An Old West Vacation (pt.1) by Gerard Barnes (Photography by Mark May) Combining the business of budget travel writing with the pleasure of scoping out strange-sounding locales can make for a contentious existence. When you aren't battling hailstones in Scandinavia or mosquitoes in Peru, you're attacking dangling modifiers and split infinitives in a leaky Samoan beach fale. Still, the life of a professional nomad does have a certain exotic charm. Only my latest assignment was a million miles west of exotic: it was, in fact, the "All American Tourist Trap." Arriving in California Hard to believe that having lived in LA for 22 years - a mere nine hours away from the Grand Canyon by Volvo - I never once visited this much-touted World Wonder. Not that I hadn't often dreamed of a genuine Old West vacation: busting broncos, roping steers, downing chow from a chuck wagon, et al. But when honesty and lumbago finally compelled me to admit that sleeping out on the range and drinking water from a hairy cactus were no longer viable options for this middle-aged hombre, I compromised my boyhood fantasy by enlisting photographer Mark May and his up-for-anything 13 year old son, Nathan, to accompany me on a more traditional exploration of northern Arizona and southern Utah. As usual, I drew up a minutely detailed itinerary of our projected trip. Also as usual, we would have a lot of territory to cover in a very short time. My gear was packed and shipped off via UPS to the starting point of our rendezvous: Alhambra, California. (Total shipping cost: $104.22 for round-trip transport, including insurance). Round-trip airfare between Philadelphia and LA on Southwest Airlines was $317.80 (including taxes.) Per my custom, I carried nothing onto the plane but a backpack full of books. This time, they were all by Zane Grey. First stop: the Autry National Center, located directly across from the main gate of the LA Zoo. This Center is the happy result of a merger among three major museums: the Southwest Museum of the American Indian, the Museum of the American West and the Women of the West Museum. If you ever embark on an exploration of Wild West mythology, there's no better place to begin than here. My old college pal-and-fellow explorer, Miles Bonner III and his genius 13-year-old son, Miles IV (both of whom would be joining us at the Grand Canyon) escorted me to this repository of cowboy fact-and-fiction. Admission price for the three of us was just $16.00 and it was well worth it: the exhibits were incredible - just the thing to get you into a Gene Autry frame of mind. There were hundreds of six-shooters and derringers and even a Gatling gun or two. There were gold Rush artifacts and Remington sculptures. Pueblo pottery and baskets, Zuni fetishes and even a Pikuni Blackfeet tipi. Western-genre movies, radio programs and television series. You name it: this place has it all. I walked away from the Center half-inspired to make the 527-mile trip north by covered wagon. Only we took an SUV instead. And we traveled by night, having learned from hard experience that crossing the desert by day can be brutal on both people and automobile engines. Even with this, the temperature hovered near 103 degrees around Las Vegas. I couldn't wait to reach the Canyon.