Our Trip: A Retrospective Part III

When we last left our heroes, day two of the road trip had concluded. Everybody was in bed on a Friday night except for Jeremiah who was watching Battlestar Galactica.

And now, the conclusion of The Zohner Family Road Trip.

On Saturday morning, we headed back into Zions National Park. This time though, we didn’t stop to board any shuttles. Instead, we stayed in the van and drove through along the Zion-Mount Carmel Highway. The highlight of this road, besides the amazing views, is a 1.1 mile long tunnel that was built during the first half of the last century. Because it was built in a time when cars were smaller, it’s very narrow. This fact can make it scary to drive, especially because it’s so dark, but we had a charter bus being escorted in front of us so there was no oncoming traffic. The kids thought that the tunnel was amazing and kept asking if there would be anymore tunnels along our route.

Once you exit the tunnel, you’re still in Zions but the view is very different. I think that this is because the other side of the mountain that you pass through has a different type of rock. There’s not much in this part of the park except for Checkerboard Mesa which is a big rock with lines in it. There’s also the east entrance to the park. Entrances can also be used as exits. That’s what we used this one for.

Once we were out of the park, we headed on towards Bryce Canyon National Park. The drive was uneventful except when I saw a deer run across a busy stretch of road and nearly get hit.

Sometime around noon we arrived at Bryce Canyon. We went to the visitors center where we watched a movie about the history of the park. We also got some ideas of what we wanted to see but since it was very cold and there was still snow in some parts of the park, we didn’t think that we would do much hiking.

There is a road that runs from the park entrance to Rainbow Point, the park’s southernmost attraction accessible by car. We started driving and decided that we’d start at Rainbow Point and work our way back to the entrance. Along the road, there are numerous viewpoints where we pulled over and took pictures. I was amazed at how beautiful the park was. I’ve never seen anything like it.

One of the last stops we made was at Sunrise Point. This is the home to the “easiest” trail in the park. By this time, the sun had come out, and we had descended nearly 1000 feet in elevation, so we decided to hike the Queens Garden Trail to get down into the canyon instead of only seeing things from above. The trail is 1.8 miles long, steep in places with big drop offs, and unpaved. Needless to say, Alex and Hannah had some struggles.

We had probably only hiked about a third of the way when Hannah said “I want to go home.” That simple sentence effectively ended our hike. If she couldn’t go down any further, she wouldn’t be able to make it back out and I’d end up carrying her. I didn’t want to do that so we headed back up to the canyon rim.

Emma had been wanting to swim ever since we had left the house on Thursday. We had seen everything we wanted to in the park so we went back to the hotel and Holly took her swimming. I stayed in our room and watched Scooby-Doo with Alex and Hannah.

Once Emma was done swimming, we all got back into the van and headed to the north end of Bryce Canyon so we could hike up to Mossy Cave. Mossy Cave is a grotto, created by an underground spring where, depending on the season, you can either see lush moss covering everything or icicles reaching from the top of the cave to the bottom. We apparently came at the right time because we got to see a lot of moss and ice. It was neat. We also hiked over to the waterfall that is next to it. It was a nice way to spend a few hours.

After we ate dinner, the kids wanted to go swimming so we all went to the hotel pool. Neither Alex or Hannah knows how to swim but they sure had fun jumping off of the side into my arms. We swam for a few hours then went back to the room and went to bed.

Sunday morning arrived a bit to quickly. We got dressed, packed, and started the long drive home. I didn’t want to take I-15 the whole way back so we stayed on Highway 89 for a few hours. The scenery was beautiful and it was a nice change from I-15.

We stopped by the Freemont Indian Museum on the way home which Emma loved. We spent a few hours learning about their history and seeing cliff drawings. We also did a little bit of hiking.

We finally arrived home at about 5:00 Sunday evening. It had been a long four days in the van but we all had a lot of fun.

I hope that you all enjoyed the War and Peace version of our trip. I tried to include a lot of details but there’s a lot that I didn’t get in there. Maybe I’ll explain a bit more when I get around to posting pictures.