Trip to St. George

Monday, November 1, 2010

Some friend's in the 6th ward invited us on a trip to St. George to ride four-wheelers. At first I wasn't very excited. I mean it did seem a bit ridiculous to drive 8+ hours to ride four-wheelers. I am so glad that we went now - it really was a lot of fun and very relaxing. We had such a great time with the Holyoak's and Long's. The trip down was really quite short as we all anticipated what our new wards would be like when we returned. (We were all split into different wards the Sunday that we left - bummer.) We stopped the first night and stayed at Chris Long's mom's house. What a nice lady. She feed us scones in the morning. The first day we rode straight to the dunes from SLC. We played around there for 1/2 a day. It was kind of like snowmobiling on hills but the weather was a lot nicer. We did get lost just a few times. It is easy to get turned around.

Chris and Becky Long

Alan and Dell were the only brave ones who went down this large dune. Going down was easy but coming back up was more challenging.

Me and Kaylene

Alan sunning on some rocks

Beautiful view

Dell & Kaylene Holyoak

I climbed over on some rocks and took a picture of our group in the background.

On Tuesday, November 2nd we rode from Mark Hicken's house (old college friends that live in Hurricane) through Zion's National park (we were only there for a short time - I guess it is illegal to ride through the park on 4-wheelers). We then rode off to find Honeymoon's trail. (The pioneer's called it Honeymoon's trail because after they got married in the St. George temple the trip back home was so long it was considered their honeymoon.) We rode forever looking for this trail. We came across what we thought might be the trail  and passing around a bend we saw a sign that said "Danger, quarantined area." We saw some trailers with a large satellite dish off in the distance. We didn't waste much time as we circled back around to the main trail. We ended up finding Honeymoon trail after some trial and error. It was actually a pretty fun ride as we slowly went down this trail. It was not a trail that you could blaze down quickly. I can't imagine wagons going up and down it. We rode pretty much all day and ended back up at Mark's house. I kind of felt like red-necked drivers as we pull into a populated gas station to fill up our machines. We were a bit worried that Alan's machine would run out of gas but it never did. We were all pretty filthy. Lots of dust.

At the top of hill. You can see Zion's National park in the background. Nice dirt on my face!

Pausing for lunch

Dell was our driver and guide. He is a great guy.

The girls

Zion's Park

On the third day we met up with Mark Hicken and he took us on a really fun trail through some water and up a mountainside where you could look down into the valley. After wards we ate at this great little restaurant in Hurricane and I had the best BLT I have ever had (we had a rule that we couldn't eat at any place that we had in the Magic Valley). We split off from the group and Alan and I spent the second 1/2 of the day walking around St. George. We met up later with Mark and Elaine Hicken for dinner. We had so much fun visiting and catching up with them. We ended the trip with a session at the St. George temple.

Looks more dangerous than it was

Mark took us to some awesome waterfalls

Only in St. George can you jump into the waterfall in November.

I guess Mark does this every time he visits this area

The Hicken's and us

We had a great time visiting St. George. I think that I could get used to living there.