are a wonderful bohemian couple with a toddler, who couldn’t be nicer. We gifted them with a six-pack of Montana microbrews and took a short nap before heading down to the Fringe for our first night of shows.