Easy Breezy Cover Girl

We finally got to sleep in, but we can no longer sleep past 7 or 7:30. It was going to be easy-like-Sunday-morning, because it was Sunday morning. At Tom’s main house, we got our coffee and broke the news to him that Zebra just wasn’t in our immediate future and we’d be heading to Bryce. (This offended him since yesterday, he did the gag me with a spoon move when we said Bryce was our next stop.) He said, totally defeated, “Well, I guess you go to Grosvener’s Arch.” Good! It’s between Escalante and Bryce! Perfectly on our way!

Thanks for the fun, map, coffee, and suggestion Tom! Can’t wait to do some laundry, take ‘er easy, drive Bryce Rim Trail and chill on a Sunday.

We had decided since we had an unstructured day that if we felt like stopping along the way for other sights, we would! Bryce was only 30 minutes away and it was only 10am. Check in wasn’t until 3pm anyway.

We spotted the “Mossy Cave.” Only 0.9 miles round trip? Sounds good! Some stunning hoodoos along the walk that looked like castles in the sky.

We ran into a lovely family, about 8 or 9 on an extended family vacation. Suddenly, there was a verbal scuffle. Something was going down between the two sisters who were probably in their 50s. We didn’t know what the fight was about, but Karen (real name) was having none of it. “Nope! I’m not gonna talk about it anymore!” she screamed as she turned on her back to Nancy (made up name) which only pisses odd red faced Nancy even more. “Nope! Nope! I’m done! (Karen pulls the “speak to the hand” motion out, only to further aggravate the charging rhino that is Nancy. (Look at the pretty hoodoos!)

Now, everyone knows the the rhino is the deadliest of Africa’s Big 5. Well, everyone except maybe Trisha (real name) who decided to step in front of rhino Nancy. Rhinos only charge in a straight line, Trisha! Oh no you di’nt! Trisha, who we assume is Nancy’s daughter, said something to calm Nancy down. She out her hands up in a defense move and Nancy batted at them until she grabbed the kind hearted Trisha and shook her, screaming … SCREAMING, “I AM SICK AND TIRED OF YOU TELLING ME WHAT TO DO, TRISHA! SICK OF IT! STOP TELLING ME WHAT TO DO!” Imagine the worst thing you’ve ever done, like turning around to grab the ruler your mother was chasing you with, grabbing it and breaking it in two. Then imagine how hard she screamed at you, throwing in a “wait until your father gets home!” That was Nancy. X10. Veins popping. A bright shade of crimson. As we continued to pass through (this was all mere seconds), the 6ish teens standing by watching motionless and mortified. The girl on the edge said quietly, “I’m so sorry.” We felt horrible for them and hope for the kids’ sake this is the end and not the beginning of their “kick COVID”vacation.

The cave was nice.

Grosvenor’s Arch here we come! Turns out, it was behind us. But not too far so we doubled back. We knew this was off the highway a bit, so we expected a detour. What we didn’t expect was the extremely rough and rocky road to get there. Could Rhonda make it without popping a tire? Only one way to find out. This was doomed from the beginning when there were no signs whatsoever pointing to this tourist attraction. Since we were used to poor signage, we went with it.

Having bailed on both google and iPhone maps (both were sending us in actual circles when we hit Tropic, which was near the turn off, we switched to my Roadtrippers app. My face icon was happily sliding down the road to the arch. I watched and watched as we crept very slowly towards the waypoint. It does take longer to get places at 20 mph, so an hour seemed annoying but reasonable. 30 minutes later, my face repositioned on the map to not approaching the arch, but it showed we had passed it. Awhile ago.

I did what I should have done before we started (when noticing the lack of signage) and looked at All Trails reviews. Well? Everyone raved. It was the. most. beautiful. arch. they had ever seen. AAANNND it was probably an hour behind us. It would have been so helpful if I had seen that it was 10 miles down the road. It was an arch that was 0.2 miles off the road on a paved path. As far as we could tell, it wasn’t visible from the road nor were there signs.

We decided we were closer to the highway on the other side so rather than turning around to go back the way we came. We popped out 2.5 hours away from Bryce. Which used to be 30 minutes away. Cool.

The 2.5 hours went incredibly fast, despite having been on our 5th hour of mostly silence as a way of not hating each other). It was a smooth pleasure no longer having our insides reorganized from Rhonda and the Rocky Roads. We later learned from the mossy cave to our next hotel was less than 15 minutes. We took a 5 hour detour to not see something and go another 10 miles to our actual destination. So there’s that.

We arrived at Bryce, pretty much over it before we got there. We recognized that these entire last two days went off the tracks AND we took someone else’s advice and strayed from our well planned out itinerary. (That for once is not sarcasm.) Was there something to that?

We went on the scenic drive in Bryce. At the first turn off, still over it, we encountered a couple that was so totes adorbs. And like ew, she was trying to tell her BF to carve their love initials deeper into the railing. Seriously? I wanted to punch them for Captain Jack and the two of us. It would have been more meaningful for Brozo the Clown to leave some DNA behind. It was clear that Haysley, (what else could her name be?) knew their love was for real if you carve it into tourist destinations.

After ticking off some more turnoffs, while it was very different and stunning scenery, we were ourselves “turned off”at that point.

So we called it a day and headed to the one hotel we knew would be the sketchiest. It delivered. Fan. Tastic. It’s the type of place that has to secure their headboards to the wall because their clientele had made off with too many.

We did find a descent bottle of wine and naughty dinner (why should we even try to be healthy at this point?) The Scarlett in me says, “tomorrow is another day.”

INJURY REPORT: 1 day with no injuries! (Granted we were in the car all day.) But it is not easy to roll over, and my neck and abs hurt every time I sneeze, which is a lot because there’s so much desert crud up in my schnoz, so that counts for something.

BRUISE UPDATE: we are too damn tired and don’t care what the bruise is doing.