Zion National Park - Part 1

This is not my first time in Zion National Park.

The first time I came to Zion was over 45 years ago. It was only the second National Park I had ever been to, having been to Yosemite a week earlier.

I was by myself - I had been in California for a two-week vacation with a friend, and I extended my trip for another week to see Zion, Bryce, and the Grand Canyon while she flew back to NY.

The second time I came here was two years later, this time with my sister. It was part of a three-week, five National Park spree.

Fast forward a few years and I came with Bob and our 3 boys.

Then 16 years ago, Bob and I were here in the winter. Words cannot describe the beauty of white snow on red rock.

And finally, we were back in Zion last week.

The park is enormous, but the most visited section is Zion Canyon, carved by the Virgin River. We were in that part of the park for six days. We’ll be back for some of the rest later.

The views never get old. They change with the lighting, the time of day, the weather, and the season. You can sit in one spot all day and watch the view change minute by minute.

We went biking. We loaded our bikes on the shuttle bus, got off at the last stop, and biked down to the start, all downhill, stopping a million times on the way down to take pictures.

A campsite with a view.

"Snowing" Cottonwood Fluff in Zion National Park

Lill and Bob’s Excellent RV Adventures, New Edition

Lill and Bob’s Excellent RV Adventures, New Edition

It’s been a while. A very long while…

I never got around to blogging about last spring/summer’s 3 month trip to Newfoundland with some Labrador, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick squeezed in.

Nor did I blog about our 3 week trip this past winter to Panama. (No, we did not drive in our RV.) It was our first time on an airplane in about 6 years. It was very, very annoying having to pack suitcases, then unpack them, and lug them around to all the places we went to.

But now we are traveling in our RV again! And I will try to blog this trip.

To catch up, Wed April 30th, a little over two weeks ago we left New Jersey and headed west. 4 of the first 8 days were long slogs of driving about 500 miles each day, with a lovely Shabbos in Kansas City, KS, and a day in gorgeous Colorado National Monument before getting to our first destination of Zion National Park last Wednesday. 

Here are some pictures from the first week:

After driving for 2 days, we make it to Gokul, our favorite Indian restaurant, for dinner. In St Louis, 950 miles from home. I asked the owner to please open a restaurant in NJ and he told me that his Jewish customers from all over ask him that.

Spent a lovely Shabbos in Kansas City

We took a picture from almost this exact same spot overlooking Dillon Reservoir off of Rt 10 in Colorado 4 years ago. There was a lot more snow then.

Colorado National Monument, less than a week after we left home.

The first week

Prayer for the Traveler - What Happened to the Robbers and Wild Animals?

We Are Off on Our Next Adventure!

Every time we start on one of our trips, whoever is not driving always reads the "Prayer for the Traveler" (Tefilat HaDerech) soon after starting out. (Or as soon as we remember, which is when we see an accident, or someone cuts us off, etc.) Or on takeoff, for those kinds of trips.

This is a prayer we always say with a lot of Kavanah (very sincerely).

I have a card with a printout of this prayer in my pocketbook, but on our last trip, my pocketbook was locked up. So I figured it would be easier to just read Tefilat HaDerech from the Siddur (Prayerbook) app on my phone. Which I did.

But Bob and I immediately realized something was very wrong with the wording!

This is a translation of the defective text from the app:

May it be Your will, G d, our G d and the G d of our fathers, that You should lead us in peace and direct our steps in peace, and guide us in peace, and support us in peace, and cause us to reach our destination in life, joy, and peace (If one intends to return the same day, one adds: and return us in peace). Save us from every enemy and ambush and may You confer blessing upon the work of our hands and grant us grace, kindness, and mercy in Your eyes and in the eyes of all who see us and listen to the voice of our prayer. For You hear the prayers of all. Blessed are You G d, who hears prayer.

What happened to the Robbers and Wild Animals? And Pooraniyot*?

Protection is generally asked for these in Tefilat HaDerech. Given the types of trips we take, we definitely need it!

Try my phone, said Bob. But his read same as mine. Duh - he had recommended the app I used.

Then I remembered I had downloaded a printout of Tefilat HaDerech. Checked my downloads folder, and there it was!

I read it out loud, and whew, now we were covered!

Here is the version of Tefilat HaDerech we use -

יְהִי רָצוֹן מִלְפָנֶיךָ יְ-יָ אֱ-לֹהֵינוּ וֵא-לֹהֵי אֲבוֹתֵינוּ. שֶׁתּוֹלִיכֵנוּ לְשָׁלוֹם. וְתַצְעִידֵנוּ לְשָׁלוֹם. וְתַדְרִיכֵנוּ לְשָׁלוֹם. וְתִסְמְכֵנוּ לְשָׁלוֹם. וְתַגִּיעֵנוּ לִמְחוֹז חֶפְצֵנוּ לְחַיִּים וּלְשִׂמְחָה וּלְשָׁלוֹם. (ואם דעתו לחזור מיד אומר: וְתַחֲזִירֵנוּ לְשָׁלוֹם). וְתַצִילֵנוּ מִכַּף כָּל-אוֹיֵב וְאוֹרֵב וְלִסְטִים וְחַיּוֹת רָעוֹת בַּדֶּרֶך. וּמִכָּל פֻּרְעָנִיּוֹת הַמִּתְרַגְּשׁוֹת וּבָאוֹת לָעוֹלָם. וְתִשְׁלַח בְּרָכָה בְּכָל מַעֲשֵׂה יָדֵינוּ. וְתִתְּנֵנִוּּ לְחֵן וּלְחֶסֶד וּלְרַחֲמִים בְּעֵינֶיךָ וּבְעֵינֵי כָל רוֹאֵינוּ. וְתִגְמְלֵנוּ חֲסָדִים טוֹבִים. וְתִשְׁמַע קוֹל תְּפִלָּתֵינוּ. כִּי אַתָּה שׁוֹמֵעַ תְּפִלַת כָּל פֶּה: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְ-יָ שׁוֹמֵעַ תְּפִלָה:

Bolded words translated as:

Save us from every enemy and ambush, from robbers and wild beasts on the trip, and from all kinds of punishments that rage and come to the world. 

*This wording of “all types of punishments that rage to come to the world ” (in other translations given as “all manner of punishments that assemble to come to earth”) is a translation for the words פֻּרְעָנֻיּוֹת and הַמִּתְרַגְּשׁוֹת לָבוֹא לָעוֹלָם

Google translate defines the word פֻּרְעָנִיּוֹת as Atrocities. I translate the phrase as “all of the bad stuff”.

We got a very late start yesterday (Wednesday)...

This was one of the weirder things we have ever seen driving on the road...

It was a long slog down I95...

Our home for the night. Santee State Park, Lakeshore Campground, SC

Hope to be in Savannah for Shabbos!

Preparing ...

In preparation for our upcoming trip, Bob bought a new pair of Lowa Renegade hiking boots to replace his 8 year old Lowa Renegade hiking boots.

Had this tread been on our tires, we would have had a blowout a long time ago.

We’ll be heading out in a little over a week!

I wonder how many hundreds of miles these old boots logged?

Mostly Butterflies and Birds and the Seagull Who Stole My Lunch

Monarch Caterpillar on Milkweed - Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens

Monarch Butterflies - all over

Swallowtail - Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens

Not a Monarch - Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens

Bald Eagle - Moose Point State Park

Note: no Moose

Glossy Ibis - Scarborough Marsh

Cormorant - all over

Deer - Several places. Yawn. Didn’t even bother trying to take pictures.

Trolls - Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens

Seal - Schoodic Peninsula, Acadia National Park. Saw it on Shabbos, so no picture. You will have to take my word for it. It was extremely cute. You will have to take my word for that also.

Something With a Dorsal Fin - Schoodic Peninsula, Acadia National Park

Possibly an orca? A porpoise? The trick is, when you see seabirds circling a spot in the ocean, there is usually some predator in the area.

This is the Seagull Who Stole My Lunch - Schoodic Peninsula, Acadia National Park

This is how it went down. First, he landed nearby. He kept hopping closer. We shooed him away. And then! When I was distracted taking pictures of the dorsal fin pictured above, he swooped in from behind and grabbed the wrap right out of my hand! He gobbled down the wrap and left the filling. But the joke was on him! The wrap was low carb.

Porcupine - Somewhere in these bushes. He didn’t hang around to pose.

I’d never seen a porcupine in the wild before!

Barnacles and Mussels - Schoodic Peninsula, Acadia National Park

Second Bull Moose Sighting! - This time at LL Bean

Continuing Home - New Mexico to Oklahoma to Arkansas - 1,260 Miles to Go

Shabbos we were at Santa Rosa Lake State Park in NM. Its main recommendations - it was conveniently located on the route home, and our campsite provided an electric connection. Electricity was necessary over Shabbos to run the water tank heaters so our pipes wouldn’t freeze during the unusual cold spell. As an extra precaution, we poured antifreeze down the drains. Temps got as low as 13 degrees Friday night. B”H, our pipes survived.

As a bonus, I was able to use our crockpot and we had hot soup for Shabbos lunch.

We took a walk to the lake Shabbos morning. The lake was more of a pond. Formed by a dam, the water level is very low due to the extreme drought the Southwest has been experiencing the past few years. The story of the drought was one we heard over and over on our trip.

Unsightly bleached skeletons of trees that drowned when the water covered them and were left high and dry when the water receded

Sunday was a long boring slog from New Mexico through Texas to Oklahoma City on Route 40 (covering the same ground as Route 66, another repeating theme on our trips).

One bright spot (literally) on the drive, just off the highway before Amarillo, was Cadillac Ranch.

Cadillac Ranch is “public art installation and sculpture,” or looked at from a different angle, a bunch of heavily graffitied old Cadillacs buried nose deep in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere, unpleasantly downwind from a stockyard.

Last time we were there, with Yoni and Aryeh almost 20 years ago, it was a weird, lonely place. Now it is still weird, but overrun with hordes wielding spray paint who are determined to leave their mark. However, the paint never even gets a chance to dry before the next horde adds another layer.

Some enterprising person has even set up a truck selling cans of spray paint. On a good day, they can sell up to 150. I asked.

Everything in the area is a canvas, not just the cars. The garbage cans were highly decorated as were some of the stalks of whatever had been growing in the fields. When we got back to Our V, we were relieved that it was still the same shade of unmarred silver as when we left.

Sunday night we boondocked at a Walmart, otherwise know as Wallydocking, just outside of Oklahoma City.

Monday, we saw the site of the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing and stopped for a tour of the State Capital Building. We have been “collecting” state capitals.

Onward through the rest of Oklahoma to Arkansas. The scenery changed from endless flat  fields to scenery similar to Appalachia. We pass lakes and rivers. We are not used to seeing so much open water.

Somewhere in the past two days we lost an hour. I am jetlagged. 

We are currently in Hot Springs National Park till Wednesday morning.