Started the morning off with the drive out of Zion through the Zion/Mt. Carmel Tunnel getting awesome views of the canyon. The Utah landscape is absolutely gorgeous between Zion and Bryce Canyon on Hwy 89. When we got closer, we parked outside of the park and took the shuttle in to avoid the parking lot wars.
Got off at Sunset Point and worked our way down the Navajo trail through Wall Street and down into the Bryce Canyon Ampitheatre. At the crossroads we added the Queen’s Garden trail because people were telling us that it is a must see… Well… it didn’t look all that different from the rest of the canyon ampitheatre. When an older dude overheard us, he chimed in that 50 yrs ago it was pretty cool and that it’s been eroded away now! I guess we came too late? But the trail back up from Queen’s Garden on the Sunrise trail was purty! We had arches to walk through and at every turn there were more and more vistas of Bryce Canyon! :)
All along the way, Alex carried Froggy in his arms because he had dropped him and broken him in half. And all along the way, we got inquisitive looks from fellow hikers and some even asked us what it was. It would have been too much to explain to them the Ashby Manor days so we referred to our favorite pop culture French film: Amelie. Even then, only the foreigners knew Amelie Poulain. One woman even asked us if it was our fertility frog… ERRRR…. AWKWARD TURTLE! Or should I say frog? 
Then we booked it out of Bryce Canyon and started the drive on I-70E to Arches NP/Moab. It was a long 6 hr drive with tons of road construction and awesome lightning storms in the east. Turns out that we were actually driving towards the storm! As we got closer to Arches, the sky really darkened. We had driven into the heart of darkness with flash flood advisories. So much for our plan to camp in Arches! :( Instead we drove around to diff motels only to find that they had no vacancies for the night. Finally we found a Riverside Inn a little off downtown Moab that we crashed at for the night. I guess it was a blessing in disguise. We were really in need of a shower and comfy bed anyway after our two days of hiking.
For dinner we tried to hit up a local brewery for late night food, but lightning and thunder boomed nearby as we were going to the car. Fearing for our lives, we tried a local pizza delivery place that had a Berkeley-esque logo: Paradox Pizza. For the record, they had really good spicy veggie soup with peppers and onions. I had to have my soup! Alex did not take part in the awesome soup! He had a Hawaiian Italian with you guessed it: pineapple and prosciutto!
With our bellies full, we are heading to bed.
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