The Road Trip - Bryce Canyon

Another day, another National Park...  Oh no, wait, this was the very last one.  Still had loads of red rocks though...  Anywho, for our last foray into the National Parks we hit Bryce Canyon, which has loads of cool wee rock formations called hoodoos, which are kind of a cross between a pinnacle and a big lump of rock.  Hang on, what am I talking about, they're ALL big lumps of rock, this whole trip has been about big lumps of rock for crying out loud!

So here's a bit of a look at the landscape without too many hoodoos in, but lots of pretty layered colours:

And here's a bunch of hoodoos:

Apparently just walking round the rim of the canyon wasn't enough though, we had to go down this path for a 3 1/2 mile hike into the depths of hell... (a slight exaggeration, there - LT)  I was going for dramatic effect, and it is all red after all!

This was as we started down looking round the main amphitheatre:

And then looking back up when we were part way down.  They were straighter than this in real life, but apparently LT couldn't be bothered to use the straightening tool in Photoshop...

This was at the very bottom looking up one of the gulleys:

And here I am back at the top, just hanging around on one of the signs, proving I was there:

We were going to have a picnic lunch, but then we found our carpark didn't have picnic tables, and the nearest ones we could see on the map were nearly 20 miles away and we had too much of a rumbly in our tumblies to be waiting that long!  So we had salad, to feel all virtuous, and then polished off some of the frozen yoghurt in the freezer...

We decided that we wanted to come back to the spot we were in for sunset, since it was called Sunset Point, but in the meantime, having an hour or two to spare, we drove right to the very end of the road - weren't we high up?

Then on that building you can see behind me in the photo above we found this sign warning people not to feed the bears or to try and play with them, how mean!

Still, we had a bit of a walk about, decided that it was all starting to look the same looking out from the tops of these plateaus, and had a bit more frozen yoghurt to help us ponder.

Finally, it was back down the road for sunset.  It's probably perfect for sunset at certain times of the year, but October is apparently not it.  Oh well, we got some photos of the glow effect at least:

Then we toddled on back to the campground for dinner, not wanting to risk that Cowboy Smokehouse Cafe again ;o)

The Road Trip - Las Vegas To Bryce Canyon

We had a wee bit of a lie in after our last late night in Vegas, and we did a truly unexciting trip round the post office and Target and Walmart before we headed off to our last big stop.  Except we were meant to be going via the Mohave National Preserve.  Now let me tell you about that.

We headed down I-15 out of Vegas, heading for the California border.  We were going great guns when we saw a funny side at the side of the road 'Police action on Nipton Road California, no pedestrians'.  How bizarre, we all thought, as if you'd be randomly walking round roads with police actions going on!  Anyway, we forged ahead, totally missed crossing the actual border as we were in a deep discussion about whisky and whiskey (and you'd better believe that he knows most about - LT), and came to our exit for the Mohave National Preserve.  Off we tootled, turned to cross the bridge over the interstate to the park, and saw a whole pile of police cars and fire engines and helicopters and... well, there were probably other things there too.  Whatever was going on, they were more interested in standing around, looking the other way, scratching their arses and ignoring the queue of traffic building up behind us.  Eventually a deputy noticed the queue of traffic and waved us round back onto I-15 heading back to Vegas again!  And that was how we never made it more than a few miles into California (we saw the border on the way back to reassure us we did actually get there!)

Having missed that, we pulled into the first wee town back in Nevada again, Primm, and stopped to eat lunch in the camper in the car park of McDonalds so that we could use their wifi and try and find out what was going on! Alas, we never found out...

Back onto I-15 we went and we drove and drove and drove and... (yes, well, it was one of those over 380 mile days! - LT)  LT had hoped to get off at the Zion exit and stop at a ghost town on the way, but it took us so long to get to the exit, that we thought it would be too dark when we got there, so we went the sat-nav way via Panguitch, which might have won the title of the weirdest town we'd ever visited even if it hadn't been halloween!  BTW, halloween with not a soul to be seen in the town at just after 6pm was very, very strange...  Still, nothing daunted, we decided we needed to stop here for dinner, as our last chance at getting a 'mom and pop' style diner meal.

The Cowboy Smokehouse Cafe was our restaurant of choice (you'll understand that there had only been one other option that looked closed anyway!)  Don't you love the decor?

Here I'm sitting on the napkins...

This guy was above our table:

You could have anything you liked to drink, as long as it was in a very chilled mug.  Lemonade for LT (as she still had 20 miles to drive:

And beer for Laura and me:

We had cornbread with maple butter as an 'appetiser', which was kind of like eating birthday cake.  Rather an odd way to start the meal, but we soon learned that the cook liked sugar!

LT's meal:

The steak was coated in seasoning salt, which was still just edible, and the baked potato was okay.  The beans though were bathing in sugar, they were REVOLTING!  Laura had ordered the smoked turkey dinner.  She made the heinous mistake of asking for cranberry sauce when it was delivered to the table and that's when we learned the following:

'This here ain't no Thanksgiving turkey, this here's a SMOKED turkey, and you don't eat smoked turkey with no cranberry sauce, you eat it with this!' as a plastic squeezy bottle of barbeque sauce was slammed on the table.  Think of this in a kind of really bad cowboy film accent, I half expected him to hitch up his jeans by the waistband afterwards.  In fact he might actually have...

So that told us then!  We elected to leave after that course, but we did take some pie for breakfast the next morning ;o)

20 miles later we were at our last 'next to a national park' campsite, settling in for the last big part of the adventure...