Hampton Inn Provo

... along with last night, which was 100% free thanks to the late "Best Rate Guarantee" deal (may it rest in peace). Over the past 2.5 years, we have stayed in many hotel rooms for free across the country. Alas, Wyndham has changed their Best Rate Guarantee (known affectionately as BRG) policy so that it doesn't include free rooms, and this is the last room we had booked under the BRG deal. It's the end of an era, and boy, did we have a good run.

... icy, but the icier the snow the faster you go! Nothing wrong with that :)

I learned to snowboard at Brighton about 11 years ago. My dad had to spend years waiting for me at the bottom of the hill, but now I have to wait for him!

... in the alpenglow.
Well, I'm afraid it's early to bed as tomorrow is another long day. Well, actually, we don't know how long tomorrow will be because we don't know which direction we're headed (well silly, of course we know how LONG tomorrow will be; we just don't know how much of it will be spent driving).Through St. George? Las Vegas? or do we stop at Lees Ferry on the Colorado for a little fishing?
Hmmmmmmmmm. How to decide?

... though, because the leaves are changing colors.

I had to rent a mountain bike because mine was stolen a couple weeks ago. I remember walking to go get it, noticing it was gone and calmly thinking, "oh ...

... the most awful stomach ache in the world, all day. I was feeling naseaous and dizzy most parts of the day.

We chatted with this nice group of guys most of the way down. They were all students at BYU, Brigham Young University, which is a private Mormon school in Provo. Which reminds me, if you do this hike on a Saturday, I swear more than half the people will be donning BYU attire, I saw so many BYU shirts and hats. Kinda annoying ...

Well, we intended to spend two nights in Hills City, South Dakota but our plans had to change. It is kinda of funny that when we checked into the Holiday Inn Express in Hill City, they told us that they didn't have any rooms for two nights in a row. We had a beautiful King Suite last night. We even slept in late this morning because we had planned on just riding around the Black Hills and then trying to figure out another hotel for the second night...but this ...

... would take one step and no less than 10,000 bugs would fly away, they covered to shore line, YUCK!!! Jess stayed away from the bugs and I decided to venture into the lake to see if my foot would float, and it didn't. So going to Salt Lake was pretty much not our favorite place as of yet.

Like we said, today all we did was drive, so we were pretty tired of sitting in Van ...

... to Canyonland National Park and spent several hours driving around to view the spectacular canyons. In 2006, when we were visiting parks in Utah, we visited both Bryce and Zion National Parks. There are many parks in this state and we’ve only seen a few but each of them is different. Bryce had spires, Zion had weird rock cliffs, Arches has arches, and Canyonland has canyons. They all have trails; some more difficult than others, and most we wouldn ...

... never been so happy to eat Wendy's. You have no idea. I was like a kid (a fat kid mind you) at Christmas! ---- tearing open the wendy's sandwich like never before. After wendy's we left refreshed (well as refreshed as you can be at that point) and full (real full) and looked for the entrance to I-15 from all these back roads we'd been on for hours. We finally spotted it and hopped on ASAP. We took a pretty uneventful trip on I-15 for about 4 hours... got a ...

... a chilly day, with dark clouds all around. It kind of made the red rocks of the park stand out even more. We walked around with our mouths hanging open for awhile. We agreed that it would be great to stay for a few days--that would really be ideal. You can't take it all in in one day. But we needed to get going, so we left there and finally made our big push north.

We plan to have a heavy driving day tomorrow, so we drove until we hit Provo and got another ...