Into The rain

Time to leave Capitol Reef. It rained most of the night and was still raining intermittently in the morning. We are all packed up and we have fresh-picked apples and pears and still have some pie to take with us. Next stop Bryce Canyon National Park.

There are two routes to Bryce Canyon, the scenic byway and the slightly shorter, but faster route. We thought that we could do some provisioning in Panguitch, the largest town along the way, so we took the faster route. By the time we reached Panguitch, the rain had returned and it was fairly heavy. It was a rather wet refueling of both gasoline and propane, before we stopped to shop.

The only grocery in Panguitch is Mike's Market and it wasn't much of a grocery store. It didn't seem to have much we wanted (it didn't help that we didn't know what we wanted, either). We left with about $15.00 worth of groceries. By then it was lunch time.

On the way to Mike's, we passed the Cowboy BBQ. It looked pretty good, so we headed back there. As we parked next to it and got out of Speedy, the fine aroma of smoking meat pervaded the air. Prospects for a good lunch seemed even better. That lasted until we got to the door. It was dark. The chairs were upended onto the tables. The sign in the window said it opened at 3pm. There was a local place across the street. It seemed to be frequented by locals, even the sheriff's department showed up, so we took a chance. We had a couple of burgers. They were okay, but didn't match the aroma from across the street.

The rain had let up by the time we left Panguitch, and the rest of the drive to Bryce Canyon was damp and gray until we got onto Route 12 and entered Red Canyon in Dixie National Forest. This is the western gateway to Bryce Canyon and the road goes up through a literally red canyon, made even more so from the rain. Finally, we turned off Rt. 12 and into the entry to Bryce Canyon.

We made a quick stop at the visitor center, but it was jammed with visitors due to the rain, so we continued on to the Sunset Campground, where the best site available was the site we had two years ago, when we first visited it. It was then off to the laundry. Bryce has a general store with showers and a laundry attached, and we were getting low on clean clothes. It was still a gray and damp afternoon, not much else to do.

While waiting, we called our friends, Harry & Sally, who are heading in this direction in their Roadtrek. We'd planned to connect with them when they got out here. The most convenient place is Grand Canyon, but it was a bit difficult to plan a route where the timing was right. We had thought of spending a couple of days at Bryce, then going to Zion National Park, via Cedar Breaks National Monument, and spending a few days there. Since we also wanted to go to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, an intended highlight of this trip, but the timing was not there.

Since we really wanted to see the North Rim and we'd already been to Zion and Bryce, we decided to go directly to the North Rim tomorrow and meet up with our friends in a week at the South Rim. After confirming this with them, as they drove through Pennsylvania, that plan was decided.

Laundry and planning done, the skies began to brighten a bit, so we took a drive along the scenic route and took a late afternoon look at the hoodoos of Bryce Canyon. It was still gray, but patches of sun broke through onto the far cliffs and low clouds floated through the canyon. We were high enough to look down on them.

Photos of Capitol Reef