Myrtle Beach - 2024 - We have arrived

Well, we made it safely to Myrtle Beach without any issues. This year we are staying in The Anderson Beach Club and Spa which is a few buildings down from the Caribbean. We have a one bedroom unit on the 14th floor. The room is nice with a beautiful view of the ocean. It's smaller but we can make it work. The building is very busy right now as there are many visitors for the Christmas holidays. Ralph and I enjoyed some time at Huntington yesterday. It's really nice to see that there is an abundance of birds this year.  We've planned our first round of golf for tomorrow at The Pearl. The forecast is for a beautiful day.  We had lots of rain this afternoon along with a Tornado watch.  Thankfully it amounted to nothing serious.  I had my camera all ready in the event that there were lightning strikes across the ocean.  Maybe next time.  The day ended with a stunning sunset.  

Birds at Huntington beach....

Saturday evening sunset

Sunday morning sunrise

Enjoying time on the balcony before the rain

A beautiful sunset to finish the day.

Bryce Canyon

Bryce Canyon has always been a place that Ralph and I wanted to visit.  It is a very unique place filled with hoodoo's and various rock formations.  Pictures don't do it justice and it is the most amazing place to visit.

We went to all of the observation areas and also enjoyed a walk down one of the hiking paths.  It was a strenuous path to take and we only went about halfway down.  Oh my..... the views were amazing and we thoroughly enjoyed our visit here.  The only area we couldn't get access to was the Amphitheatre.  It was just too crowded and we were unable to find parking.  

The path we hiked down was called Queens Garden. It was very. beautiful.

Zion National Park

On Tuesday we decided to go see Zion National Park.  We were up fairly early and headed to Starbucks for a coffee and to check our emails.  Our house that we are staying at has really poor wifi and we cannot get very good access to the internet.  That's ok though as we can head out for a nice coffee before starting our day.  

Zion is an absolutely gorgeous park.  The only sad part about that is that it attracts millions of visitors every year. We we got there, we could already tell that it was going to be crazy busy.  You are not allowed to drive your vehicle in certain areas of the park are are forced to find parking outside in the town of Springdale.  From what we saw, no parking was to be found.  We drove through the entrance and checked out how long the waiting was for the shuttle bus that takes you through the park.  It looked to be about 2 hours. Not going to happen we. both said out loud. I personally do not like crowds and did not feel bad about avoiding the lineups and waiting time.  We opted to drive the scenic route. We had an amazing day just doing that.  There was so much to see and we really enjoyed our time there.  The views are incredible.  We saw someone doing rock climbing and I could only watch for a short while.  It was soooo high and soooo steep.  I was terrified for the two people doing the climb.  We also hiked along a dried up river bed.  The striations in the rocks along the river bed were so beautiful.  There was such a variety of rocks in the area and the colours were so different depending on where you were.  It was so pretty.

Can you find the rock climber

This is the wall the rock climber was going up....yikes

Kolob Canyon

 Today we decided to go to Kolob Canyon, which is part of Zion National Park.  Its not as busy as Zion and offers many trails that you can hike along as well as a beautiful drive with many outlooks.  It was a beautiful day for a hike so we decided to take the Taylor Creek hike which followed a stream and took you to a natural bridge (made from rock).  The hike starts with a fairly steep climb down however there are stairs provided which are made from natural rock.  The scenery was amazing while going down the stairs and the views of the mountain were incredible.  Once you reach the bottom you start following a natural trail.  It's rocky in spots and often crosses the stream itself (we were later told that you cross the stream 102 times during this hike) and our hiking shoes were soaked by the time we finished our walk.  We weren't expecting it to be as far as it was and eventually I started getting concerned about my sugar levels.  I encouraged Ralph to keep going to the end, while I turned backed and walked back to the truck. The hike itself was a 4 hour journey.  I completed 3 hours while Ralph did the full 4 hours.  We met lots of nice people along the way.  Afterwards we enjoyed a nice lunch and then drove up to the top of the mountain and enjoyed the various lookouts.  It's a beautiful area and well worth exploring.

After spending the day at Kolob Canyon we headed back to Cedar Breaks National Park to watch the sunset.  It was a beautiful evening.  The snow was melting and it wasn't quite as cold this time.  

Cedar Breaks National Park

We spent a quiet day on Sunday and eventually headed out to view the sunset at Cedar Breaks National Park.  They had received a lot of snow a couple of days previously and the park itself was closed for the winter season. The gates were open so you could still drive in however certain areas were closed to visitors.  As we were driving to the park, it got foggier and foggier and by the time we reached the top elevation (10,300 feet above sea level), we found we had very little visibility.  Wow, we didn't really know where we were going or what to look for because we couldn't see anything.  We stopped along the side of the road and took some pictures of the trees and the snow and eventually we found a path that we could walk on.  It was really cold (28F).  After a short walk we decided we would head home because there really wasn't much to see.  Just as we were leaving the park, the clouds started to clear and we were able to stop and see a sunset albeit a short lived one as it was almost over.  It was beautiful to see the snow around the hoodoo's and we said that we would return the next day and try to catch the sunset again. The park itself was only about 30 minutes from where we were staying.  

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