Down The Road A Piece ... in a 5th wheel: Zion National Park

Today after taking care of Sydney and Tanner off we went to Zion National Park. It took us about one hour or less to get there most of which was traveling south on highway 15 with an 80 mph speed limit. We found Zion National Park, one of the post popular parks in the national park system, to be a combination between the great outdoors and Kings Island. We parked our car in Springdale, since I already knew that the parking lot at the Visitors Center would be full (we later confirmed it was full). In Springdale we caught a shuttle to the park entrance which was only five miles or so away. Once we actually paid and got into the park we took another shuttle down the scenic route which goes down the canyon. They no longer allow private vehicles on this road due to the congestion that was being created. You could get off on any one of about eight or nine stops as the shuttle made it's way to the end of the canyon. We found the canyon to be very beautiful but we have seen many of these canyon sites, maybe on a smaller scale, in the last week or so.

After leaving the canyon we headed to an area which is not commercialized. There is a national monument not a national park not far from our rv park called Cedar Break that we headed toward. This site is at an elevation exceeding 10,000 feet. On our way we stopped at Hot Mama's in a little town called Duck Creek, Utah. This is about as remote as we could get. Outside there were more four wheelers parked at the restaurant than there were cars. One reason I wanted to go this way is because I wanted to take the rv that way yesterday and was met by six big warning signs talking about 6-8% grades for 12 miles which also warned semis not to go this way. By us going around route 14 we probably drove 60 miles out of our way. After traveling in the car today on route 14 there is no reason we shouldn't have taken it yesterday in the motorhome. If it were winter it would be a different story but we were on several similar roads yesterday with no problems. We decided after leaving Hot Mama's to go back to the motorhome and drive back to Cedar Break tomorrow since we also decided we did not want to travel to Bryce Canyon. We found more neat sites on the back roads that we really liked better than the more commercial sites so that is what we are going to do tomorrow.

Here are a few pictures from today.