This final travelogue has taken me a bit longer than expected. We arrived home last Wednesday evening to a house full of happy cats and, well, a whole lot of work piled up.
Unfortunately, I'll need to keep this one short, since the work is still quite overwhelming ;)
We woke very early on Wednesday morning in the hopes of getting to Cedar Breaks for the sunrise light, and were well on our way by 6:30am. The sun began to show over the mountainous horizon at around 7:15am, so our timing was absolutely perfect. We expected Cedar Breaks to be cold, but I don't think we were quite mentally prepared for just *how* cold it would be -- and the temperature gage on our car continually dropped as we climbed until finally it read 12 degrees. When I got out of the car at Sunrise Point to take photos, the windchill combined with the 12 degree weather must have made it below 0.
The view, however, was stunning (as far as I could tell from the tiny slit I made in my scarf around my eyes).
I made Jon stop the car so that I could take a picture of the light play on the trees without getting out of the car, and of course that was when a ranger came by. She politely made it clear that we needed to only stop at designated pull off points. Oops!
We left Cedar Breaks and headed to Zion, which was also spectacular. At one point, Jon commented that it felt like we were in a fairytale. I agree. The majesty of a place like Zion feels so unreal, it's hard to believe this is actually the planet we live on.
We aren't sure that Pixel liked Zion very much. There were small ants and bugs on all the rocks that made her more than a little skittish.
Zion was a little stressful for me, as, of course, clients needed some quick attention on their sites *just* as Jon and I were going into an area with no internet / cell service. This was a bit unnerving, but we couldn't really delay our trip by adding an extra day as I had to get back to work (with the Nov. 2 election, I had to be home to watch over
CAVotes.org).
But we left Zion and had a wonderful lunch at a place called Oscar's in Springdale, UT. They were very accommodating for a gluten-free customer, and I was able to have their delicious famous phish tacos with almost no substitution at all!
From there, we raced home as quickly as possible, clearing Las Vegas, Bakersfield, and everything in between just as the sun was setting. On the road, we saw a Coffee truck that matched the one we saw in Tennessee (or was that Kentucky?), and we are wondering if it was the same one! And we arrived home all in one piece, and unloaded our well-traveled grandfather clock into my office, where it now sits, untouched since we got home. Once it's up somewhere, I'll post a picture on this blog. Don't hold your breath, though, as it might take a while ;)
