my travels in pixels

We had read the weather report for both Salt Lake City and Jackson (the nearest town to the Grand Tetons) and both had said that thunderstorms were on the agenda for the next few days. We found a little state park campground on the way up and it snowed while we tried to cook dinner! The little van is really only a fair weather vehicle, it is not pleasant when it's raining or snowing as the space inside is very limited and you pretty much have to go to bed. We arrived on the second day and found a camp spot in Gros Ventre campground which is just outside the Grand Teton National Park, but run by the park. It is close enough to Jackson for us to go in and get dinner. You can’t cook if it’s raining! Unfortunately Lindsay had already started cooking on the first night before we realized it would rain and he got wet. snow! Bison in our campground The next morning we woke up to snow! We spent the next couple of days in the same campground and went into Jackson du...

When I booked our campsite in January I was actually trying to find a spot in June but backtracked to May to get five days in a row. We could only get space in a campsite outside the Village. Forty-five minutes away. Next time I would book single nights if possible and jump online as soon as the window opened for the dates we want. I rang the information line to check if the Tioga Pass was open as it isn’t due to open until June, but they had a mild winter and it was opened a week before we arrived. We stayed the night before in a campsite called Lee Vining named after the town we had just come through. There were others along the route but luckily we hadn’t keep going as they were all closed. This was our first encounter with the bear boxes. You have to put all your food and toiletries – basically anything that has a smell – into metal cabinets. And yes locking them is a good idea – luckily there weren’t any bears around as Lindsay didn’t shut ours properly – potentially we could ha...

The drive into Zion from the eastern entrance is very windy, tight and narrow. There are a number of tunnels to go through and RV's need to be escorted as the road needs to be blocked off for them to fit through the tunnels. Driving through, we weren't impressed. This is Utah's most popular park. Zion is busy, really busy. We had to share a group site the first night and were ready to leave the next day because it was so horrible. The next morning we found a spot at the Southern campground which is near the river with lovely trees all around us which squirrels run up. The main hike people do here is up the narrows but you need a wet suit as you are walking up the river, so we won’t be doing that one! What a difference a nice camp site makes. This is really nice, cottonwood trees blow fluff through the air and there is a creek a few hundred metres away. They have an excellent bus service here, so I stop off first at the three Patriarchs which unfortunately are in shade and...

Another place I was really looking forward to see, and wasn't disappointed. It is breathtaking. I would love to come here when the hoodoo’s are covered in snow. We got a campsite in the Sunset campground and we had collected wood before we got in so that we could have a fire. The campground is lovely and the rest rooms are nice and clean, with trails in the middle so that you don’t have to walk through anyone’s camp site or back along the road. The campsites are surrounded by Ponderosa pines which are beautiful and as Lindsay said, you don’t have to worry about them dropping their limbs, like gum trees. They do have a bus service but we decided to drive to some of the points. Sunrise, Sunset, Inspiration and Bryce Points. Bryce Canyon I wanted to check where Thor’s Hammer was for the next morning, so walked partly down the Navajo trail to the two bridges. I had told Lindsay to go back as he had pinched a nerve in his back, but I didn’t know if he had taken that as back to ...

Antelope Canyon, UT I had been looking forward to this site ever since I found out it existed. We got into Page and had lunch on the lush green lawns of the visitor centre of the Glen Canyon Dam which sits on Lake Powell. Lake Powell, there are a lot of houseboats on the water I then needed to find a tour company to do Antelope Canyon as it is on Navajo land as you can’t go in there by yourself. There are two parts to the canyon, upper and lower. I decided to do the most popular, the upper one. I also decided to do the photographic tour which is two and a half hours (the other is 1.5 hours). I had read a couple of reviews on a few companies and couldn’t really decide, so we went to the visitor centre. Two doors down was Antelope Canyon Tours and we went in there and booked. We were lucky that Lindsay had decided not to do it as there had been a cancellation that day for tomorrow, with the next available spot more than three weeks away! That night we found a commercial campgroun...