The Great Wander

Alright, so a couple of weeks ago I was so excited about the hotel, I almost skipped a campsite and national park!  We got to the hotel and we were so excited!  You could get up in the middle of the night without grabbing a dog leash to go to the bathroom!  You could get out of bed and not have to reposition the sleeping bag to get back into bed!  It wasn’t the Ritz Carlton, but wow was it great!  We were in Kanab, UT, which is situated between Zion National Park and the Grand Canyon, and on the way to the Grand Canyon is a great dog kennel where both pups stayed for a few days.  It was nice to be able to enjoy both parks without having to worry about getting back to the dogs. 

Because of the location of the dog kennel, The Happy Horse & Dog Pet Resort, we went to the Grand Canyon first.  The kennel is great.  Darlene really knows her stuff about taking care of dogs, in fact, Kona went back for some training while we finished up getting ready for leg of the trip to go to the boat.  I highly recommend them, if you are going to be going to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon or Zion, again, minimal places dogs can go, consider using The Happy Horse & Dog Pet Resort.  Also, I’m not getting paid by them to say this.

We only went to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, there’s a lot to see and we wanted to go to Zion the next day.  Seriously, you need a couple of weeks, if not months in the Grand Canyon.  Hit the North Rim in the summer, it’s at a higher elevation and a bit cooler than the south rim.  Head south as you move into winter.  I think that’s what I would do.  We hit Bright Angel Point, then Point Imperial, and then to close out the day, we watched the sunset a Cape Royal Point.  Really a spectacular sunset.  Matthew and I toyed with staying for some star photography, but as it was, we didn’t get back to Kanab until after midnight.  So I’m glad we didn’t stay too much later. Though, Grand Canyon is a Dark Sky Park.

Watching the sunset there was incredible.  You could see the rays hitting the walls of the canyon and lighting them up as the sky turned different shades of red.  Really, it was incredible.  I took a lot of pictures, but I also just sat there too.  I just took in the view.  The Park Service lists Cape Royal Point as one of the best places at the North Rim to watch the sunset.  There’s a good reason for that. It’s incredible. 

We had initially planned to get up early and get to Zion early, so we could see a lot there.  But after getting back to the hotel so late, we slept in and even though it was only 30 miles away, to get to the Visitor Center, the Google gods said it would be about 2 hours.  They weren’t wrong.  We cruised along the highway…then boom. Stop.  Sit. Wait.  Inch forward. Rinse and repeat.  Thankfully, we had the America the Beautiful pass, so once we got close a ranger came up and asked if we had one, we replied we did, and he moved us along to the much quicker line. 

Driving into Zion, you get some stunning views.  Have your camera ready as you go through the tunnels.  The second one has the best view at the end. Suddenly you have towering cliffs all around you with the most amazing colors.

Zion is pretty unique too, because you have to park at the visitor center.  Which is hard if you get there later in the day.  Once you have a parking spot, you take a shuttle to the all the cool spots.  We took the shuttle all the way up to a place called “The Narrows”.  The Virgin River is carving a canyon there and depending on the time of year you can be swimming in parts of it to get upstream.  We only had chest deep water in a few places.  Most of the river though, we were in ankle to shin deep water.  It really was amazing and as you approached places you weren’t sure about; people all offered a helping hand.

It was interesting in the river, because before we left on this leg of the journey, I had so many people tell me I was an inspiration, that they were envious, because we are taking this giant leap and doing something pretty different.  While we were in the river, I found a path that avoided a more treacherous route.  Sandy and I crossed and then we had people following us along that route.  They all said, “You paved the way for us.”  I saw a little similarity there and thought, I didn’t really pave the way.  I just a took a chance.

That’s really what this is all about right, taking a chance.  Early on in the blog I wrote about the daily grind and the desire to replace it with something else. Which is what we are doing, just taking a chance.  I don’t know if it’s going to work, but we are giving it a shot!