Moab!

What a nice trip we had! We drove 14 hours, only stopping for gas and eats. We had great weather (for November 1st). The air was clear almost everywhere we went, and even though it rained much of the time it was very minor. Actually, the rain was kind of enjoyable for a couple of reasons:

• I put new wiper inserts on the car before we left and they worked beautifully
• The light rain only needed medium intermittent wipers to keep rain clear, which was just the right amount to keep any bugs from clogging up the view.

We had all our cool techie gadgets to keep us going. The new portable DVD/mp3 player I bought for the trip worked perfectly. Suz spent half the trip with that thing on her lap, playing with it. At one point she commented on how geeky we were--Having a portable dvd player, three digital cameras, two laptop computers, and two cell phones. Yep, traveling geeks.

We ended up driving straight through to Utah and staying overnight at Suzie’s half-brother’s house with he and his family for the night in Salt Lake City (Lehi actually). When we got there last night she and Mark (her half-brother's name) spent a couple hours swapping stories of relatives they had in common. We slept in sleeping bags on the floor of their rec room. After Suz and Mark had spent a satisfactory bunch of hours again this morning swapping stories and pictures, we shoved off and thanked them for their hospitality. It was weird because Suzie didn't really know anyone any better than I did. It was kinda weird though--They're Mormons. Normally I wouldn't think much of it, but the fact that they don't drink occurred to me last night when Suzie and I polished off a couple beers before bedtime. It was further reinforced this morning when we got up and found they didn't have coffee or a coffee maker. DOH! It was tough... I need my morning coffee. It was also one of the weirdest breakfast meals I've ever seen. Vanilla ice cream, homemade "applesauce" (more like apple pie filling if you ask me), cool whip, and biscuits. Very unusual. His wife works late and the ice cream/apple stuff was also their dinner when she got home last night at 11:00. Again--Weird...

I had my doubts about the weather this morning when we got up at their house. It was rainy and windy and cold. When we turned off the main road and headed towards our Moab, Utah destination, the weather got better and better.

We took a bunch of pictures on the road between Interstate 15 and Moab where we're currently sitting. We encountered tons of very dramatic lighting conditions. It was the kind of weather that had intermittent rain squalls, so every now and then there were some pretty cool cloud formations too. At one point I took us off the road onto a dirt road and we headed away from the highway and across the valley. It was a lot of fun and we got some very good pictures during that side trip. Here's a shot we took while we were out there:


We are going to have tons of pictures put up on our SmugMug picture site, that's for sure, but probably not until after we're back home.

We checked into a motel here in Moab (the same one Sarah and I stayed at last summer) at about 5pm. We're going to stay here two nights as we're planning an awful lot of hiking/photo outings in this area in the next two days. For those of you stuck in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, eat your heart out--Here's tomorrow's forcast for Moab: