Shooting Goblins

I'm sitting at the dining table overlooking Salt Lake City at night. Just got back from camping this afternoon. But we're going to Tarintino it up. Cut to

Alec scrambling for quarters in his apartment. His emergency load of laundry is in the dryer after one cycle, and still incredibly damp. I am still two quarters short. The landry room at my apartment sucks and its now around midnight. I string up a clothesline across my room and hang some of my clothes to dry. The others, well, they'll just have to be washed again. I finish packing around 1 AM.

Alarm clock radio starts. 6:45 AM. Sally calls me, asks what I want from Sonic for breakfast. I meet her outside my apartment a little later with both kiddos in tow. Gabriel hands me a momento from Legoland. They bought me a really cool little AT-AT walker with a storm trooper mini figure. It's way cool. I'm lucky to have such good friends.

Flight short and direct, an hour and a half and I land at the airport with snow-capped peaks on both sides. Aunt Brenda picks me up outside in her hybrid and we take off. First stop is gyros for lunch at a very popular little Greek fast fooderie, then we hit the camping goods store and I pick up a bottle of fuel for my campstove, since if I tried to take it on the plane, they'd probably encase my pack in lead, call me up to the check in counter, and special operations agents would rush in and beat me senseless with truncheons. So I decided to leave my cannister at home, and suck up the three dollars. Also picked up a few other assorted things. Then we drove up to the University, and Aunt Brenda showed me around and then had a few meetings with people.

Wednesday night, we had grilled pork loin, which was really good.

Thursday morning, I slept in until 10 AM, which was ok since uncle David was really busy, rushing around to submit drawings to the city for a residential project. After he'd come back from the government offices, we both packed, had lunch, hit the grocery store, and hit the map store, it was around 3 o clock in the afternoon.

We drove south to the Canyonlands, towards Moab, taking smaller and worse roads down to Goblin Valley State Park. Very cool place. The goblins are basically very stumpy hoodoos, which tend to look like mutant mushrooms. There's this huge basin, which is filled with them. As they are 6-20 feet tall, its very surreal walking amongst them. There's absolutely no water anywhere around, so there was very little vegitation down there. It actually reminded me of the topography of the surface of that planet they find in the movie ALIEN. There were a few other people there, but we didn't encounter any of them. We got there just as the sun was at a beautiful angle, and then after we'd walked around down in the basin enough, we had a beer and watched the sun set over the hoodoo'd ridge behind the basin.

We camped in a nearby campsite which had 22 sites, most of whihc were already reserved for RVs. Each site had a concrete pad, a perf steel clad pavaillion, and a patch of dirt clearly designated for the tent, and each one of these these sites located 30 feet from the neighbor. We took a short hike and pitched our tent amongst the goblins.

Pictures to follow, soon.