To celebrate our two year anniversary (whoohoo!) my husband and I took a short, but adventurous getaway to southern Utah. We indulged our outdoorsy side and took to exploring Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon, both magnificent. Although my husband has just recently come around to the the whole sleeping outside thing, I have always been a camper. I grew up in Oregon, so camping is sort of a requirement for citizenship there. Despite my husband’s recent conversion to life in the outdoors, we were both stoked for our little weekend holiday.
Friday afternoon we packed our Odwalla bars and Chacos and we were off! By the time we arrived in Zion’s we were famished so, we so we succumbed to the temptation and treated ourselves at the Switchback Grille. After all, it was our anniversary! By the time we were finished with our lavish meal, the Sun had long since gone down and we were left to assemble our tent in the dark (rookie mistake). As we brought out our trusty headlamps and began assembling our home for the next few days, I heard a strange noise. It sounded halfway between a hiccup and a burp. I didn’t think much of it, but as I flashed my headlamp toward the ground, I saw a large slimy toad that had taken a liking to our tarp. I immediately started laughing and my husband, clueless to what I had found so humorous, began thrashing his headlamp about in an attempt to discover what I had seen. I pointed his lamp in the right direction just as the toad hopped away. We were both happy that the toad decided to depart from our campsite on his own because neither one of us wanted to be the one to physically remove him (bleh).
When our tent was finally set up, we were completely exhausted. As our heads hit our pillows, we both immediately fell right to sleep, only to be awakened by the worst storm in the history of storms. Okay, it wasn’t that bad, but it was kind of scary. What was at first a light drizzle, quickly turned into a violent downpour with unrelenting thunder and lightning. Every time I finally fell back asleep, the thunder would tear me away from my rem cycle and the lightning would light up our tent as if it had instantly caught on fire. As the rain kept pelting down, I kept (half awake) imagining our little tent floating away on a river that once was our campground. Needless to say, we didn’t get much sleep.
Regardless, the next morning we woke with a pep in our step ready for the day’s adventures. We hiked the Narrows, which is basically a shallow river with steep canyon walls on each side, and it’s stunning. Since it had rained the night before, the river water was a bit murky, but it was still gorgeous. We spent the entire day hiking and retired to our camp late that night. Thankfully, no storm pursued. The next day we made the trek to Bryce Canyon to discover its majestic orange stone moguls. Unlike Zion’s, Bryce Canyon is less of a hiking kind of adventure and more of a driving up a winding mountain kind of adventure. Neither one of us had ever been to Bryce Canyon and didn’t know what to expect, but it was absolutely breathtaking. Photos just don’t do it justice. In the late afternoon, when we had seen all there was to see, we took the scenic route and made our way back home. Although I loved our little vacation, it’s always nice to get back a normal bed and your own shower.
Shop my look:
J.Crew Beach Tee, Flannel (similar), Chaco Sandals (similar), Levi Shorts