Let's review some of the high & low spots of our trip so far--two UPS trucks, several peculiarly chatty strangers, lots of fountains to touch, unearthly Mars-like scenery everywhere we look but, sadly, no Dairy Queen blizzards.

This morning we got up early & had bumbleberry pancakes with bumbleberry syrup & bumbleberry-stuffed French toast at the Bumbleberry restaurant (supposedly, bumbleberries are native to Zion, though the woman at the restaurant had never picked one). The pancakes & especially the berry-cream cheese French toast were very good; the waiter was very dim. He seemed baffled by our fairly simple breakfast order & then utterly confused the family at the next table by garbling all the details of the park & shuttle bus. After breakfast we checked out, gassed up, & had our tires rotated before setting out through the park, through a lovely 1-mile long narrow tunnel built in 1930, to route 89 to the Grand Canyon.

On the other side of the tunnel, while you're still in Zion Park, the scenery is again amazing but in a different way: two notable features are the checkerboard mesa (below at left with Robert; the pattern repeats all down the hill walls, sloping onto the ground) and the slickrock (the top of it is above at right, with trees and bushes apparently growing out of pure rock); Robert climbed very high up the slickrock, and I met him partway to take pictures up (of him, a small blue-shirted speck) and down (of our faithful Norman by the side of the road).

We drove through Kanob & the Vermillion Cliffs, then through Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument & Glen Canyon, where we stopped to look at the Glen Canyon dam (free tours, though having toured Hoover just last year we skipped it, & a very nice new visitors' center; air-conditioned, shiny, & with, in particular, numerous plaques there informed us of the six-times more effective light bulbs, heat-repelling windows, efficient waterless urinals, & other exciting features). We do recommend Glen Canyon, though (right).

After leaving Glen Canyon, we drove through completely desolate & impoverished looking parts of the Navajo Indian reservation; the map told us that over 50 miles we passed through 2 towns, but except for 1 gas station, 2 horses, 4 cows, a bunch of sheep, several small shacks selling Navajo jewelry (1 where we bought a pretty silver & blue-black hematite unicorn necklace & bracelet for Aurora & 1 with a portopotty marked grandly, ''Restroom for customers only''), & 2 intermittent signs for school bus stops, we saw no signs of life, economic or otherwise. It was really weird wondering how people managed to live there. At the booming town of Cameron (2 gas stations & the first restaurant we'd seen since Kanob), we turned to head into the Grand Canyon from the south-east.

We took a very nice scenic turnoff overlooking a canyon at the Little Colorado River--it was amazing, and we weren't even at the real Grand Canyon yet; your sense of perspective gets confused as you look out in the distance, & a snapshot can't show at all the scale or enormity of it all. Especially nice is that just yesterday we were at the foot of a canyon like this, & today we are looking down on it from above.

Our trip continues through the Painted Desert & the Kaibab National Forest to the Grand Canyon itself. There, we walked a little at the east rim & paid $.25 each to go up a tower there. We took a few more scenic overlooks along the drive through the park, got very confused about time zones, & eventually checked into our motel--Moqui Lodge, not the best choice either for location (just outside of the park, just north of Tusayan), economy ($90/night in midsummer booked 2 months in advance), amenities (no a/c or pool), but when every other place in the park is booked up, & all the decent motels in Tusayan the same, it's better than sleeping in your car or driving to Flagstaff for the night in our book. Actually, it's not hideous--just overpriced & far from the rim; our room was Motel-6 sized & had a nice tub/shower with better water pressure than we expected, & you get a free buffet breakfast. We took a shuttle to the West rim to listen to a how to photograph the canyon talk & to watch the sunset, then left the park around 8:30 for dinner &--you guessed it--more SciFi! (okay okay--let me just say that what we've been watching lately was a 2-hour movie of the SciFi show Lexx each night; we'd seen a little of it during the year & didn't really get into it, but with these movies we got to see the history & beginning of the Voyager/Farscape-like series, & were starting to really get into it.