To Eliminate Stress - 1 part good food, 10 parts ZION's!

Zion's was just the break we needed! Dave thought it would be nice to cook all kinds of fabulous dinners while we were down there, so we came with the fixings for Chicken Enchiladas, Pesto & Pasta, Chicken Parmesan, and eggs with sausage (for breakfast one day). I convinced him that we could eat leftovers for some of the nights. I had to work a half day, so on the way home I picked up In-N-Out (Dave's FAVORITE fast food). We ate that, packed up our stuff and hit the road!

Mom & Dad came down that night as well. They needed to prune the apple trees at the cabin and get a little work done around the house. Saturday morning Dave helped  my Dad with the pruning, my Mom worked on some inside projects, and I worked on a few projects of my own. We hiked the Watchman Trail after lunch. Neither Dave nor I had done it before, and we were impressed by the view. We plan to do it again some time when the plants are more green (well, as green as the desert can be). Here's a picture of the view from the top:

Sunday we headed down to Hurricane for church, lunch, and some serious hearts! It was great to see Grandma & Grandpa: they're looking great, and we had tons of fun. Dave just loves my grandparents, and enjoys getting to know them better. He hasn't been very close to his Grandparents, so it's nice for him to have that type of relationship with mine.

Monday we hiked Emerald Pools and the Overlook Trail in the morning. I think every time we go to Zion's we hike Emerald Pools, but the Overlook Trail was new to us. It's right after the tunnel and goes up, through a cave and again has a great view! As you're heading up the trail you can see one of the slots below (I believe it's Pine Creek, but it's been a while since I've done that one). It was just what we needed to get out there and hike like crazy!

Tuesday we tried to hike the Sand Bench. It's about a 6 mile trail that should take 4 hours to complete. Most of the trails in Zion are clearly marked, when you come to a fork in the road. Sand Bench is not. We got an hour into the hike and the trail split into 3 paths. I said the middle one looked correct, Dave chose the one veering right. I'm still not sure which trail was the correct one, but after following the right trail for 3 HOURS without finding the loop around that was described in the guide book, we decided we had picked the wrong trail.

This path lead us up hill on a completely sandy trail. It's tough to hike up hill in sand! It really made our calves burn, but the view at the end was beautiful! Because the snow is melting right now you could see a waterfall at the top of the mountain in front of us, and if you turned around you got a up close view of the Court of the Patriarchs. Beautiful, but not what we thought we were getting ourselves into!

It was just so beautiful and so relaxing!!! We needed a break from school and work so bad, and this gave us exactly the break we needed. Thanks Zions!