Been Away

 We don't have an official  bucket list, perhaps a bouquet (spelled bucket) list, that includes places we'd like to go and things we'd like to do before we get too senile to enjoy them.  Our trip this last week was one of those.  We went to Utah, to dig for fossils and to see Zion National Park.
Mac has always wanted to find fossils out in the wild so he did some research and found a place in the middle of nowhere, in Utah, where you could break up slate and find trilobites.  Having found that he asked me what I'd like to do in Utah and I immediately thought of their gorgeous National Parks and said I'd like to see Zion.  So that's what we did.
We flew into Salt Lake City, drove about a 100 miles south and 50 miles west to a small town called Delta that we were going to use as our base while hunting down trilobites.  The next morning we drove to U Dig Fossils, passing an antelope foraging on rocks, certainly wasn't much grass around and a small herd of wild horses,  on our way to the site where  we met the owner who looked like a character out of an old western movie.  He gave us hammers, buckets,  a quick lesson on how to chip the trilobites out of the slate  and left us to play.  It was great, what a thrill tapping apart a stone and finding a fossil inside.  We spent the day there having brought our lunch with us.  At the end we sorted through what we'd found, kept the best and headed back to Delta.  I found the biggest trilobite, but Mac was better at popping them out of the stone.

The next morning we drove south to Zion, what an incredible place.  Our hotel backed up to the park, you leave your car at your hotel in town, take a free shuttle to the park where you pick up a free shuttle that takes you through the park with 9 stops.   You hop off and on as you like.  Before they started the shuttle service they say the park was overrun with cars and it was a mess.  Well we loved the shuttle service  and think other parks ought to do the same.
The canyon itself was spectacular, I took loads of pictures, but none of them really do justice to the park.

Court of the Patriarchs, Zion National Park

At certain times of day the rock formations were red and looked too beautiful to be real.  We hiked, Mac fished, I painted, it was wonderful.  In the evening we'd sit on a balcony at the hotel, sip a drink and watch the sun work its way across the rocks behind us.

The View From our Hotel Balcony

View From Hotel Lobby