Day 3

Wow! what a day! We had spent the night in Cedar City, UT and headed out to Bryce National Park... unfortunately we got a few miles down the road towards the park to be confronted with "road closed" notifications. We would have used the Tom-tom to help us find an alternate route however turning it on led to being told to take the next exit and u-turn back to Tucson (?! like that was going to happen ?!). Fortunately we are old school enough to have brought along paper maps. We cruised down the road which was very bucolic and actually got to see Bambi and his mother out in a field along the road. Everything was quite green and it was a pleasant drive. We were still about 15 minutes away from Bryce when we found ourselves in Red Canyon. We are convinced that we have now found the source of the Crayola crayon called "Burnt Orange". I had no idea that was a real color. What's the most amazing is to see Ponderosa pines sticking out of it. I think my first grade teacher would have told me that wasn't very realistic if I had drawn it! We finally got to Bryce but had to wait for deer to stroll across the road in front of us - zero fear there! We were delighted to find that the temp on the rim of Bryce canyon was upper 70's. We picked our trail and headed down the canyon and down and down and down. It was a lonnnnggggg way down. There were some really cool sticky up things which we learned are called hoodoo's. I kind of like sticky-up things as the best technical term. We took a nice rest at the bottom after looking at a field of man-made cairns - or at least someone else called them that. Stacks of rocks like you see in a zen garden .... there were hundreds of them. Then came the climb out. Switch after back after switch... I think the climb would give Tumamoc a run for its money...Anyway we made it and were glad we did. Monica was all for using the coin showers but since we had no towels, she would have had to dry off by streaking the parking lot - we opted for ice cream instead. We headed out from Bryce at around 3:30 and stopped at the Cowboy Smoke House for yummy sandwiches. Since we are on vacation we opted to stay off of the freeway as long as possible. We had a nice drive through more of that bucoliic countryside that I mentioned earlier. lots of horses cows, sheep and even a donkey farm.... About an hour out frrom Provo we started seeing a large cloud formation to the NW which we thought might bbe a rain storm but turned out to be a wildfire - fortunately on the other side if the mountain from us..Technical difficulties....will upload pictures and complete tomorrow.....