Vacation

So I've been on vacation for the past week. You may not have noticed it only because I wrote a buncha stuff in advance and passed it along to the Monkey King to keep up the tawdry facade of semi-daily communication (Thanks to the Monkey King for his aid). Actually, we've got enough back issue material nowadays that next time I go away, I'm thinking of running a "Best of Grubb Street" sequence (like this favorite quote from 1993 - "When will the President let his hair down and indulge in the same hobbies and interests as the rest of the country?")

Oh, yeah. The vacation.

The Lovely Bride and I headed for the American Southwest, landing in Vegas and circulating clockwise around the Grand Canyon. We visited friends in St. George, hit Zion and Bryce National parks, cruised on Lake Powell, and river-rafted down the Colorado to Lake Mead.

We also fought incredibly inclement weather throughout, We were snowed upon in Bryce, hailed upon in Zion, caught in a massive thunderstorm on Lake Powell, and caught sleet while hiking the rim of the Grand Canyon. However, it was beautiful floating down the Colorado (the Lovely Bride is proud of her head-on confrontation with white-water rapids, and can now say "I've done it once", when she refuses similar offers in the future). In any event, as a result of all the rain (this and earlier storms), the desert was in bloom to a degree I had never seen before - cholla, prickly pear, ocotillo, jimson weed, and all manner of wild flowers. It was amazing, though in talking about the local weather, the punchline "We're from Seattle" quickly became old.

I'll probably have more later on the trip, but for the moment, this is just to tell folk that we survived and have stories to tell (including hanging from chains over a 900-foot drop in Zion.)

More later,