Well, Plan A involved staying gone for a couple more days, however, once the wheels of the motorhome touched Oregon ground, homesickness set in, and we made a bee-line straight for home.
Coming down our street, we were first greeted by a portion of our front fence downed by a skidding car on an icy street, not long after we left on this trip.
The Sheriff had called us early one Sunday morning and informed us of the accident, but this was our first look at it. Oh, well, not a major problem, we’ll deal with this tomorrow.
Then the entrance of our Quail Bend greeted us. It was so good to see.
Isn’t it amazing how good home looks after you’ve been gone a while, especially, in our case, for four months!
A peek out the back door, showed the river was up and the pond area (that seldom has water in it) between our place and Milt and Donna’s house next door was completely filled with water and several ducks and one lone goose were merrily swimming away.
Walking around the yard, I find the tops of jonquils peeking up through the earth, promising Spring to be on it’s way.
Ah, it’s so good to be home…then Don checked out the well house. Water was flooding out the door into the yard thanks to a broken pipe. In other words, we had no water to the house.
Thankfully, there was still water in the tank of the motorhome, so we had someplace to brush our teeth and use the bathroom.
The next day the “Well-House Guy” showed up and $500 later we are back to doing laundry, dishes and flushing inside the house.
We could have done without spending the cash, but since it was the well house and not the main house, we are not going to complain too much.
Don will do the repairs to the drywall and such himself.
Don, of course, has done the calculations on our trip which are as follows:
* Time gone: Four months.
* Miles traveled in the motorhome: 9,222.
* Additional miles put on the car sight-seeing when the RV was
parked: 5,402 (does not include towed miles).
* Most paid for diesel fuel: $4.00 gallon (thankfully, not till the last
day out).
All in all it was a wonderful, wonderful trip! Thanks for riding along with us.
We'll give you a heads-up when we leave again in a month or so. We hope you come along on that trip as well.
Bryce is an amazing place! The color and the rock formations leave one speechless.
We left the motorhome in the RV park near Zion and drove an hour and a half or so up to Bryce. We realized as we drove, that Bryce is at a much higher elevation than Zion judging by the amount of snow along the way and in the park.
The herd of buffalo we drove past contrasted strikingly against the snow.
It is interesting how when you reach the area of the National Park, the landscape changes suddenly as if one flipped a switch. Once again, I will mostly just show you pictures with minimal verbiage in this blog posting.
Good thing we left the motorhome behind, we don’t think it would have fit through here.
I enjoyed seeing the snow on the colored rocks. This is a view that the summer visitors don’t get to see.
This is Natural Bridge. We did not see this the last time we were here because the pull-off was jam-packed with cars and there was no place to park.
Due to traffic such as that, now during the busy season you can no longer drive yourself through either Zion or Bryce. You have to ride on shuttle buses. That does not sound like a lot of fun to me.
As I haven mentioned previously, traveling in winter as we do, we see a lot of “Closed for the Season” signs. However this was one case where the off-season was to our advantage.
Most of the viewpoints are right on the main road. This one required a walk of about a city block. The snow in places, like this one, was higher than my head.
Other place had almost no snow at all.
Well, this marks the end of the scenic part of our trip. The rest of the way will be across the deserts and flatlands of Nevada and Eastern Oregon. Then we will be home and after being gone for four months, we are looking forward to that!
We parked the motorhome in an RV park in Springdale, Utah, just 1/2 mile outside of the entrance to Zion National Park.
The RV park sat right at the base of a massive rock wall that is so typical of the Zion landscape. This made any time spent in the RV, pretty enjoyable.
We have visited Zion in years past, but since we have gotten so darn old, we don’t remember that much of what we have seen in the past.
We spent a day and a half in the park absorbing the beauty. There was some snow which gave the landscape even more interest. There is not a lot I can tell you about Zion that is not better communicated by just showing you pictures.
For your information, I took almost 400 pictures. I have just spent a torturous hour picking out the much smaller number I am going to show you here. So here we go.
This big horn sheep was already most of the way across the road when we came along and he refused to turn around and pose for me. Sorry about the end that is facing into the camera…
Melting snow resulted in frozen waterfalls here.
This is called “The Checkerboard.” It has both vertical and horizontal lines, giving it a checkerboard look.
More waterfalls here.
Some of the waterfalls come from so high up that I can barely get the top and the bottom of the fall both in the same picture.
We walked a mile back to the Narrows…or at least to the spot where the path to the most beautiful part of the Narrows stops being on dry ground and involves walking up the river to get there.
The water is very cold this time of year and we didn’t have boots. I would have liked to see that part of the canyon, but not by wading in ice water. It is a pretty path to get to that point.
I enjoy seeing things like this cactus growing out of the side of the rock wall.
We were pleasantly surprised to see petroglyphs on a huge rock very near the road. This spot is not really marked with signs, so we missed this in the past.
Unfortunately, other people have scratched graffiti into the rock around these original carvings. The good part is that the actual petroglyphs have not been damaged…yet.
This is what sunset looks like on the rock walls of Zion. I took these from our motorhome in the RV park one evening.
That white line is a jet contrail, not a plane crashing into the mountains…so there you are. That’s my pictures for today. If you need more, I have about 275 other pictures of Zion. It’s an amazing place. Hope you enjoyed the ride through the park.
Tomorrow is a visit to Bryce Canyon National Park.
