Getting There

I've decided to do incremental posts on my trip to Utah, as to provide some logical breakup of the trip beyond simple paragraphs.

I got picked up by my mommy from school at around 2:00. I got my brother keys to my car so he could drive it last week (since he can park on campus using my permit, and I'm nice like that) then we headed up to BWI on 295. My flight was leaving at around 5:00pm so despite the stop-and-go traffic on 295, I got to the airport with plenty of time. I got my boarding pass, and waited to check my luggage (I had one of those e-tickets so I just went to a kiosk to get my pass, and the people working behind Delta's counter were calling peoples names to check their luggage.) There were tons of army people flying around to report for duty, and each of them had a half dozen or so large duffel bags, and they were all carrying firearms. This slowed things down some, but it was still a while before my flight was supposed to leave. While waiting there I misread a sign saying that lighters couldn't be put on checked luggage (it really said carry-on) and I remembered that the last time I flew they were letting people carry lighters onto planes. I took the lighters I was bringing out of my backpacking backpack and put them in my normal backpack, or rucksack if you would, and then checked my luggage. Then when I went through security their x-ray machine detected the lighters and they took them. I had a few nice zippos in there, too. Oh well.

I got on the plane and the guy I was sitting next to looked identical to Garrett, Aerials brother. I don't mean he looked similar. The resemblance was enough that despite the fact that he hadn't said anything to signal that he recognized me (we bump into each other every now and then and talk) I asked, just to be sure. His voice was about as far from Garrett's voice as it could get without him sounding like a kid, woman, or James Earl Jones. The flight was ho hum, they showed Batman Begins, which I had already seen, and I listened to some Elliot Smith and read. I got to Salt Lake City around 8pm local time and sat and waited until midnight when Will's plane landed. More reading and Elliot Smith (the only music I had on me.) We got the rental car, and headed to his friends' (Suzanne, Anne, and Zelly(sp?)) place where we rolled out our sleeping pads and went to sleep on the floor.

The next morning we got up, hit up a R.E.I. to pick up some stuff we needed like fuel for my backpacking stove, cooking utensils, etc., then went to the grocery store to get food. Then, we drove south along I15 towards Zion National Park. We got there before it got dark, and started to setup camp. The ground at the park was terribly hard, so the tent stakes weren't going in, and my tent isn't free standing: it needs to be staked down to stand up. We improvised and tied one end to the picnic table and the other end to a log we dragged over. We started cooking sausages, at first on the camp stove which didn't really work, and it started to rain, which made me worry about how the weather would be this trip, but it let up after a short while and then we just sat there by the fire, cooking polish sausages on sticks in the fire. It gets dark early in autumn, and so we went to bed around 8 or 9.