As soon as my friends put up pictures of our amazing trip to St. George, I will either re-post them here or (morel likely) direct you to Erika's blog again.
We began the trip at approximately 5:30 in the morning. After collecting everyone (Adam, Colin, Erika, and me) we started heading south, although we had a brief detour to the Wal-Mart in Springville so that we could get supplies. This stop lasted longer than we planned on it lasting because we were all kind of wandering around aimlessly picking out random food and hopelessly trying to convince each other to get different foods. But eventually we got off and on our way to St. George!
We took turns driving (except for Adam, who was virtually asleep any time we were in the car--we were beginning to think something was wrong with him) and made it to St. George about an hour before the temple closed for the day. It is a really beautiful temple, the first to be finished in the West! It is really, really blindingly white and it was such a beautiful sunny day that it almost hurt to look at the brightness of the temple (Well, for me, it did hurt, cause my eye was reacting really weirdly to my contact and it was rather painful and I wore Erika's sunglasses most of the time we were at the temple). We weren't in for very long because it wasn't very busy, but it was a wonderful experience to be inside the temple and to feel the Spirit and the power of the wonderful things that were happening. We then went to the Visitor's Center and watched the Joseph Smith movie (which, because of my eye, made it so that I was crying the whole time--my eye was already constantly watering and hurting, so anytime there was a moment that was in any way slightly spiritual, sad, or sweet, I just started crying hardcore! But it was very good.
Then we went and changed into hiking clothes in Bed, Bath, and Beyond and went to In-n-Out, which was not as magical as an experience as I thought it would be. First of all, my stomach was doing weird, extremely painful things to me because it thought it wasn't getting food when in reality it was at the moment and so that was not very fun, and also (and partially because of that I think) the food wasn't as amazing as I had heard--Burger Supreme is pretty good too, I think. i was a little upset that the 5 bucks I'd invested in In-n-Out was wasted cause I barely ate any of the food! But that was my thing with In-n-Out. I think everyone else enjoyed it.
Next we drove to Snow Canyon, about a half hour away from St. George (after getting lost a couple of times) and had an amazing time!! We made a list of all the trails we wanted to go on and then got ready to start them (even though everyone was saying how tired they were and how they just wanted to nap--I got them all to come out by taking all the food in the car and putting in my backpack and walking away, haha. But we started out on Jenny's Canyon, which I wasn't expecting that much out of because it was described as as a half-mile, easy, children-friendly walk. We walked on this little sand path for a while and then (surprise) ended up in one of the most beautiful, coolest holes in the rock ever! The trail went through this canyon thing that had huge, red rocks on either side which rose up to almost meet at the top. The rocks were lined with cool ledges and holes and all sorts of fun places to climb around and get covered in red dirt. We played there for a bit and found this ledge up on the rock where we all laid down and thought about taking a nap, but then we got up and decided to find the Cinder Cone trail.
We drove up and down Snow Canyon for about a half hour looking for the volcano that we were supposed to hike up and then be able to look down into the crater. We were pretty excited, but the more that we drove around, the more direction and consciousness we lost :) We eventually found the cinder cone, but couldn't see a trail up it, so...we went back to the center of the canyon and to the Lava Flow Overlook.
Once parked there, we had another repeat of everyone else wanting to sleep and Elise getting out of the car and walking a ways before everyone else got out of the car, but were they sure glad that they did! We walked about a mile (?) across this plain thing covered in igneous rock and all sorts of desert plant life and then climbed to the top of a big red, lava rock. It was one of the ones where it looked like the lava just bubbled on top of itself, so we basically had steps to climb on and it was very cool and pretty high (which Erika and I--both terrified of heights--discovered after sitting on an edge for a bit and then throwing wheat thins off the top to see how high it was--we retreated rather quickly after that). We then sat for a while eating grapes (on which Erika said she could taste the pesticide, since we neglected to wash them, but I couldn't tell a difference between the pesticide and the dusty dirt on my fingers, so it didn't really matter. They were very refreshing to eat, however, but most of them ended up being part of a grape fight that was fun, felt a little bit like paintball, and ended up being quite messy. But we had a grape fight on top of a huge lava flow. It was pretty monumental.
Sometimes I just couldn't believe that we were in a place like that and how incredible it was that there was this much space and that these rocks were this big! It was so cool and so much fun to get away from school and stress and to have a little roadtrip, attend the temple, and play around on rocks.
I'm hoping that someone puts up pictures soon so that I can show you all how amazing and beautiful it was.
Oh, also, Mom, I put in my old kind of contacts today and had no problems at all. I don't know if it's because I had more sleep (although I left them out for quite a while yesterday before I put them in) or because they are just less painful. I'll give them both a few test runs and see what happens.
Anyway, it was an incredible exprience and I can't wait for the next adventure that will now most definitely happen.
