Today we wanted to do the canyon thing, so we started out at the Zion National Park visitors centre (it closed too soon the night before so we missed it). There is a beautiful view of some of the canyon from behind the visitors centre. We watched a video and listened to a park ranger. Her name was Sonya and she is from Minnesota. Interestingly, she had spent the winter in the Everglades .. she was almost certainly there when we were.
Next we drove on to Bryce Canyon via Red Canyon. Very georgeous scenery. We first stopped at the Bryce Canyon visitors centre. The temperature was probably not much above freezing. The night before it had been down to 8 degrees Fahrenheit (ouch .. good thing we did not spend the night at the campgrounds there).
Bryce is quite beautiful. There is a long road to the end, which is at the highest point. And here we are:
On the way back they recommend that you stop at the spots along the way. We stopped at about half of the stops (which was certainly more than some of the kids wanted to do). The views were spectacular. Here are a couple of them:
After Bryce we decided to head back the way we came (via Red Canyon) where I got a shot of this canyon as well.
Next we headed north to start our long trek across Interstate 70 into Colorado. By the time we got to 70, however, it was getting pretty late (around 7:45 PM) so we went only about 20 miles along 70 and stopped at a Best Western in Richfield, Utah.
The accomodation was fairly nice (two bedroom suite). We headed out to a late dinner at a nearby Pizza Hut (after checking out a local restaurant that was recommended - just down the street - and finding that it had just closed). We started dinner around 9 PM and did not get out of the Pizza Hut until after 10. We ordered two New York style pizzas. These are quite large pizzas with a special sauce. It was funny because Reba said, 'let's get it, it's good'. I did not find out until we had been waiting for the pizza for a while that she had no idea what it was really like (she was just responding to advertising .. and who says advertising doesn't really work).
That night was very hot (the heating system was obviously not functioning properly). Daniel could not get to sleep until almost 4 in the morning! Just before that we had to turn the heat right off. This was a bit counter-intuitive, since the outdoor temperature was around 30 degrees, and remember our experience of the night before.
The next morning we got up pretty quickly, checked out the 'free' continental breakfast (not great), and bought some Burger King breakfast stuff while David did some grocery shopping for lunch at the grocery store down the street.
At one point we were hoping to get to Arches National Park (about 30 miles off 70 to the south along our route) on our trip to the resort. Unfortunately, time and local interest (the family), was not prepared for another canyon-type thing. We thought it best just to head straight in to the resort and get some highly civilized accomodations.