So sleepy! We're leaving at 8am this morning and breakfast is from 7 downstairs so when I get up I look around for the usual in-room coffee supplies and realise there aren't any. That's right, this is Las Vegas and we don't put anything in the room which will keep you away from the casino floors.
I run into Kerry and Pina on the way into breakfast and sit with them. Our waitress person puts us in a back corner rather than anywhere near all the other tour people and we wonder briefly if there's a reason (because the area is mostly empty). The waffles are good. The coffee is so-so, but it's coffee.
Everyone makes it onto the bus before 8am, and we find we've got little placecards with our names above the seats. Today I'm a couple of rows back on the driver's side. Pina and Kerry are in the two rows behind me, and further back are Liz and Jane. In fact, just about everyone has their own double seat except for those who are travelling as a couple. That being said, half of the bus remained empty so we weren't going to end up squashy any time soon.
Our plan for the day was to head north-east out of Las Vegas along the I-15 which cuts across the corner of Arizona (where we lose an hour) and then onto Utah. We were to visit Zion National Park around lunch time and then head onto Bryce Canyon later in the afternoon. As we drove along the scenery moved from the desert flats around Las Vegas to reveal a series of red mesas and JP explained that most of the tour would be spent at an altitude of at least 6000 feet (as a comparison, Mt Kosciusko is around 7300 feet) and that we should remember to drink enough water to help counteract any altitude sickness (should we experience any).
We will be driving through three different deserts during the tour (out of the five in the United States): the Mojave, which we will see parts of this morning; the Great Basin Desert; and the Colorado Plateau, which we will get to later today after visiting Zion.
Around 9.25am we roll through Mesquite and cross the state line from Nevada to Arizona and instantly lose an hour (it's now 10.25am). We wind along the Virgin River for a while as we pass through the Black Mountains - through the Virgin River Gorge - which rise up about 5400 feet seemingly out of nowhere and drop back to a flat desert before we cross into Utah a little before 11am. We stop at St George to collect supplies for lunch. I find a deli which makes sandwiches with your choice of any meat and cheese they have in the deli case - there's at least 50 of each and I elect for a smoked ham and provolone sandwich with salad and mustard. We spend about 45 minutes in the store collecting supplies before driving on to Zion National Park which is a little under an hour away.
The mountain structures which make up Zion NP are visible as we pass through towns which border it and once we pass through the entrance it's obvious that the canyon is different to anything we'd seen along the way today. Both sides of the road through the park are surrounded by towering sandstone walls in shades of reds, pinks and white. We leave the bus at the visitor centre a few miles into the park and are free for about and hour and a half. I catch the free shuttle bus up to the furthermost end of the park which is accessible by vehicle and wander around for a while on foot. There's not quite enough time to walk too far but I catch glimpses of climbers leading up some of the rock faces.
I catch the shuttle back to the visitor centre in time for our 2.30pm departure, but we're still sitting there around 2.40 waiting for two people. Initially we presume they're running late, but we end up figuring they may have forgotten to set their watches forward by an hour despite the numerous times JP had mentioned the change. Had we been somewhere where there was transportation to our location for the night (ie, anywhere but a national park) we would have left, but there really wasn't anything we could do but wait. Around 3pm they arrived on a shuttle bus having travelled mistakenly in the wrong direction twice before realising their mistake.
We leave Zion through the Zion-Mt Carmel Tunnel which requires the rangers to stop traffic on one side of the tunnel as the bus needs to drive on the centre of the road to avoid hitting the sides/ceiling of the tunnel. We stop to view the Checkerboard Mesa but otherwise continue on our way towards Bryce Canyon. Our surrounding change back to country farmland with some colourful fall foliage.
As we approach the Bryce Canyon area we stop along the way at Red Canyon which is a little like a mini/preview version of the hoodoos which Bryce is noted for. It's 5pm and it's noticeably chillier now than it was at lunch and most of us have pulled out jumpers after the photo stop in preparation. We stop briefly at our hotel for the night (Ruby's Inn) to drop off our bags before heading into Bryce Canyon and our first stop, Bryce Point, is about 8300 feet above sea level. This change in altitude from earlier in the day (we've now driven up onto the Colorado Plateau) along with the late afternoon breeze combine to make it rather chilly outside. This point is the highest we'll be at for the next couple of days, and is well above the 2000 feet Las Vegas sits at.
JP mentions that the Ponderosa pines which dot the canyon are a little like scratch-and-sniff trees and that they smell like vanilla (as long as you don't scratch a burnt tree). We all sound very doubting but do stop to smell the trees (a missed blackmail photo opportunity if ever there was one). They do, however, smell like vanilla so I think I lost that argument.
We drove back towards Ruby's and stopped around at Fairyland Point which has an excellent view of of a hoodoo known as Thor's Hammer. The hoodoos - the weathered spires for which this park is famous - are meant to have been named by the Native American tribes of the area (such as the Ute and Paiute tribes) and apparently they believed that they housed the spirits of the bad/evil dead. Also originating from the Native Americans was the state name - Utah. Anyhow, how Thor's Hammer ended up in Fairyland I don't know. But it's yet another impressive vantage point of the canyon (interestingly, it's not technically a canyon as it wasn't carved out due to a river a la the Grand Canyon). I don't expect that my camera (or perhaps that should be my photography skills) will do it justice.
It's cold and windy out in the late afternoon but apparently it's not as cold as it's going to get. I'm regretting not having packed gloves or a scarf, but presumably there'll be somewhere I can find some of these along the way (we're heading north for the next week so it's not going to get any warmer). Most of the group head into dinner at the restaurant at Ruby's Inn as we arrive back there on a warning from JP that it tends to get busy. The buffet has more than enough food, but the highlight has to be be icecream machine we found in the corner. Mmm... ice cream, crushed chocolate cookies, nuts, syrups, etc. As we leave we notice the line about 30 people long leading into the gift shop; early-ish dinner was an excellent plan. I end up purchasing a new memory card for about the same as I paid at home and the usual touristy magnet stuff before heading back out into the cold (which has developed a bit of a bite) and back to my room. There's free wifi in the rooms here so I get a chance to upload some photos and chat to people at home before calling it a night around 10pm.
