Moab, Utah

We have been to Moab before….traveling from Colorado Springs to Las Vegas and back for Black Belt Seminars with karate. However, that was a long time ago and in the heat of the summer…with two active elementary school boys that I had to keep my eyes on or they would fall off a cliff or climb up something they couldn’t get down. Honestly, this was the first 15 years of motherhood with those two. A lot of fun and adventure…heavy on the adventure…and a lot of it a blur. This time it was just Rich and me. It was January. Not the time of year that most people venture out to National Parks. However, I am beginning to be a big fan of winter visits to parks. Although we have a National Parks pass, most of these parks are not manned during the winter. There is just not enough traffic to warrant the man hours. It wasn’t that cold. If you are from Florida, it may have been chilly, but Nebraska weather makes you hearty. We rarely even wore jackets. I didn’t have to wait for people to get out of my shots. That is huge. I do have some people in some of my photos of arches, but I did this by design to show the size of the arch. We stayed for a day and a half and hit Arches a few times (that is where I took the astrophotography photos) and also Canyonlands National Park, which I had never heard of. Both of them have gorgeous vistas and the red rocks with snow on them were particularly stunning, I thought. Of course, I am a winter person! The sunsets were amazing. The first day was crystal clear skies and the second had clouds…so I had a lot of God’s wonderful creation to work with. If you don’t know my husband, Rich, he is a big kid in a 53 year old’s body. He is always up for an adventure and something that makes my heart leap into my throat. On this trip, I met him challenge for challenge of sitting out on a ledge over a several hundred foot drop. I am not fond of heights, but was not going to let him out-do me this time. We were lucky enough to bump into another couple at a gorgeous arch and have them take our picture together. Funny enough, we had met two couples while in Moab and it was so deserted that we bumped into both couples in town and in both parks. If you want a little less stress with a National Park visit, go in the winter! Just make sure the roads are open! Moab is such a great place to go…I felt like we were on another planet a lot of the time.