Thursday 26th June - New and interesting road kill...

After leaving Park City today we realised pretty quickly how much the countryside was changing. Mountains, streams and white-water rafting gave way to dry and rocky landscape and while we as adults thought it was still beautiful, the kids were a little less inspired. We also realised how different it is driving here - in January we headed west of Brisbane to St George and lost count of how many dead kangaroos and wild pigs we saw, so today's game was to find the most interesting road kill. In contention were gophers, and raccoons but the outstanding winner of most unusual road kill was a skunk!! We haven't seen a live one yet and I hope it's at a distance if we do, but I quite like the thought of finding a real live Pepe Le Pew.

We drove as far as Bryce Canyon, Utah today.  To be honest, I'd never heard of Bryce Canyon before this trip, but apparently 1,000,000 per year have, and it was well worth the trip. Snow, ice and water have created the most amazing canyon, in the middle of a very dry and elevated area, around 8300 feet above sea level (2529m - to put that in perspective, Mt Kosciusko is 2228m!).  It's impossible to describe, so I'll just add photos. It was really windy there today and we were quite happy not to be blown into the canyon while walking on the rim. We were really keen to see the stars tonight - apparently it's the best spot in the USA to see stars, but the sun sets after 9pm, it isn't dark until around 10pm and it's really cloudy tonight - so it's not going to happen!!

 Red canyon. On the drive into Bryce Canyon.