Back in the US! The plan is to hike in Zion National Park for a month, then go to Deb’s Songworks conference in Texas for several days. After that, back to the Midwest to visit friends and family. In June we have a flight booked to London, where we’ll do several weeks of inn to inn hiking in the Peak district and Lake district. Then a slow meander heading North till we reach Edinburgh, where we’ll hang out for six weeks, enjoying the culture and the Edinburgh fringe festival. In September it’s on to Germany and Austria in the fall, with plans to winter over in Israel.

Then Covid 19 hit.

We had been in Utah for a couple of weeks – Deb rented a car and drove to Phoenix for a week to see her family. We also had a chance to spend a weekend with Chris and Dale, Deb’s college friends – hiking in Zion park. We rented a nice home in Hurricane, about half an hour outside of Zion park. (The rental market close to Zion is dramatically more expensive) Then, about mid March, Deb was just getting back from Phoenix when the shutdowns started. Fortunately, we had a comfortable house to hang out in while we isolated. And although Zion park got shut down, we were able to walk through Hurricane as the streets were quiet. And, best of all, we had a beautiful regional park just a couple of blocks from our house, with several miles of trails, seen below.

There was even a tortoise preservation, a fenced in area where they kept the wild tortoises that had to be rescued from other areas until they could be released back into the wild. We also found some good, uncrowded hikes within reasonable driving distance from our house.

Although we only spent a few days in Zion park, we did get to hike Angel’s Landing, a hike that Tim had done a few years back but Deb hadn’t had a chance to try.

The picture below shows the trail to get to Angel’s Landing- you can see the people at the bottom of the picture, and the narrow ridge that leads back to the main trail in the middle top of the photo.

A couple more pictures from Zion.

The weather in Hurricane in March was wonderful, but we knew it would be warming up fast. After watching the greening of the plants, and spring flowers, we moved to our next place – Hesperus Colorado. Hesperus is about 30km west of Durango, in the foothills of the Rocky mountains. At this point, everyone was on lock down mode, so we found some good prices on AirBnB long term rentals. We ended up with an unusual house – a dance studio/performance space, that had been converted to a one bedroom house.

The picture only shows about half our house’s parking lot- lots of room for guests, if we had any! The house had one bedroom upstairs, but we chose the bed that was located in the main living area, set on the performance stage. It was an amazing house, we’ve never stayed in a place so unique.

The main wall of windows faced North to the mountains, with the kitchen on the East. Below, you see the living room- 55 feet (17m) wide! That’s a baby grand piano (Deb’s favorite!) tucked in the corner next to the fireplace. Our bed was on the stage on the left, with a second bed between it and the fireplace.

We had a mountain lion over our kitchen, a puma? over the entrance door, and assorted other creatures keeping an eye on us.

A pleasant kitchen. Eight burner commercial stove with griddle and and fryer, two ovens, two warming drawers, more counter space than we knew what to do with.

It was an amazing house to live in for a month and a half. It had it’s drawbacks-  internet was via satellite, and with the added demand due to Covid 19 our bandwidth was barely enough to check email and get a little news. And we found that if we were sitting on opposite ends of the living room, we couldn’t even talk to each other and had to get closer together to hear!

A small road led away from the property towards other houses, and we enjoyed walking this route each day. Depending on the route, we could get 6-10 miles with around 800-1600 foot elevation on a hike. (10-16km, 240-480m) Again, we got to see spring, with the greening of the trees and the blooming of spring flowers.

And, we bought a car! Definitely not in our original plans, but with everything being locked down, and countries closing their borders, we figured we might be here a while. Rental cars are expensive, and we figured if we kept the car around 3 months it would be cheaper than a rental. So we bought a 2017 Hyundai Elantra from Hertz, a former rental vehicle. We did this in Hurricane, and it ended up being more complicated than we thought. Turns out we had to register it in Washington state, since that’s our official residence. And we only found one company that would insure us, since the car wasn’t being kept in the state of registration. But fortunately Washington allows all the paperwork to be done online or through the mail, and with the help of Jason, (Tim’s cousin through marriage) to send us a few documents we got it sorted out. (Thanks Jason!)

Well that’s it for round one of the Covid report. Round two comes up soon.