Day 4: On the road again

Finally back to my trip recap! I'm going to forget everything at this rate.

As usual, here's where I post links to the previous entries in case you're just joining us:

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3 (Part 1)
Day 3 (Part 2)
Gallery of all my photos, most of which did not make it in the blog posts

Okay! On Saturday (back on October 10th), Dania and I had our last morning in Utah before heading back to Vegas. Before leaving Bryce, we wanted to check out the view in different lighting, and from a different point than what we had seen the day before.


We headed to Inspiration Point, which is at 8,100 feet elevation.


Even though these pictures are cool for me to look at, I know that they don't compare to real life. There are so many textures and colors and every angle is a little different. Plus it's just really interesting, and not the kind of terrain you run into every day (unless you live there, of course!). I'm getting broken record-y about this, but it was just such a unique experience to see this canyon full of spires and hoodoos.


Eventually it was time to get going, and we said goodbye to Bryce and started back on our longish drive (about 4 hours, I guess) to Vegas. It went pretty smoothly, and they let you drive fast in Utah. Sometimes the highway had an 85mph limit! I wasn't very comfortable maintaining that, though I'm sure I would if I had a bit more practice.

We stopped for lunch in...I forget the town. A place that has a university. Oh, Cedar City! I looked it up. That was probably the first normal-sized city we came across, and they happened to have a Zaxby's. I had only been once in NC years ago and remembered it being a yummy southern fast food chain. We picked up some lunch, made another stop at Walmart (I can't even remember why now), and then made it to Vegas in the early afternoon.

Since we had a bit of time before our flights, we made a couple of stops. First was to a mermaid show Dania had read about. This girl was the only mermaid that day, and she swam around and played little window games with the kids.

Then we decided to go back to the Bellagio. I really wanted to see it again because I loved it there and was eager to watch the fountain show again in daylight. First we walked through the lobby and conservatory, though.

You saw this from when we went on Wednesday, but it was night time then.

Check out this pumpkin made of roses.

I'm in ♥ with the Bellagio. Hm...am I supposed to say "the" in front of it or not?

We watched the fountain show, and then went and had some gelato. Time was getting tight by this point, because everything takes longer than you think it should (like walking to the gelato place, waiting in line, finding the car, dealing with traffic). But we managed to get the rental car back in time and clear everything out.

After we were checked in at the airport, we eventually parted ways so that Dania could fly back to Sacramento while I flew to Albuquerque. It was a little sad to see this portion of the trip come to an end, but I was excited to see my sister's family for a couple of days! I can't even remember much about the rest of that night besides landing in Albuquerque and my sister and brother-in-law picking me up. We got back late, so most of the girls were asleep in anticipation of an early morning at the balloon fiesta. The oldest, L, was letting me use her bedroom and it looked so cute and tidy! And then we all went to sleep.

Hopefully soon I can talk about Sunday at the balloon fiesta and the remainder of my trip! Thanks for following along. As always, I have additional photos here in this gallery: Utah Trip Gallery