Bodhisattva Path

We planned a trip to Zion. It was somewhat a spur of the moment decision. It was my birthday and my wife wanted to end my streak of crappy birthdays and also it is our tenth wedding anniversary next week. We don't have any money to go back to Hawaii like we wished we would but we figured we needed to go somewhere.

So we looked for cheap hotels online and got a good deal at the Holiday Inn in St. George, UT. We we arrived late to check in they were nice enough to give us the Honeymoon suite at no additional charge. Honeymoon suite means that there is a heart shaped, jetted tub (just like Dumb and Dumber!) and only three walls on the bathroom. Which meant I could look over the glass partition and watch football or the Golden Girls marathon while I was washing my hair.

As if that wasn't enough, we still traveled to Springdale where we ditched our car and headed up the canyon. We started hiking up to Angels Landing but it was very hot and my wife is terrified of heights. So we just headed to the Narrows where hot days are made more enjoyable by hiking through a chilly river.

When you're in Zion you feel like it is impossible to take a good picture because everything is so grand and panoramic that you know you can't capture the whole place in a picture but at the same time it is also difficult to take a bad picture. I did some fancy work with tape on one of these pictures to give you a better idea of what it was like to look all the up from inside the canyon.







It is also hard to go to Zion and not swing by Bryce canyon as well. Our shuttle driver said that Zion is the geographic layer on top of the Grand Canyon and Bryce Canyon is the geographic layer on top of Zion. I believe the call the whole works The Colorado Plateau.

Bryce is more enjoyable because it is higher in the mountains with cooler temperatures. Viewing points are easy to drive to and pretty astounding. We kept eating crappy food for the sake of saving time and my wife said she didn't feel like hiking down into the canyon but I couldn't help myself and told her I would just run down a trail a little ways. But that is a hard thing to do at Bryce. It just gets prettier and prettier the deeper you go and you can't stop. You always want to know what's around the next corner.







Needless to say, it was my best birthday in years and years. I missed my kids but they didn't seem like they were in any hurry to get back home. They like it at grandma's house. I also took a picture of EVERY lizard I saw for Ethan, no matter how tiny.