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There also happened to be a football game on at the same time so it was a wild place to be. Here are some notes:

• I ate a corn dog for the first time. (I wont be running back for one of these anytime soon)

• The weather was awesome.

• We tried to get as many free things as possible. I’m now the proud owner of an oversized orange Ford t’shirt that is now my pyjama top, and a football stress ball that sits in my office next to my Kiwi plushie.

• I was very confused when I read fried lemonade on the food board. Turns out they are golden syrup dumplings with lemon instead!

Ok these things might not that exciting to you but we had a lot of fun roaming around absorbing everything.

Perhaps this one is best shown with images!

That evening we went for some Texas BBQ. My only regret is that I ate too much food during the day so I was not as ravenous as you should be to eat Texas BBQ. I’ll know for next time!

We spent the morning running some final errands AKA go see H.E.B (A giant supermarket) It was glorious. It had homemade in house everything. I believe they are known for their homemade tortillas and also ice cream? Unfortunately we couldn’t buy very much but we did buy the tortillas and ate them while we washed the car. They were still warm and were kind of like a crepe. Would be good sweet or savoury! I also bought some caramel M&Ms for home since we don’t have them!

We started to see all the Halloween decorations appearing. Better escape the country before Halloween truely takes over!

It was a bit sad saying goodbye to the car, even though I’m still bitter they gave us a giant car instead of the normal Subaru Forester sized car we booked. (It made manoeuvring on the other side of the road more stressful ok? … just me?)

As I spun around from filming this clip I found a bullet on the ground. Just the classic things you find on the ground in the USA right?

We went back to our accomodation to pack our bags. This took a few hours! Gotta fit in all those caramel M&Ms. This is some ominous foreshadowing for the mean airport lady we would greet in 2 days time.

It is an annual event and this is the 12th year running. Previously it had been held in LA but the past few years it has been in Dallas TX. I presume to make it more accessible for those in the Eastern States.

You could spend the entire time roaming the hallways networking with people, talking to the vendors and not even go to any of the presentations which is exactly what some people were doing.

Considering this was my first time attending, my approach was go to as many presentations as possible with a side of networking. I really enjoyed these. Each talk went for about 45 minutes. I tried to choose a variety and I really got a lot out of them. Some talks were from YouTubers themselves, but I also went to one hosted by a lawyer, a graphic designer and a panel of producers.

There was an app for the event, so you could contact other attendees. An Australian guy who lives in the US had put all the 10 or so other Aussies together in a group to meet for dinner after the day. To my surprise we were actually the only other ones that showed up to the dinner. Maybe everyone else was busy riding their illegally imported kangaroos?

Overall it was a really well organised event and super awesome to regain clarity and direction. It felt like you were apart of something bigger! I’d love to attend future years if I can!

No pressure to respond at all, just wanted to give y…

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We are about a 10 minute drive from the venue. The venue being the Irving Convention Center. The manager of our accomodation was incredibly nice. He was cooking a BBQ lunch for the staff members and randomly invited us to join them. So there we were walking into the staff room pretending like we deserved that BBQ just as much as the workers.

It was a chilled out day. There hasn’t been too many days of doing nothing so it was rather nice. I actually spent most of it in the hotel room writing drafts for two videos. I didn’t plan on that but the ideas just came into existence. Forcing yourself to write video scripts when you’re not in the mood for writing is hard, so I like to jump on the writing train when it appears before it dumps me off. 🚂

One of the drafts I wrote was a little skit that you haven’t seen yet, and the other was your Water Bladder VS Water Bottle video that I released the other month.

The day went pretty fast and it was soon time to get ready. The welcome party was a chance for networking and had lots of food floating around! Although I would like to announce its quite hard to eat finger food successfully and meet people for the first time.

We met all sorts of people from YouTubers, actors, talent managers and company reps. The event really does create a great platform to meet people.

I’m pretty excited for the main event though, shoving as much knowledge into my head as possible over the next two days.

Catch you tomorrow!

• We went to REI one last time because of course!!

• Saw a massive store called Half Price Books where they had… you guess it, half price books. I would even argue they had Quarter Price Books. I bought 2 quarter price books for the price of a Half Price Book.

• Stopped off at an op-shop or as they like to say here, thrift store. For the purpose of buying an extra bag for the plane. (Been buying too many gifts, but my Christmas shopping for my family is done. Bonus.)

• Found an office supplies store to grab a notebook for the VidSummit event. (The reason we are in Dallas.)

• Speaking of, we checked out the VidSummit venue and picked up our registration packs that included this cool lightening bolt riding astronaut t-shirt.

  

• Cheesecake fan here. Went to the Cheesecake Factory and selected a slice of banana cheesecake. Can confirm their actual base cheesecake recipe is better than our cheesecake chain called The Cheesecake Shop. But i'm yet to find a cheesecake better than my own. There will be no modesty on the topic of cheesecake.

  

My first observation about Dallas or at least for the outskirts of Dallas, every building is offset from the road, allowing for parking nearly everywhere you want to go! What genius designed that?

The entire week we are here in Dallas, the weather is predicted to be sunny and 31°C (88°F) How perfect! I thrive in the 30°C and above temperatures. Dallas is pretty cool! … well warm, but I meant cool as in trendy cool.

Also Dallas features a sea of under and over passes. I had no idea what was going on.

I drove the first leg and now i’m sitting in the car in the passenger seat writing this update. I don’t know why I needed to tell you I was sitting in the passenger seat but we shall continue.

What else can I tell you about today? I’ve seen some:

• Shrubbery

• Cows

• Roads that have no bends in them.

Fascinating I know, but oddly, it is still fascinating to me. I’m in a different county in a different state and the novelty of that has not worn off. It’s very peaceful to stare out the window. I’m good at staring out windows.

Roadkill Count: 3.

We did stop off at a Buc-ees which I had no idea what it was.

My god.

It’s a gigantic service station with it’s own thriving ecosystem inside.

You know you’ve created a successful business model when civilians can willingly and happily spend more than 5 minutes getting fuel.

Would you believe the only photo I took today were these candles made to look like old milk bottles. I thought they were quirky so it warranted a photo. (These candles were inside Buc-ees in case you were wondering.)

Throughout this trip I have strategically spent many many minutes perusing over the USA stickers. Here is my current laptop sticker status. (If you are annoyed by the gap on the right hand side it’s because i’ve left room for a hard-drive mount that I don’t own yet.)

I week in Dallas, let’s go!

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We only have a 2.5 hour drive to Lubbock today so there was no pressure to leave straight away. There happened to be a Saturday Market on in Roswell which was delightful. I really wanted to buy 3 big zucchinis for $2 but i’m not sure I could get through 3 big zucchinis in a week.

We thanked Roswell, said goodbye to the zucchinis and off we went.

We devised a grand plan of going to the cinema because can you really go to the USA and not go to the cinema? I was tossing up whether to see One Battle after Another or Him a new film produced by one of my favourite directors Jordan Peele (But I don’t tend to watch any scary type films in the cinema) so One Battle After Another it was! It had a fantastically filmed bumpy road scene. It was a great film but I shall reveal no spoilers.

The main thing that stood out as being different at this particular cinema was they gave you a paper bag to go fill your popcorn up yourself. On the popcorn front they had a tap for ‘extra butter’ which was literally warm butter out of a tap to poor over your popcorn in case your buttered popcorn wasn’t buttery enough. 🍿

I did not touch the tap.

I devised another grand plan while I was back in the hotel room. One future Hayley will thank me for. There is a company here called Hoosier Hill Farm that sell things like powdered butter, powdered cream and powdered sour cream. Which is a gem in the world of DIY dehydrated hiking food as diary and fats don’t do as well in the home dehydrator. The only problem is these powders don’t exist in Australia nor do they ship to Australia.

We will be in Dallas for the next week so my grand plan was to order some of these and hopefully bring them back through customs. I ended up buying cheese powder, cream powder, yogurt powder, sour scream powder, honey powder, butter powder and cream cheese powder. They also had some funky things like Worcestershire sauce powder and soy sauce powder.

I am back home in Australia as I am posting this, and can confirm they all made it back. Let the dehydrated recipe development commence!

This video just mostly contains my HEAVY…

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Let me put that into a sentence for you: “Let’s do a mainy”

Even though Roswell, New Mexico (population 47,000) is almost 5x the size of the town I’m from, I was most intrigued to conduct a mainy. The benefit of a mainy, is it really gives you a chance to take in your surroundings and dart off at any given moment if something catches your eye… Or the visitor centre will just give you a map of the towns highlights but please yourself.

On our stroll through town we visited the International UFO Museum and Research Centre, alien related gift shops and other quirky places like a black light alien walk and old toy museum. It’s pretty fascinating that an entire town has embraced the alien thing. So in case you don’t know, what is this alien thing?

We had the Roswell UFO Tour booked in with Paul. Who for the next 2 hours would take us along the events as they unfolded. There were 2 other passengers with us, we all hoped in and out of the van as Paul took us to different locations.

I had a better understanding of the events from Paul than I did from the museum.

Paul is a clear believer (but hey so am I) but he is also very respectful to the facts and the people involved. He is constantly trying to seek new information and also expressed his disappointment about the councils decision to tear down certain historic buildings associated with the events.

If you’re into space and aliens, I would highly recommend the tour from Paul. If you’re not into space and aliens then I would highly recommend the tour from Paul.

I packed up my tent for the very last time on this journey to the USA (For now) and hit the road. We have a 9ish hour drive today. I could just end this piece of writing here because how many things can I say happened on a 9 hour drive in the desert?

But don’t you want to know where we’re going? I’ll give you a hint. It’s another bucket list item of mine.

To Roswell!! (New Mexico)

A town that has fully embraced the 1947 alien crash landing and identifies as the alien capital of the world. I used to love watching alien documentaries on television when I was younger (Who am I kidding I still do) so it’s a place that any alien goer should visit for a bit of quirky fun.

We had a few stop off’s along the way, one place in particular had shelving after shelving of fireworks. Despite being quite an environmentally conscious nature lover. I do have 1 guilt stricken love that I can’t part with. A love for fireworks. It’s weaves into my love for glow sticks / all things that glow. RGB keyboards? Yes those too. My little heart had to imagine the mesmerising display of exploding colourful gunpowder and just admire the boxes instead. They were pretty cool boxes.

When talking to people along this trip and they ask what other places we are visiting, my response has always gone something along these lines. “We started off with some time in LA and San Fran but doing lot’s of hiking. We’ve got a permit to go down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, we’ll be visiting Yosemite, Zion oh and find some aliens in Roswell” It made someone laugh or smile every time.

I was driving on the last leg to Roswell. The sun was setting and there was a beautiful 360 view of purple, orange, blue and yellow hues in the sky. There aren’t too many trees or mountains AT ALL in the last leg to Roswell so it felt like the sunset could reach across every corner of the sky. An epic sunrise and sunset in one day. How lovely!!

We have deliberately avoided eating McDonalds this entire trip because I believe there’s a special Maccas in Roswell… shaped like a flying saucer.

And if believing is seeing then a flying saucer I would see. But I also saw it so I believed it.

You still with me?

First impression on dusk is that it looks like quite a nice town!! Do not underestimate the influence a town taking on board the alien craze has upon my itinerary.

See you tomorrow.

Equipped with my past experience of about 3 times being on a horse, I was ready!! We got there a little early so I did some star gazing in the warmth of the car while we waited. I saw a total of 5 shooting stars. Yes I was counting.

We booked with MTA Horse Tours. They were starting to slow down after the summer season so we were actually the only two people on the tour. I booked the 2 hour tour thinking some of it would of been spent with a little briefing, but it was actually just “Hey, welcome, here’s your horse”

My horse was named Magic, he was super well trained and just followed the guide's horse, I barely had to do anything. He wanted to stop for a grass snack just once and would even take the lead a few times.

The sunrise was very magical and the whole thing was super peaceful, just very fitting to ride a horse in this part of the country. The guide explained a few of the shapes and names of the monuments. We just had a very chill time! I’d absolutely recommend doing it. You’re not allowed to film anything which I think adds to the experience but we did get our photo taken at a certain point.

The only other thing on our list today was the self driving tour of Monument Valley. Where you, exactly as it sounds, get your automobile and go for a drive! The road was rough! If you have a lowered car, good luck to you. Honestly the driving tour seemed unnecessary after doing the horse riding. That’s how good the horse ride was. Maybe i’d do it in reverse order next time.

You are able to get out of the car at certain points and take photos, there was even a little canteen where they were serving Navajo fry bread. Navajo fry bread is my new favourite thing.

To pass some more time we hung out at the main cafe where I charged my laptop and did a bit of photo editing before heading back to our tents after the heat of the day was gone.

Tonight was the night for star gazing!

Have you ever seen a photo overexposed but overexposed in orange? ⬇️

I had my camera set up ready and instructed by alarm device to wake me at 1am. I naturally woke up anyway and the stars were primo!! I set a star trail photo going while I whipped out my start chart. I can’t express the strangeness to look up in the night sky and have it be different. You know you are on the same planet but you look up and the familiar stars are not there or not in their usual positions.

I had such a lovely time locating new constellations, there was a spark of excitement every time.

Now the photo below is not edited, it’s just my first test output of my star trail. BUT WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING ON IN THE SKY AT THE BOTTOM LEFT? Keep in mind this is about 1-4am. Because of our location i’m going straight to the most Hayley answer. It’s aliens.

I stayed up for maybe 45minutes, let my camera go until the battery ran out, left the vestibule of my tent open and fell asleep.

Bliss.

The driving sure doesn’t feel that bad when you can switch drivers. We stopped back in at Page for a mini rest stop. I had recently seen a video of a girl who was obsessed with Hershey’s Chocolate Pies that you can get from Burger King. I don’t know if this girl has been deprived of chocolate moose her whole life but it was kind of just like chocolate moose with some cream and chocolate. Will I ever have the urge to get one again? No. But it’s fun to try these things.

We made the 2nd stint from Page and arrived at a decent time to set up our tents once more. We are staying at The View Campground and you can’t argue with that view. Well views can’t audibly argue so... There are cabins here too. The cabins were already booked out when I looked a few months ago, so tent it was! It will be the last time we’re tenting it for the trip.

We have to get up rather early tomorrow morning for a sunrise horse trail ride around Monument Valley so we had a 4pm shower. (The campground at Zion didn’t have any showers, so first shower in 2 days + post day hike was fantastic!

We had a sneaky walk through the gift shop and headed to the restaurant.

Before long we were treated to a striking sunset glow!

I whipped my star chart out ready for the night but remembered I should probably go to sleep so I can perform my best as a western saddle riding outlaw. Star gazing mission happens tomorrow!

When I originally planned this trip 5 years ago, you didn’t need a permit for this hike. However is has grown in popularity so now you do! Permit holders are let off in 3 stages. Before 9am, 9am and 12pm. I was actually unsuccessful in the lottery for a permit.

But guess who was successful!? My travel buddy Dan. We got the before 9am slot so it was an early rise to catch the shuttle to the trailhead.

I knew that the track was only going to get busier so I devised a strange plan when it came to filming. I’ve never filmed this way before and I haven’t even checked the footage yet so I hope it turned out, but I essentially thought I’d B-Line it straight to the top (Like a normal person) and film all the bits walking up on the way back down.

I filmed the way up on the way down. Of course the sun will be in a different position for any of you detail oriented people but I do acknowledge to camera that I was going to film it like this. Honestly i’m glad I did because despite limiting numbers with permits, it got progressively busier. I can only imagine being on the chain section stuck behind a line of people, would perhaps have taken some of the fun and meandering moments away. I love to meander on a hike. If you have somewhere to be. Probably don’t come hiking with me.

Here are some stats for the hike itself.

Angels Landing

Type: Out and back

Distance: 5.4mi / 8.6km

Time: Approx 4-5 hours

Difficulty: Considered strenuous

Elevation Gain: 1,488 ft / 433m

Summit Height: 5,790 ft / 1764m

I had a few simple thoughts that I think sums up the hike. These were:

“There are a tone of switchbacks”

“Look at the pretty early morning light”

and in reference to the chain section:

“This is fun”

“This is not as notorious as it looks”

Ok that notorious part is coming from a point of view where I am not afraid of heights and overall I imagined the trail to be way thinner with sheer drop offs at every turn. That’s not to diminish anyone else’s thoughts. I sometimes have a weird perception of safety. I will go bungie jumping, but never wish to go sky diving.

You can hike to Scouts Lookout without a permit. Which would be a great substitute. The chain section of Angels Landing starts at Scotts Lookout. There’s a ranger here that will check your permit before you can proceed on.

It was an awesome hike with a beautiful 360 view from the summit. Lots of chipmunks to keep you company up there too.

On the way back down when I started filming I got so many comments from various people in regards to their “Mass respect” for me for bringing a tripod all the way up. (Keep in mind they were currently enduring the uphill) I’m finding that American hikers have been very forgiving and supportive of my efforts to film.

There were still some hours left in the day when we finished Angels Landing so we decided to catch the shuttle bus through the rest of the park to the end at Temple of Sinawava. It was about a 30ish minute walk to get the the start of The Narrows. This is where we would have come out from if the rain didn’t cause us to cancel our overnight Narrows Hike. I stared down the canyon and thought “I’ll get you next time”

We went for dinner in town to refuel after a day outside! Where my burger threshold is over, I got fish, veggies and rice.

One of the things I have noticed along the trip is how cool some of the USA state number plates are. Why don’t we have cool number plate designs? It was here in town where I came across a store that was selling expired ones! It was a toss up between Utah and Arizona out of coolness. I ultimately went for Utah. It’s now in my office ready to be mounted on the wall.

It does make me wonder who was it that had this particular plate? What colour was their car? What was their car’s name? Did they know it was going to end up on the office wall of some random from small town Australia. Questions from the universe.