Sunday, May 6, 2018
Weather: Cloudy and windy in the a.m. but cleared up and ended up at 75 pleasant degrees in the afternoon
Steps: Shaun: 11,247, Shannon: 7,406 (which caused us to continue to question Shaun’s Fitbit)
The Novel House was an inn so they didn’t serve food, but they gave us breakfast vouchers for a couple of the local restaurants. We showered and headed out to Oscar’s where we had a wonderful breakfast that included the best guacamole on the planet (it was on Shaun’s breakfast burrito that they made vegan special for her).
After breakfast, we walked back to Novel House and set up the car for our next adventure. It was here that we discovered that our laptop and Kindles that we had put into a dry bag and then into the cooler to protect them from the intense heat of the previous day were under water and that the dry bag had NOT stayed dry. All three of our electronics were under water!
There wasn’t a whole lot we could do on a Sunday in the little tourist town of Springdale, Utah, so we took everything out of their cases, laid them on a towel in the back of the car to dry out and did what any self-respecting person would do in this situation...we went shopping! There were all kinds of artsy fartsy shops, a Visitor’s Center, and a cool natural grocery store where we bought lunch and ate it outside on the patio. We also bought brambleberry jam (which is a local specialty and very nummy), and Shannon bought “May the Forest be with You” PJ pants with forest animals done up like Star Wars characters, which just proves how much of a geek she is.
After we finished shopping, we drove the road that paralleled Zion National Park to see the surrounding area. We decided to wait to go into the park until the next day since you can only get around on a shuttle. The road outside the park was called the Kolob Terrace Road, and we drove it until it ended (at a very uninspiring reservoir) and then came back down it.
Unfortunately, we missed seeing the sunset on the rocks, but it was still beautiful and gave us a great introduction to the geology of the area and a southeastern view of Zion Canyon from the edge of the great Colorado Plateau. We also saw some kind of a raptor near a place called Lava Point, but we didn’t see it well enough to grant a point for it. It was still a great spotting by Shannon, the Eagle-Eyed Wonder. To top off the day, we had to tinkle behind a couple of bushes at a closed campground because we couldn’t find an open place to pee. Oh well, it wouldn’t be a true vacation without Shaun and Shannon dropping trow in an inappropriate place!
During the drive back to the Novel House we saw a ton of mule deer, a lone turkey and then, later, a couple of rafters of turkeys (I had to look that one up!). Shannon saw a roadrunner, and then Shaun spotted a lovely group of elk with males with velvet still on their antlers and winter coats molting. They were pretty far away and it was getting dark, so our pictures aren’t that great, but it was still a cool sighting. We also had a couple of incidents of cow escapees, and this trend would continue through the whole trip. Apparently, most areas in this part of the country are open ranges where cows roam freely, and they really like to forage on the side of road where the grass is nicer due to the rain runoff.
Right outside of Springdale, Shaun saw a peregrine falcon, but she couldn’t figure out how to put up the frickin’ flash on her new camera, so no picture was taken. Luckily, Shannon saw him too, so he was a verified point. This came right after Shannon shockingly saw four...wait for it….ostriches….yes, ostriches, for heaven’s sake, so she got a point for them as well, even though they weren’t on the list because...they were ostriches! One of them was rubbing her/his head in the dirt (maybe it was trying to bury its head in the sand….harharharhar!).
We ate at a TexMex place called Bit and Spur that had really good root beer but nothing for Shaun to eat. Oh well. You can’t win them all! Back at the Novel House, we settled up the bill with Ciaran, and he gave Shannon his copy of Jane Eyre. Wasn’t that nice of him? We also uploaded our pictures onto the Surface (which did power up), but you could see water behind the screen, so we aren’t holding out much hope for it. Our Kindles are fine, though, so we’re very glad about that. We’ll buy some silica gel and put the Surface in it to dry it out the best we can and then see what happens. Wish us luck!
After breakfast, we walked back to Novel House and set up the car for our next adventure. It was here that we discovered that our laptop and Kindles that we had put into a dry bag and then into the cooler to protect them from the intense heat of the previous day were under water and that the dry bag had NOT stayed dry. All three of our electronics were under water!
There wasn’t a whole lot we could do on a Sunday in the little tourist town of Springdale, Utah, so we took everything out of their cases, laid them on a towel in the back of the car to dry out and did what any self-respecting person would do in this situation...we went shopping! There were all kinds of artsy fartsy shops, a Visitor’s Center, and a cool natural grocery store where we bought lunch and ate it outside on the patio. We also bought brambleberry jam (which is a local specialty and very nummy), and Shannon bought “May the Forest be with You” PJ pants with forest animals done up like Star Wars characters, which just proves how much of a geek she is.
After we finished shopping, we drove the road that paralleled Zion National Park to see the surrounding area. We decided to wait to go into the park until the next day since you can only get around on a shuttle. The road outside the park was called the Kolob Terrace Road, and we drove it until it ended (at a very uninspiring reservoir) and then came back down it.
Unfortunately, we missed seeing the sunset on the rocks, but it was still beautiful and gave us a great introduction to the geology of the area and a southeastern view of Zion Canyon from the edge of the great Colorado Plateau. We also saw some kind of a raptor near a place called Lava Point, but we didn’t see it well enough to grant a point for it. It was still a great spotting by Shannon, the Eagle-Eyed Wonder. To top off the day, we had to tinkle behind a couple of bushes at a closed campground because we couldn’t find an open place to pee. Oh well, it wouldn’t be a true vacation without Shaun and Shannon dropping trow in an inappropriate place!
During the drive back to the Novel House we saw a ton of mule deer, a lone turkey and then, later, a couple of rafters of turkeys (I had to look that one up!). Shannon saw a roadrunner, and then Shaun spotted a lovely group of elk with males with velvet still on their antlers and winter coats molting. They were pretty far away and it was getting dark, so our pictures aren’t that great, but it was still a cool sighting. We also had a couple of incidents of cow escapees, and this trend would continue through the whole trip. Apparently, most areas in this part of the country are open ranges where cows roam freely, and they really like to forage on the side of road where the grass is nicer due to the rain runoff.Right outside of Springdale, Shaun saw a peregrine falcon, but she couldn’t figure out how to put up the frickin’ flash on her new camera, so no picture was taken. Luckily, Shannon saw him too, so he was a verified point. This came right after Shannon shockingly saw four...wait for it….ostriches….yes, ostriches, for heaven’s sake, so she got a point for them as well, even though they weren’t on the list because...they were ostriches! One of them was rubbing her/his head in the dirt (maybe it was trying to bury its head in the sand….harharharhar!).
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