Today’s two goals were:
- Try to get Katja’s oil changed
- Get to Zion National Park
An early AM stop at Findlay VW, only 5 mins down the road from our hotel, netted a 2:30PM appointment for our trusty Golf R. With that in hand, he headed towards Zion, only 35 miles away.
Arriving there, we were immediately struck by the splendour. As we drove, I couldn’t help but stop at every pull-out spot to take photos.
We went through the very long tunnel in Mount Carmel and exited to find different, but equally beautiful rock formations.
The “windows” you see in the picture above weren’t noticable to us when we looked this rock face from below, but on our way home, they were there as plain as day.
Given I was spending more time capturing images than covering distance, we didn’t get too far before we had to turn back in order to make our oil change appointment. We also wanted to leave some buffer in case we wanted to stop at points we skipped/missed on the way out. Yes, more photos were taken.
The oil change went smoothly and we headed to our hotel for the night (different from last night and about 16 miles closer to Zion). After a refreshing dip in the pool, we headed back to Zion, grabbing dinner in Springdale at Porters Smokehouse & BBQ.
We then took a stroll as the sun set. The setting sun really lit up the place, resulting in even more photos.
On our walk, we also encountered some locals.
There might have also been a few Trish and Naresh sightings, too.
We hung around the park until almost 10PM in order to do some star gazing and boy was it worth it. With no lights in the park, it’s REALLY dark. We drove the route we had taken during the day, including the tunnel!
As the sky lost all light, we perched on one the lookouts on the near side of the tunnel, pulled out the tripod, and took these, our first night sky shots.
I’m sure the quality of these leaves a lot to be desired, but I’m blown away by number of stars up there. Being a city dweller all my life, I’ve never seen a sky like this.
I’m so glad we took the time to hang out there, despite being so dark. It was hard to see anything and almost all camera work was done by touch.
We actually turned off all of the car’s interior lights as they were so bright they created a period of blindness after they went off. Still, it was really cool to find how much better your ears work when you can’t see, how vulnerable it makes you feel, and how isolating it is when wandering 20 feet from the car (and your spouse) renders both invisible.
That’s it for tonight. Sorry about the volume of photos, but I think this is the prettiest place I’ve ever been. Tomorrow, we head to the Grand Canyon, passing through Zion again.