I Am Bismark

so yesterday i went on a road trip with mariam and two of her friends to zion national park in southern utah. it was pretty awesome. here is the rundown with pictures and twitter updates throughout.

twitter update #1 @ 6:01 am: loading up the car for roadtrip to zion 2008. (if I get eaten by a bear, at least you all know where I went now).

ok, so yeah, i did say 2008, but it was 6 am so forgive me. by the time all the girls were ready, which took forever, it was 6:30 and we finally made got out of provo. i downloaded animal farm and the screwtape letters audiobooks to listen, and everyone else promptly fell asleep while i drove. our first stop was in parowan at around 9:30.

twitter update #2 @ 9:52 am: hello everyone! i’m back from my time warp currently eating breakfast at the high class parowan cafe!

i picked parowan because it was the only place in southern utah with a restaurant that looked interesting on yelp. the parowan cafe was a nice quirky little place, though i disagree with the yelp reviewer about the “ashbrowns”: they really weren’t that good. parowan itself was just as quirky, and i decided to walk around a bit until i noticed some hoodlums wearing dark hoodies following closely after two of the girls and i decided we should be on our way.

twitter update #3 @ 10:11 am: @pjlibrarylady with Mariam and two of her friends. we are heading to park here in a bit, hoping to make it home tonight by 8ish. then we were off to kolob canyons, which were really pretty.

we wanted to hike around a bit and mariam asked if the trail was called “if you could hike to kolob” but they were a bit too icy at that altitude. so from there we headed to the main part of the park, which was just absolutely gorgeous. my iphone camera hardly does it justice (i’m waiting for mariam’s friends pictures from her camera). we drove past the court of the patriarchs and big bend and then finally stopped at the temple of sawakava.

we hiked up the canyon narrows a ways until the trail was sadly closed by ice. i really want to go back during the warmer months to go up further to see where the canyon walls come right up to the river. after that, we drove through the tunnel and hiked the canyon overview trail. amazing. here are my feeble attempts at capturing it:

we spent a good hour up there just enjoying the view. by the time we were done, it was about 4:30, so we decided to head out of the park and down to st. george for some dinner. i decided since its the only one in utah, we would eat at in-n-out burger, so that was fun.

twitter update #4 @ 5:35 pm: no bear related fatalities.

getting some dinner at in-n-out and then back to provo. it was turning into dusk then, so before we headed back we went to look at the st. george temple. it is a very pretty building.

after a walk around the ground it was apparent that the women folk were about to fall over from fatigue, so we piled back into the car and started heading north. it was a really freaking long drive it seemed and even the audiobooks didn’t keep me all that entertained. we finally pulled into provo around 10:15 pm. once i got everyone unloaded, i went straight to bed.

twitter update #5 @ 10:45 pm: home safe and sound in bed. worn out from ~8 hours of driving but had lots of fun.

overall, it was a pretty sweet day trip.