Day 11: Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef and Moab

Today will be a busy day! Not only do we have to drive from Cedar City to Moab (8 hours non stop), but also we would like to visit Bryce Canyon and Capitol Reef, which we pass by on our way. So we got up a bit early and are on the road at 08.30. On our way to Bryce Canyon we make a stop at Cedar Breaks National Monument and make some pictures of the big impressive canyon. Though today will be sunny with a clear blue sky, it is very cold here because we are at 9000 feet (like 3000 meter) and it is a bit windy. So we take some photographs and get back in our car driving up to Bryce Canyon.

At the Bryce Canyon visitor center we watch an informative, award winning movie about the Canyon. Though it is not as great as the Hubble 3D experience, we had an interesting 22 minutes. Now we know more about the canyon we can explore it ourselves. We drive to Sunset Point and make a 1 hour hike down to the canyonfloor (the Wall Street loop, for the insiders). I kind of get boring telling how great and beautiful things are here in the National Parks, but what we see here is very very special. When you walk down the canyon you feel getting smaller and smaller, because the wall on both side get higher and higher. And the walls are not just walls, they consist of beautiful layered, red and orange colored sandstone, something I saw earlier in the Antelope Canyon near Page. But it is hard to explain the experience, maybe the photos will tell more here.

We leave the gorgeous Canyon behind and continue our way to Moab. The landscape transforms from prairy, to the moonsurface and to very sculptural cliffs, colored from red to grey to yellow (also at Capitol Reef, where we experience the landscape passing by since there is no time for walking around).

In the nighttime we arrive in Moab at the most expensive hotel of these 2 weeks, the Comfort Suites Moab (ze hebben een aantal mooie foto’s op internet Maai! 😉 Veel plezier in Turkije alvast!). All the hotels here are very expensive (this was the most inexpensive one) we think because we are in a rural area without any villages nearby. But our room here is gigantic, about 40 square meters of space and even our own “living area” with a desk and a couch. And they serve hot breakfast, something we didn’t have before here (our toasted bread not included). For dinner the pizzahut treats us with 2 enornous pizza’s of which we take home for breakfast more than half. It seems that our first hot breakfast will have to wait untill the day after tomorrow!