Today

Today was a low-key day. We slept in, wrote postcards, played outside, and generally relaxed ALL morning. Had some leftover and odd assortments of food for lunch and then headed out for the day.

We first stopped at the post office to mail our first set of postcards, but they were closed for lunch. They only have one postal worker in this town, so I guess she has to eat lunch sometime. We went and got a few groceries that we needed and then went back to the post office. On the way, we confirmed the rumor about the sheriff cars staffed by mannequins. One mannequin was even asleep on the job…it’s so hilarious to me!

Then we headed back to Zion National Park! I really wanted to snap more pictures on Mt. Carmel Highway, so we stopped at quite a few of the turn-outs. Next time I come to Zion (which I hope is in fewer than 16 years, which is how long its been since we drove through on our way from Michigan to California after graduating from Calvin) I’m bringing a super-wide angle lens. It just isn’t possible to capture the landscape with a regular lens. Who knows if a wide-angle lens would do the trick, but it’d be worth a try!

Anyway, we had originally intended to do the drive to the other section of Zion, called Kolob Canyon, and then head back to the campground area for a dip in the river. But by the time we got to the campground area, it was almost 3:00 and driving to Kolob Canyon would have taken about an hour one-way. We elected to skip the drive and swim!

Wise choice. We had so much fun in the river, and I hardly even panicked about the girls floating away in the current. I didn’t take too many pictures as we were just having fun in the water, staying cool, and horsing around!

We stopped at a few more turnouts on the way back out of Zion on Mt. Carmel Highway (it’s a skinny little road with lots of switchbacks that makes it way from the bottom of the canyon to the top of the canyon) and the light was much different and so pretty. I’m sure my pictures will leave much to be desired. I just had to soak in as much as I could. It’s a kind of beauty that I have never seen before. Love. Love. Love.

We decided to have dinner at the pizza joint just outside of the Zion entrance. It was decent pizza, and we ate outside in the shade of the sort-of covered patio. It was about 90 degrees, but felt really comfortable and we were enjoying sitting there alone on the patio, eating together. All of a sudden it started to rain, which is when we discovered that only half of our table was actually covered by tin roofing. The other half was covered by slats of plywood that didn’t quite meet. As it began to DOWNPOUR, water came rushing down between the cracks, and splashed all around us. It surprised us so much that we were just giggling and laughing about the ridiculousness of the plywood coverings and the rain that came just at that moment when we could hardly see a cloud in the sky! We finally moved to all the way under the tin roofing, and then it started raining even harder! The rain was splashing up everywhere and getting us really wet, so we had to finally retreat to the indoor eating room. Thankfully, we were almost done with our pizza so we picked out our ice cream treat and headed for home. The girls are now taking their baths and showers (they swam in a river with tadpoles, after all, as I explained to the girls, who were protesting yet another bath night) and then we will have family game night. Tomorrow we return to Bryce for lunch at Bryce Canyon Pines (homemade soup & pie!), a couple hikes we didn’t get to on Sunday, and we hope to see the sunset from Sunset Point.