March

Emily turned 22 while away at college. 

Caitlyn got her a cake. Ty took them out for pizza. We sent a gift in the mail. I had been trying to get her to make a wishlist since before Christmas, to no avail. We sent her some miscellaneous gifts and a gift card. Marian sent her some money and also treated them to sushi.

My brother was able to go back home to his family but has a long way to go for recovery. He is still going in for physical therapy and is on disability currently.

The main line of our septic tank got clogged and backed up into the house. Christian had taken a shower the night before and was a little dismayed that a bunch of water seemed to have gotten out of the shower. It was late though and he had to go to bed since he had work in the morning. He mopped up the water and went to bed. In the morning, all seemed normal. I even did a load of laundry. Afterwards, I went to take my shower and I turned on the hot water to warm it up. I stood outside of the shower to see where it might be leaking from but didn't find anything. 

When I opened the door to step into the shower, I saw that the drain was backing up. I tried to clear it and plunge it and that's when all hell seemed to break loose. The septic water backed up into the shower, the toilet seals had failed and was filling up the bathroom floor. The adjacent bathroom was doing something similar. It was filling the tub in there as well as the toilet. Christian had put in the seal of that toilet though, so at least that was fine.

The toilet next to our shower was put in by the so-called professional plumber when we had to re-pipe the house and is obviously compromised.

I spent hours over the morning bailing septic water from my floor and then the tubs, carrying the water outside, where it was lightly raining. After several hours, I got control of the situation. I took a break to rest and have lunch then went out to the store to get a new was seal for the toilet for later. I tried to clean up as best that I could before Christian got back from work.

Once he got home, he got to work on it next. He couldn't find out snake, so we had to go out and buy another one but he had trouble getting it through. It helped but didn't make enough of a difference after hours of snaking the damn thing. He ended up having to go rent a machine to do it. It took several more hours before it was back to normal. I cleaned up the other bathroom while he finished up so that we would have a place to wash up before bed.

We were both sore the next day, and for the rest of the weekend, really, if I'm being honest. It was bad. Christian's hands were killing him and my legs and back hurt. I could not even attempt to finish cleaning our other bathroom and just used the one for the rest of the weekend. And Christian couldn't remove our toilet to replace the wax ring. I still think that we need to clear the vent on the roof but for now, everything is at least working again. 

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Christian had his "Spring Break" this month. We didn't go anywhere right away because I had a dentist appointment and we had to plan, shop and pack. We thought we lucked out initially because the weather was going to be fairly nice for our trip.

We decided to go to Kodachrome Basin State Park. I had wanted to go since last year but the weather was not good at the time. Way too cold. It is supposed to be a lessor known park in Utah with surrounding areas that we can explore. I was excited to go, but all in all, it was a bit disappointing. It didn't start out too well, as Christian realized that he actually forgot his camera at home. He put it in the area of all the stuff we were taking but it must have been overlooked in the end.

Then, on our first night of camping, we thought we found a pretty nice little spot. It was fairly remote but not that far from the road. However, after we set our campsite up, we heard music blasting in the distance. We knew they must be near the road. We took a walk along the trail to see what was going on. A car had pulled over and was blasting their music. They were about a mile and a half away but we could hear it clearly from our campsite. We had been driving all day and the sun was going down already so we could not just keep going to find a different area to stay. They were blasting music for about four hours before we could get any reprieve. Along the trail, we also found mountain lion tracks in the drying mud. That didn't make us feel very cozy.

In the morning, we continued on our way. We didn't get a very early start since we were not able to really sleep for a long time. We made it to the Kodachrome Basin State Park some time in the afternoon. 

Our goal was to do some hiking and take pictures. Our first trail was the Grand Parade Trail. We also took one of the optional box canyons. We then headed over to the Panorama Trail. 

The park is known for their monolithic spires. There used to be a famous arch there but has since fallen. There is also an area called the Hat Shop but most of their "hats" have also crumbled.

When you consider that most of the views here, while beautiful, isn't any more spectacular than many you see from just the side of the roads, it's difficult to want to come all the way out here and pay for it. While the cost is reasonable, still just $10 for a car, there isn't that much left to write home about. The rangers keep it fairly clean, all things considered but there are two things that make this a place that I probably won't return to. First, they allow dogs and the people that own the dogs, inevitably will pick up their dogs poo in their little bags, but then will leave the bags on the side of the trails all over the place. It is so obnoxious. And secondly, they allow bikes on most of the trails and I don't want to get run down or pushed aside by them when I am trying to relax and hike around. And of course, they don't pay attention to the signs and also ride down the trails that they aren't allowed on, so there really isn't any way to get away from them.

It was pretty hot on the trail and since I am so out of shape, I opted not to explore any additional trails and called it a day. We left to find out next campsite while we still had a bit of daylight left. We found a decent spot without too much trouble. Christian had been trying to take some night time time lapses with his GoPro but it keeps turning off and not saving any of his data when it gets too cold in the night, so that was frustrating him a lot. He had rigged up a little external battery to extend his battery life in order to get more footage, but the main battery keeps shutting the whole thing down when it gets cold. He had gotten his older GoPro to work with just the external battery pack, but his new GoPro won't operate without the main battery.

In the morning, we decided not to go back to Kodachrome Basin. We saw the main features and didn't think it worthwhile to return and pay for another day. We headed out to town to gas up and stopped by the Ranger Station to check their maps. With our bad luck, they seemed to be having some big meeting with all the rangers in the area and we couldn't hardly find parking. They told Christian of a place we were interested in checking out but didn't have the maps of the area for us. We also found out that Christian left his hat where we aired up outside of Kodachrome. After getting gas, we backtracked to get his hat back and he went into the visitor center to check their maps. He did end up with some maps, but not really of the area that we were interested in at the time.

We ended up going on a trail heading back home. It wasn't so much of an off-road trail as just a dirt road. So of course, there were tons of cars on it. Most of them stopped to explore the first feature on the trial. It appeared to be a mostly dry creek that might lead to a slip canyon I guess. We didn't stick around to find out. We continued on our way and the next feature we found was the Bull Valley Gorge. That was pretty neat. No one was there so we stopped by to take a peak. 

There is the remains of an old truck that rolled into the gorge many years ago that is still stuck in the narrow part of the gorge. There was a hiking trail that seemed to go along the gorge which I would have wanted to check out, but we did not lock up our Jeep and didn't want to go far from it.  

There might have been one or two other features that you could explore from this road but we did not stop to check them out. We were wanting to leave the area as it was way too crowded and more than a little disappointing so far. We had decided to head back through Nevada and hopefully find some place to explore on our way home. When we got out of trail, we pulled over to air up our tires. There were a few other vehicles out there of trucks that obviously pulled side-by-sides out there, but no other people. While we were doing this, this guys rides up this deserted road on his bicycle. He passes us by and goes maybe another 500 feet and stops at the intersection. Then he turns around and rides back down the road towards us and stops just 20 feet from us. I don't know what he is doing, he doesn't try to talk to us, but he's taking a drink or messing with his stuff, but he won't go away either. There is no one for miles and he insists on stopping by right next to us. This is so typical. We have to be careful of when and where we get off the road because some idiot will see us and follow us to see where we are going. We go way out there to get away from people and these morons will all gravitate to other people. They don't enjoy the wilderness or the solitude, they just want to invade ours or they go out there to destroy it until we have nothing left.

The traffic in Southern Utah is horrendous. We thought it was bad driving into Riverside, but it is even worse in Southern Utah. The place has exploded over the years and does not have the infrastructure to support it. We found a small road leaving Southern Utah and heading west into Nevada and followed that as far as we had daylight for. It turned into a dirt road but was nicer than a lot of paved roads in Southern California. When we started to lose daylight, we started going down side roads looking for a place to camp for the night. We found a few but none were ideal as they were either not level enough or were too close to the road.

We finally found a perfect camping spot, but when we got closer, we found that some jerks with side by sides and torn all the good areas up by doing donuts on it. We finally found a couple of small spots that were still flat and not covered in broken glass to call it a night. We were not happy. There were some cows nearby. We didn't see them but could hear them lowing in the dark somewhere close by. Luckily, they eventually moved off farther during the night.

In the morning we continued on our way and finally crossed over into Nevada. We mostly just drove through it. We stopped only once to take some pictures of some prong horns that were darting across our road. Unfortunately, when we found a place we could get off the road to take pictures, the prong horns were kind of far and heading farther away from us. Christian took a time-lapse of the clouds while we stopped to have a late lunch.

We then continued on our way and got to the eastern slopes of the Funeral Mountains by the time the sun went down. We found a place to camp and set up out camp. Christian set up another time lapse since it was a lot warmer here and there would be no risk of the camera shutting down because the battery got too cold. We had a late dinner.  We were pretty tired from driving all day and not having very much fun. After dinner, Christian when to check on his camera when he heard a rattling. When he shined his light around to investigate, he found a young rattle snake had curled up right next to his tent. We freaked out and it moved away from his tent when he shined his light on it but it moved under our car instead. We had to keep watching for it to make sure we knew where it was at all times. Once it moved from under our car, it turned and headed for my tent instead! At that point, Christian decided that he'd had enough and took a shovel it. But we realized that because it was so warm here and was probably the first really nice warm week in a while, there were probably tons of snakes out and about looking for food and stuff.

We decided that it was just too risky to stay out there. It was very likely we'd wake to more snakes snuggled up to us during the night for warmth. We ended up tearing our tent down to leave. Although we were exhausted, we decided to cut our losses and just head all the way home. We took turns driving and got home in the early hours of the morning and didn't leave our house the rest of what was left of the week. What a waste of time and money.