• 2 : 19 A.M. MST
  Make sandwich night into PENG-WICH night!

Today we woke up at the Purple Sage Inn, a nice, cheap motel in the town of "Panguitch", which could be pronounced a bunch of different ways. It seems to be run by Mormons, which makes sense, considering we're right in the middle of Utah. It's clean, the prices are cheap, and the room features everything you'd want in a motel room. In fact, there's only one thing I'd change about it:

I'm not sure if this is a pun or what

First thing we did was go to Bryce canyon, where we realized that we had already spent $50 on National Parks entrance fees, which would have bought us a year long pass to all national Parks had we known such a thing existed. Helen suggested we ask the ranger at the gate if we could just show all our receipts and get into Bryce canyon free. I thought this would be far too altruistic a thing to expect the government to do, so Helen did the talking. The ranger seemed almost eager to "upgrade" our receipts, and ten minutes later we were in possession of a real live plastic NP pass! It even works at Mt. Rainier back in Washington! We're good till next September, so our return trip to the G.C. and any other place will be free! (It used to be free anyway, but the national parks are trying out a new "entry fee" system, where the entrance fees go into park development. As a result, many of the parks feature nicely redone visitor centers and walkways.)

Bryce canyon, I would say, is the most cheese colored of all the canyons in the Colorado Plateau. Its bright orange hue looks absolutely delicious. We walked up to several viewpoints along the natural amphitheaters and took teeny tiny pictures of vast expansive panoramas.

"It's a hell of a place to lose a cow." -- Ebenezer Bryce, c. late 1800s

Our lunch was cobbled together from leftovers and whatever foods we still had from our original stocks. Thus, I somehow found myself with a fried chicken and salsa sandwich, which turns out to be amazing. I'm going to learn to make salsa so I can eat them when I'm stationary.

Okay, I want to go to bed so I'll be overly terse: then we went to Escalante, which Bill Clinton declared a national parks at the last second. It was yellow canyons and slow. And cows wandering up and down the road making goofy cow faces at each other.. Then there was that llama in a pile of sheep, which was pretty funny. He was all stuck in traffic. A sheepwreck.

Then we drove and drove. We wound up in Ogden for dinner, which was full of modified cheap cars. You know the kind. Biplane stapled to the back, scrapes over speed bumps, muffler replaced with a kazoo. TONS of those things going up and down Washington Blvd. Ogden is apparently a town with a college in it, though these kids looked like high school age. It's possible that I'm old enough that college students seem that young to me. Anyway, I'm betting Ogden is some kind of industrial car work center or something. Lots of auto shops everywhere I looked. Also, Ogdenites do not know what is wrong with this picture:

It was spelled this way all over the entire Texaco

Oh yeah, turns out that the line painter from a couple days ago got fuckin orange paint droplets all over my car and I don't know what to do about it.