CaNeUt Vacation Day 2, Travel and Bryce Canyon

If you missed the start of the trip yesterday, you might want to go back and read that first.  Next morning, after Paul and I left the kids in Nevada, we drove on to Utah, toward Bryce Canyon.

It was lots and lots of this as we crossed Nevada.  No traffic, no power lines, just the occasional shot-ridden road sign and miles of sagebrush.

And then!  We started to see yucca plants.  It was pretty exciting to finally see something different for a while.

We stopped here, at the end of the Extraterrestrial Highway to get cold drinks.

Then later, we stopped for lunch, and to stare at our phones for a little bit.

This was the thriving metropolis of Caliente, Nevada.  It has a population less than the number of my Facebook followers, but still a cluster of businesses and houses bigger than some of the tiny towns we passed through.

Lunch was yummy.  Paul had a burger and curly fries.  I had fish & chips with warm "fry bread," which turned out to be like sopapillas, and was served with honey butter.  Really tasty.  There used to be a little "hole in the wall" Mexican restaurant in Sonoma that my dad and I went to when I was a kid, and they had yummy sopapillas.

The gas station in Fallon used to have one of these funny green dinos out front, and we took pictures of the kids on it in years past.  It seems to have changed hands more than a year ago, however, and there's no more green dino there.  So I smiled to see a green dino gas station and took a picture to show the kids.  Yes, 4 hours in, I already missed them.

Smoke from one of 3 different wildfires we encountered.  A fire in Utah, which we could actually smell from Bryce Canyon in the evenings, a fire we could see from my dad's house in Nevada, and a fire we saw near Sparks on our way home.

Actually, the cemetery above reminds me of a funny story from Day 1.  We'd been in the car for-ev-er.  And hadn't seen anything but tumbleweed for quite some time.  Suddenly, we come to a cemetery outside Austin, NV, and Hannah pipes up with, "Signs of life!"  Cracked me up.

Roadside stop to look at the scenery.

We arrived at Bryce Canyon and checked in to Ruby's Inn.

Then we went across the street to check out the little touristy shops, and found this jail cell.

I missed Eli in the rock shop.  Our family has a rock gene.  My granny had it.  My dad has it.  I have it, and Eli has it.  It manifests differently in each of us, but it's there.  When I was a kid, my grandmother had rocks she'd picked up in various places all over the house.  I remember my dad choosing rocks for the border of our garden in one yard, and specific rocks as part of the landscape in at another house.  Personally, I tend to like touching rocks with a lot of history, like the Great Wall, or an old mine shaft.

There were lots of pretty little things in the rock shop.  I ended up bringing home 3 bracelets.

Being together, without the children, overnight, for the first time since 2010, we went a little wild and had ice cream before dinner.

Then we wandered over to Bryce Canyon to check out the amazing views.  We started at Sunset Point.

We got there as the sun was going down, so most of the canyon was in the shade, but it was still pretty.

We both had our cameras with us, so we got lots and lots of pictures.

Bad lighting, sorry.

The view was spectacular.  You can't really process how incredible it is from a picture.

I bought postcards for Zach, Annaliese, and Sam, and was able to mail 2 of them the next day from the Bryce Canyon City post office on site.

And that is the end of day 2!


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