Saturday, December 25th, 2010
We hiked to Angels Landing in Zion today. It was one of the best hikes I’ve ever experienced. 1500′ above the canyon floor, with very little to keep you from falling except your own attention. Fun!
Here I am at the top (taken by Lori).
And Lori on the way up, making it look easy:
We had a wonderful day, and we hope you did too!
Friday, December 24th, 2010
Yay! Rainy Utah is a little less rainy for Christmas. If it can’t snow, sun is always welcome. 
Here we are after a short walk from our campsite:
Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010
Merry Christmas everyone!
We are in Utah soaking up the rain in our camper. That’s not quite what we had expected or hoped for (snow or sun would have been more seasonal), but it’s what is here.
We are happy to be on vacation and unplugged. Unfortunately, we are not as unplugged as we would like to be. The places we really wanted to visit are accessed by clay-dirt roads. Right now those roads are the consistency of peanut butter. Even our jeep would get stuck in the first 100 feet if we tried to drive on them. That means we are staying on the pavement and staying in state parks. The last couple of days we have been in Snow Canyon in St. George, which is spectacular.
Yesterday we were going to move over to Zion since the campsites have electric, there is a strong cell-phone/internet connection, and the scenery is just a little better than Snow Canyon. Not surprisingly though, the Virgin River was bursting out of its banks and the park was closed. And so, we stayed in Snow Canyon with wonderful scenery, no electric except for batteries and generator, and no internet.
The rain slows us down in getting out to enjoy the fantastic scenery, but once we get out the door, it’s not so bad. There are numerous waterfalls in the slickrock that ebb and flow with the rain showers. Some places it is a bit muddy, others mostly sandy or slickrock. The slickrock is not at all slick even when wet, so Cookie can still go verticle, and we can climb around like kids.
Back to the Beginning
Lori took a quick trip back East to Maine on Thursday, with plans to fly back to meet me and Cookie in Las Vegas. Her travels came off without a hitch even though there were constant weather threats — especially for the trip back to LV. For the trip out, Cookie and I left rainy Mill Valley on Saturday morning with our focus set on getting to Las Vegas to pick up Lori. We got a bit of a late start after trying to wrap up some last minute house fixin’. The house fixin’ is another story, but suffice to say that I was glad to hit the road and switch to camper fixin’.
It rained for all but about 3 hours of the drive. We spent the first night in Mojave, CA where it must have rained an inch or so — probably their entire year’s expected precipitation. The next morning we started off in light rain that tapered off. About 20 miles outside Barstow we stopped for a run in the desert and then even took a little time to do some plinking with a couple of my old rifles. I was reminded how much fun a .22 can be, and how much a high powered rifle can kick… and still be fun.
So, after an hour or so of that, and one bruised shoulder later, we got back on the road. And it started raining again as twilight set in at 3:30 p.m. And the lights on the camper stopped working. And one of the jeep tow lights stopped working as a running light. We limped in to south LV and parked at the BassProShop for some camper fixin’.
The nice thing about this particular BPS is that it is also a casino. Yeah, that sounds strange, but the reason it is good is because there is a huge parking lot, the casino is 24×7, and a camper looks perfectly normal parked there at all hours. So, it makes for a nice pirate campsite. Cookie and I spent a windy, rainy, Sunday night in the parking lot and worked on the camper lights. We figured out what is wrong, we just can’t figure out WHERE it is wrong. We fixed the jeep tow lights, and we can be legal without the camper running lights so we have deferred the repairs until we get home.
Monday at Noon we picked Lori up at the airport (Cookie was so happy and releived!), ate some barbeque at Famous Dave’s, gassed up, and headed for Utah. In the rain.
Originially we were going to shoot for Zion, but the heavy rain, very dark night, and the convenience of Snow Canyon made it an easy decision to stop in St. George. While we went out for dinner in town, the creek in the canyon flooded the road back to the camper and we ended up taking the long way around to get back. And, 36 hours later, it’s still raining, the creek is still flooding, and the waterfall in our campsite is waxing and waning. Our plans are up in the air right now, but we’ll figure something out. And, in the mean time, we’re having fun being together on vacation.
I will add pictures when we have a better internet connection…
