End of the line

I added the last of the photos (I think) to our vacation collection on flickr and edited the whole thing down (from a gazillion) to about 150 pictures.



We went canyoneering - the one word term for exploring slot canyons and all the climbing, rappelling, scrunching, crawling, hiking and learning that implies - on Saturday morning. It was our one guided excursion of the trip, and it turns out our Zion Adventure Company guide, Lynn, was a former rower from Marietta College. (We already thought she was pretty cool - that was just the icing on the cake). She managed to coax Nick to rappel off a 50-ish foot cliff and helped us all get in touch with our inner spiderman/spidermom. All of us left skin offerings to the slickrock (some more than others) and gained a whole different perspective on perspective. Lynn informed us that 80 percent of the land in Utah is public; I'm convinced it should be known as "The playground state."
We managed to bring rain everywhere we went, and the Utah desert was no exception. On Saturday afternoon the skies opened up with a major thunderstorm while we were catching a late lunch. Later that evening we saw helicopters buzzing around some of the mountains. It turns out they were plucking people, trapped by flash floods, out of some of the more technical canyons.

We decided to forgo the drive over to Bryce Canyon in favor of one more trip into Zion - just a short hike to stretch our legs and a little break to soak our feet in the river before the drive to Las Vegas.

In Vegas we drove through downtown on our way to the hotel and almost choked on the cigarette smoke that came rushing in through the AC when we stopped at a traffic light in the heart of downtown. The lights were cool at night, though. In Las Vegas even the Motel 6 has a full-on neon sign that you can see from miles away.

We got home yesterday evening and I spent the morning marveling at how soft the ground is and how green the grass is. (Everyone I told this seemed to only notice how long it is.) Got a high-five last night from Nick, congratulating me on a trip well-done.