From Zion

We just finished dinner our second night camping at the Zion River Resort, just outside of Zion Canyon National Park.  I've never been here before, aside from sleeping through a family RV roadtrip through Utah.  I'm currently enjoying a cold Wasatch "Apricot Hefeweizen". 

Don't have much battery power on my Macbook (it drained itself from 100% down to 55% just by sitting around for ~48 hours) so I'll try and make this concise.

Yesterday (Tuesday) morning we left campus around 7:30 am, and made it to this campsite by about 6pm.  We had taken a detour to have a late lunch at Red Rock Canyon, which was prety cool - although having to drive through the Las Vegas traffic was annoying. After setting up camp just outside Zion, we set up to make dinner.

We had dinner/breakfast assignments, and I was in the first group to cook last night, and it was fajita night.  I quickly volunteered to do the onions and bell peppers :P  It was a great vegan dinner.  The other people made chicken, and we had grilled flour tortillas, and tapatillo sauce to top my vegan fajita burritos off.  

I got no sleep last night - I was too cold, even though it's quite mild and warm here even all night, i just get freezing cold when I sleep.  Tonight I'll wear an extra layer, and put a fleece jacket over my sleeping bag's face-hole.   Also, I have trouble sleeping in general camping, it makes me nervous, for at least the first night.  

So I woke up at 5:00 am freezing to death (after eventually getting to sleep at 12:00 midnight with the help of my iphone's ipod), and then again at 6:00 am when other people got up and i heard chatter and laughing, so I just said fuck it and got out of bed at 6:30 and after washing my face and inspecting my huge under-eye circles, I helped make the oatmeal with brown sugar at breakfast time, and we all packed our bag lunches for the day (pb&j yummmm).  We set out towards Zion Canyon by 8:30 am, for our first free day.  We got to do whatever we wanted, however much I wanted to see angel's landing, I knew I couldn't do it because of my fear of heights/falling, so I went on the riverside walk, the weeping rock, the archaeology trail, and the lower emerald pool.  I was satisfied, and plenty tired out.  I had an ice cream cone :/  

We all met back at the vans by 3:15, when we were supposed to be there at 4:00, and we played frisbee for awhile in the parking lot which was fun ("Car!!!" then "...Game on!!"), and our professor showed up at 4:00, turns out he had been having a pint at a little cafe without us, when we were all there at the cars early waiting for him!! So we all went and had a couple pitchers before going back to camp.  

We made pasta and salad tonight. Well not me, the cooking group that was scheduled tonight.  They were very concerned with me and constantly asking for input as to what I felt was sufficient precautions for my vegetarian pasta sauce (as opposed to their sausage meatballs and ground beef sauce).  Very nice of them :)  However our professor bought no vegan salad dressings (dammit, I should've thought of that and packed my favorite Trader Joe's dressing, the tuscan italian!) so I had thousand island :x

I suppose I should have known this trip would make me about 80% vegan 20% vegetarian. I mean, I'm not gonna break down and eat some chicken or steak or anything, but it's just so hard to maintain 100% veganism in this situation.  I'll try harder.  At least I always have PB&J, and the wheat bread (Orowheat) our field camp professor packed is at least milk-free! Yay!

Well my macbook is pretty low on power so I'll turn it off now.  Tomorrow, we head out through Zion, towards Salt Lake City, stopping in Bryce Canyon (never been there either, so excited!), and camping just north/past SLC.  

Anyway.

Hoping I can sleep better tonight, 

Geovegan