Honeymoon-day 9, August 2, 2023

“Live your life by a compass not a clock.” – Stephen Covey

After a restful night in a hotel, complete with showers and an excellent bed, we headed straight to Salt Lake City, Utah to experience Great Salt Lake from Antelope Island State Park.

I’ll mention several of the stops we have made, I visited when I was in elementary school when my family traveled for 64 days one summer. This was one of them. I have lots of vivid memories from that trip but revisiting locations has been tremendous. This was one location that completely surprised me as to how majestic the colors, layers, and landscape were. We saw more variety of wildlife at this state park than at any other location on our trip.

After getting our fill of hiking, driving, and photography, we hit the road headed south. Originally I had planned for us to head straight for Antelope Canyon and Horseshoe Bend in Arizona. (Allowing me to be the copilot can be dangerous, I want to do it ALL!) However, while putting our next stop into the GPS, I noticed how close we were to Bryce Canyon Nationa Park, Utah, also something I had seen as a kid. So of course, we had to go. As we approached and saw signage for Zion National Park, Utah, we added that to our list for the following morning.

Our travels took us past an In and Out Burger stop, a first for Chris. We also stopped to see Butch Cassidy’s Childhood home.

We arrived at Bryce Canyon just in time to see it turn golden as the sun approached the horizon. We were shocked to discover you can easily hike down into the canyon as little or as much as you like. We didn’t go far, but we did descend for a short walk along the canyon’s edge, becoming more in awe with each step. While not Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon has its unique beauty to offer.

We headed back to a “no reservations” campground in Red Canyon for the evening. We heated leftover Chinese on our propane stove, eating dinner around dusk. After a short stint of tent struggles, we danced under the stars listening to our portable radio play the local 50’s love ballad station.