Travelogues
2013 Valley of Fire

Tuesday, October 29

 

Happy Birthday, Michelle! We hope you have a great birthday celebration and a good year ahead.

Today, we moved from Zion River RV Resort to the campground below the Quality Inn. We tried to make a reservation in person yesterday, but they said we should just show up this morning. The campground was nearly empty, so there were plenty of spaces. They need to make some serious improvements to their campground reservation system. It has to be costing them thousands of dollars every year.

The skies were still overcast, and it looked like it would start raining again any minute. We couldn't even see West Temple, which is straight across from the campground. As the afternoon wore on, we noticed the clouds were lifting and we could start to see the features on the canyon walls. We drove toward the park and stopped to photograph East Temple from the parking area near the Zion sign. As the clouds were lifting, East Temple peeked through the mist and over the cottonwood trees.

Out of the Mist East Temple

We checked out the area behind the old visitor center to photograph the Towers of the Virgin, but they were nothing special in the midday light.

Towers of the Virgin

Our drive up to the slickrock area netted us nothing but 5 minutes of hail at Checkerboard Mesa. It wasn't until we saw the bighorn sheep on the way back "down the hill" that we had anything to shoot. The bighorn were focused in on eating, so we had no problem getting up relatively close. However, they also didn't do anything interesting the entire time we were there.

The best part of our day was our scampi dinner with garlic bread. We spent the evening relaxing and watching our favorite TV shows. We haven't seen "Davey" in nearly a week, so we're hoping he found his way out as easily as he found his way into the motorhome. We will be searching the motorhome for anything Davey may have gotten into before we close the motorhome up at the end of the trip.