Cross Country Adventures: April 7 to 16, 2009

Last week at this time we were happily getting ready for a leisurely trip back to Ottawa, following I-40 and heading in a fairly direct easterly routing. Unfortunately, that was not to be. We were having some problems with our satellite dish and found that the only way to get it fixed was to visit the head office of Moto Sat in Salt Lake City, Utah, directly north of Phoenix about 650 miles. So here we are tonight in St. George, Utah where we'll be spending the next 4 or 5 days as we can't get an appointment at the company until next Tuesday.

We spent last night at Sam's Town RV Park in Las Vegas, Nevada. It was a fairly windy day and the road had lots of elevation changes so I'm sure we didn't get great mileage. It was about 6:30 when we arrived. It's a good thing we got into town when we did as it got dark quickly after that. I don't like having to set up in a strange park at night. As it was it was too late to make supper in the rig so we visited the Casino next door and had supper there.

Today we only travelled 120 miles but we went through some pretty country. We passed through Virgin River Canyon as we travelled through Nevada, Arizona and Utah in about a 30 mile stretch. The Canyon was a remarkable combination of nature and engineering skill.

Really, this seems like a bit of a downer but we are actually pretty pleased how everything has worked out. We are about 30 miles from Zion National Park and expect to visit it at least two of the next four days. We had hoped to visit parts of Utah this winter and decided we couldn't afford it. Well, here we are! Also, there are great bike trails in St. George and we'll likely try those out as well. Every cloud has a silver lining :-)

This is a picture of the highway between Las Vegas, Nevada as we were heading towards St. George. There was some pretty extreme weather around Salt Lake City and this was the southern edge of that system.