TRAVEL: Day 1, St. George, Utah

We've begun a long-dreamed of trip, a circle tour through the red canyons of Arizona and Utah. As we left Las Vegas, the road began climbing through the spectacular Virgin River Gorge. A sense of pleasant disorientation, notification of being Now, came to me.  

   We'd been watching monsoon clouds the color of bruises and finally caught them, or they us. Nickel-size raindrops began plashing the windshield in the canyon and rain continued intermittently throughout the next day.

 That evening, John the hublet wanted to return to the restaurant he loved when we came to St. George years ago.  And he found it, in Ancestral Square near Zion's Bank.  We dine on pan roasted pomfret, pesto-stuffed chicken, and lovely wine. 

Canyon country begins definitively here. The cliffs and gullies are chili-pepper red, paprika, cinnamon, claret, russet, terra cotta, sometimes burnt chocolate. They flame, they glow, they hold and give way to the power of erosion and time.