Sunday, June 25, 2006 - Zion, Utah

Today we slept late, had breakfast and decided to relax this morning. We decided to make reservations for the rest of our trip in Utah. We did not make them earlier, since we were not sure about our schedule. We will be in the KOA in Cedar City from Friday, June 30 to Monday, July 3, Ruby's Campground outside of Bryce from Tuesday, July 4 to Friday, July 7, Thousand Lakes Campground in Torrey (Capitol Reef) from Saturday July 8 to Wednesday, July 12 and finally Portal Campground in Moab Thursday, July 13 to Tuesday, July 18. We may stay an extra day at Portal free if we choose to. From there we plan to go to Mesa Verde National Park in southwest Colorado near Cortez.

Later in the morning, we noticed that it had become cloudy. When we spoke earlier with the ranger in the visitor center, he mentioned that they had not had rain for two months. When we saw the clouds, we hoped for rain. Later, we smelled a burned odor. We looked again and the clouds were not rain clouds, but smoke from a brush fire on the other side of Zion. The fire had started yesterday and would become a threat to the communities outside of Zion. The main danger to us was that the road to Cedar City would be closed intermittently throughout the week.

We decided to go out to eat tonight. We drove out of the park to Springdale and found the Spotted Dog Cafe Restaurant. While we were there, we asked about the fire. They were nervous about how close it was, especially to their homes outside of Springdale. We had a great meal of southwest pork loin with new tastes for our Midwest/Texas/Southern palettes.