In which I post gratuitous pictures of my car against awesome scenery

9/8:

Last morning in Zion! The stay has been all too short. We started with the Canyon Overlook hike, which was quite pleasant. There were some great overlooks to stop at on the way out of the park as well, which provided some photo ops for the lovely Jane!

Obligatory picture of me and my mom

Some weird beehive-shaped rocks

View from Canyon Overlook

The most insane crossbedding I've ever seen!!

From there we moved on towards Capitol Reef, our next stop in the “Mighty 5” Utah parks tour. Bryce Canyon NP is on the way to Capitol Reef, but my parents wanted to save it for last so we passed it today. We did stop at Red Canyon though for some quick shots of a very cool rock outcrop (and more importantly, my very cool car):

From there it was just a lot of driving through the most scenic part of Utah. I've got hundreds of pictures, but I'll only share a few so that I don't bore you all! You'll just all have to deal with the abundance of pictures of my car though, as it really is the only thing I have available that potentially is better-looking than the scenery.

You can see for hundreds of miles out here

Finally after an extra couple of hours of dilly-dallying (whatever that means), we made it to Capitol Reef! We got there just in time for the park rangers to inform us that a large storm was coming (we knew, as you could see it 60 miles away) and that we'd have to clear out pretty soon. We still opted to stop at a couple of overlooks and to do a bit of the scenic drive first. After driving through a bunch of washes that clearly flood during rain, I bailed and turned back around to go back to town. Good thing too, as the rain started shortly thereafter!

A British man who told me that my car made a "lovely noise" when I went past

We booked it back into town as the rain came down harder and harder. There was only one really good restaurant open in town, so of course everyone was in there as there was nothing else to do. Really delicious food though and I was glad to not be camping tonight! And now that I think about it, I am exceptionally lucky to not have been rained on a single time while camping this whole trip. 6+ weeks, and not once have I had bad camping weather! If that isn't lucky I don't know what is!

Tomorrow we will explore Capitol Reef a bit, weather permitting. Then we'll head further east to Moab, hub for Arches and Canyonlands! Kelly signing out.