Dear Steemit friends

It is time for new travel story from my side!
Finally I have some free time and I am dedicating it to Steemit 😄

That will be my third travel story, but definitely not the last. I am trying to honor all my followers and supporters with travel story every time I achieve some milestone. This story is a bit late for my 500 followers, but I am sure that you will enjoy reading and looking it 😃

I was inspired by @travelfeed to write travel stories at first time. They are doing an amazing job and I am sure that there is a bright future ahead of this project.

I would also like to thank to all my followers. Especially huge thanks to my main supporters @cyclamen @oldtimer and @gaja @nedy @kid4life @sirsensei. I don’t use other social networks as I simply don’t like them and don’t see a point in them. On Steemit I find many interesting stuff to read and many photographies that I dream about them.

Today I will be writing about my recent trip to USA.
As there was so much interesting going on this trip I will do it by parts – perhaps separated by days.
So stay tuned and much more is coming…

I went on this trip with my girlfriend and a friend. We have traveled together before to Belgrade, Dubai and other places, so we know each other very well.

Our flight was from Venice airport to Las Vegas with short layover in Zurich. Flight was calm, although I was a bit disappointed with Edelweiss Airlines regarding service on board.

We had rented a car on the airport in Las Vegas and returned it on our departure from USA on the same place.
There was very funny anecdote on the counter at Advantage rent a car company. The lady at the desk tried to sell us everything. That was the most intrusive thing in my life. I could write 5000 words just about this, but as it was not a pleasant thing I will skip it and go to the part that we get the car we paid for at the end.

We went to the Strip on first day and we slept at Elli’s Resort & Casino.
That would be all I am sharing with you from Vegas for first two days of our travel.
You know – What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas! 😉

We are now in third day of our travel and it was the first real day of our road trip.
We were all excided and get up early, so we were in the car before 7 am and took the road to Zion National Park. It is around 250km, which means 2,5h drive. We knew that we will lose an hour due to time zone change so we had to be focused and quick. When we were driving across Springdale we already saw all these beauties. We couldn’t wait to finally arrive to Visitor center in Zion.
Just near visitor center we also saw some dears, so we were really aware now that our trip through National Parks of USA began.

We have planned everything in advance, so we knew that we will take the Zion shuttle to 5th stop which is Zion Lodge and do hike to Lower Emerald Pool trail, then continue to Upper Emerald Pool trail and to really see the most we did not return the same way back, but we have done Kayenta trail to get to shuttle stop umber 6 – The Grotto.
This hike was stunning! Amazing start of our journey. However photos will say it all…

Next thing on our to-do list was to visit the narrowest section of Zion canyon called Narrows. We didn’t have time, equipment and guts to go upstream Virgin River, but we had only saw people walking in ice called river. For sure it is an amazing experience, for which I hope I will do it once in the future. The trail which leads from last shuttle bus station to start of Narrows is called Riverside walk, but it could easily be named also Squirrel walk 😊
So many small beautiful squirrels running up and down. As a responsible human we didn’t feed them although they had this puppy eyes begging for food.

Next thing was shuttle back to visitor center and continue our way to Bryce Canyon National Park.
There is around 130km distance in between, results in good hour and a half drive.

On the way we stopped in Subway to get a quick lunch/dinner, before getting to Bryce Canyon NP. It was already quite late, around 6 pm. So we get going to the park and firstly wanted to do hike from sunset point (Navajo Loop trail or Queens Garden trail), but it was simply too cold. It was freezing. So windy and cold that we only took few photos and decided to drive to the end of the canyon and explore it like this. As we came to the end, to the highest point called Rainbow point with 9115 feet elevation. We recorded a temperature ob – 3 degrees Celsius, with wind and real feel temperature of -19 degrees Celsius. To cold if you were in Vegas this same morning and it was around 20 degrees Celsius already at that time. So that is why we only took few photos and escape to our accommodation for tonight. We were staying in Best Western PLUS Ruby's Inn. Nice motel, with impressive lobby and surrounding area.

We had a good night sleep as we were really tired and that is also the end of first part of my travel story. I hope you enjoyed reading it, all of your comments are very welcomed as always. Have a great Tuesday!

All photos in my posts are @originalworks and were taken with my own equipment.

@crazy-andy