Road Trip to GDC 2017 - Day 1 and 2

Next week is GDC (Game Developers Convention) 2017, and our company Megapop is traveling to San Franscisco to be there in force - 5 people showing off our Trolls vs Vikings 2, our latest game.

I am travelling down a couple of days before the conference with my friend & and Megapop CEO, Jørgen Tharaldsen, for a couple of days of driving through Arizona and Utah. We're flying Oslo - Los Angeles - Phoenix, landing around midnight. We picked up a rental. The one we had booked was a convertible or something. This is what they actually had:

Enough room for both our families in this monster

The plan was to just find a motel along the road to Monument Valley in Utah, but it turned out that several festivals were happening, so we drove for two hours before we were finally able to find a place to sleep in Sedona. We went to bed at 4:30 in the morning after almost 24 hours of travel. Fortunately they allowed us to keep the room a bit longer, so I got a good night's sleep.

Jørgen is a really good amateur photographer and crazy person, so of course he went up at 7 in the morning to drive around Sedona taking pictures while I slept. I woke up to this view of of the hotel room:

Johnny Cash on the stereo, driving through Sedona. This town is very proud of their (probably rather imaginary) magical vortexes, which even feature on the tourist maps. There are places selling crystals and stuff everywhere. While driving we spotted a bunch of people standing on the top of a rock, probably being vortexed or something.

On the road again...

We drive up to a lookout point above Sedona.

Jørgen and the view of Sedona

Yours truly has forgotten his sunglasses

 After driving through Flagstaff we see these beautiful peaks in the distance.

A sign along the road says "Dinosaur Tracks"! Of course we go to investigate. After a little while we find the tracks!

We are getting closer to monument valley. There are beautiful rock formations everywhere. Jørgen is cursing the poor lighting conditions.

Monument Valley itself is breathtaking. This is the view from our room at the rather aptly named The View, the only hotel in the Navajo Reservation.

We had both been looking forward to a nice beer after a long drive. Turns out that alcohol is banned in Navajo Nation. We try out the local tea and some Navajo dishes for dinner, pretty good stuff!