Utah Rocks!

Our fall Exploritas/Elderhostel trip was fantastic! The national parks and monuments of Utah (state parks, too) are magnificent. There were 40 in our group, including a P.E.O. (Chapter AW-North Carolina), one AAUW (Littleton, CO), a quilter (Corfu, NY), and a Methodist pastor (NC). (No librarians. But there was a woman with whom I had been stranded overnight in New Orleans in a fierce rainstorm, both of us trying to get to Minneapolis (and for her to Rochester, for me to Fargo), in January, 1998.)

I kept up with e-mail and FaceBook, but not with blogging (obviously). Here are some of the photos:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2039387&id=1260485671&l=d259f91f03

Trip highlights, pre-Elderhostel
* seeing friends Lynn and Rob in their new locale of Boulder City
* tour of Hoover Dam and Lake Mead
* surviving Saturday night on the Strip in Las Vegas
* discovering Springs Preserve, a nature preserve in Las Vegas (www. springspreserve.org)
* touring the Atomic Testing Museum (www.atomictestingmuseum.org)

Trip highlights from the Elderhostel:
* historic St. George, Utah, founded on orders from Brigham Young as a cotton-growing community
* tour of the St. George tabernacle, the original LDS church building in St. George (now a venue for concerts and the like)
* National parks: Zion, Bryce, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands, Arches, Monument Valley, Glen Canyon/Lake Powell
* State parks: Snow Canyon, Anasazi, Dead Horse Point
* Antelope Slot Canyon
* Expert geology tutelage from tour leader Eldon Griffin
* Expert tour guidance from leader Nancy Osborne
* Excellent bus driving by Bill Costello
* the city of Moab, whose long Main Street lined with boutiques, restaurants, motels, and sports outfitters reminded us of North Conway, NH (though the surrounding hills were a very different color!)

It was raining when we landed in Chicago on Thursday evening, a fitting contrast to our two weeks in desert country. My internal clock is just about readjusted. (Las Vegas is on Pacific Time; Utah is on Mountain Time; Arizona is on standard time year round, and we were in all three.)

The new Exploritas catalog came this weekend. Where shall we go next?!