Declan's Blog

I’d booked us into the motel just outside of Bryce. It turns out that it’s a huge complex of buildings, but easy to navigate and quite close to the park. We woke the next morning to a mysterious substance coating the car:

I haven’t owned an ice scraper since Illinois, but thanks to my genetic influence, Erin’s a genius and we used the room key cards to scrape the windows.

We had a 7-8 hr drive to Denver ahead of us, so we swore we’d just spend an hour or so in Bryce… how hard could that be? 😉

Erin wanted to prove she’d been in snow:

I made the world’s smallest snowman:

Erin shot a lot of our pix from the passenger seat, so she wanted a clean window:

Bryce is full of scenic view of hoodoos. What’s a hoodoo?

Those are. The way I understand it, the area used to be 3000 ft sand dunes, then a sea settled above that. The minerals in the sea seeped down into the sand, inconsistently, forming columns of cement in the sand. As the land was pushed up and the water ran out, it carried away the loose sand, leaving these amazing columns of fractal sand and cement.

There was usually someone at any stop who would trade a group shot if you did one for them:

The variations on the formations were beautiful:

I need a week in just this one spot to do it justice with a camera:

Ok, you get the point – it’s beautiful and everyone should go see it! 🙂

Six hours later, we dragged ourselves out of the park to start the 7 hr drive to Edwards, CO to see my brother. We lost the light soon, but I’ll never forget the drive:

We got up the next morning, found some breakfast, then headed north on I-15 to Zion. On previous trips in this part of the country, I’d stuck to the interstate. The views were always awesome, but I wondered what getting off of the beaten path would yield. I was not disappointed!

Zion is a short trip off of I-15, just north on St. George, UT. We stopped at a little town called Springdale and looked at some rocks:

I decided then that I’d resist my rock collection obsession or else the car would be laden with 1000lbs as we headed over the Rockies later in the trip 😉 Erin got her Mom some earrings, and we headed into Zion proper. I didn’t know what to expect – I’d done some research for the trip, but I didn’t want to look at too many pictures before I saw it for myself.

There’s a $25 entry fee, then you leave your car at the visitor’s center and hop on a shuttle that runs the length of the park.

I’ll put a link in the blog to all of the pictures, but WOW! Just WOW! It was amazing:

Erin has the photography bug too. I got here here and I was using my iPhone – one of my favorite images from the trip:

I was drawn to the rocks mainly, while Erin loved the water features:

I got a new wide lens piece for my Lensbaby and tried it out here, but only got one or two interesting images:

I need to spend more time with it to learn how to get some part of the image in focus.

I can paste beautiful rock formation pictures in here all day:

I also got a 70-300 Canon IS lens to play with, and it didn’t disappoint:

Erin goes in search of more water pictures:

We encountered much wild life, such as the Thanksgiving bird:

We couldn’t find the stuffing gophers.

Where’s Erin?

I was going to have some deep comments about ageless stone and modern technology, but I remembered that I’m not that deep:

Finally found some phone signal!

It was getting late and we needed to get to Bryce for the next day, so we headed out through the tunnel on Rt. 12:

and found even more amazing sights:

SOMEone was getting a little tired of stopping every 5 minutes to take pix, but I have to say – this was one of the most amazing drives I have ever made. Beautiful!

Good bye Zion. I’ll be back, and I promise to spend more that a day….

Erin and I took off early on Saturday morning:

to get to our first stop, Las Vegas! This was Erin’s first time so I wanted to make sure she saw the most important part, Barry Manilow!

Ok, not really – our goal was the Blue Man Group but first we needed to get a good meal. I looked out the window of our hotel and saw the Peppermill, a great place my buddy TJ intruduced me to on my last LV visit. Erin was impressed with the very colorful sugar:

Ok, so was I:

Next, we walked (and walked and walked) the Strip:

Caught some amazing magic:

Then finally saw the men of blue:

When I took Nathan to this show a few years ago, I neglected to bring a camera, so we missed this shot…

Erin really wanted to see the Excalibur, so we hoofed it down the Strip again after the show and she scored a nice image:

Sadly, the dragon statue is gone now. A guard told us that it was breaking down and they couldn’t get parts. I blame the IT department, or this Emo kid:

Erin and I took a road trip from San Diego to Denver and back. I’ll post more as I get the pictures edited, but here’s the initial map:

View Larger Map

I should know better than asking my Ops guys if they have a spare ladder on April Fool’s Day 😉 my office: