Arrival in Virgin, UT

Our drive was a lot shorter yesterday - 250 miles vs 310 on Wednesday - and it was almost totally I-15 the whole way. We turned off at Exit 27 on I-15 which is just before the town of St George. The campground was about 15 miles off the freeway and we knew we were in for some spectacular scenery as we got closer to the campground:

It was close to 1:30 by the time we arrived at our campground - Zion River Resort - which is the campground where our friend Donna had been manager for 10 years before moving to the Jackson area. We received a nice discount and our reservation had us in one of the nice sites:

The only problems with our site are that we cannot use our satellite dish for TV because of the trees - we do have cable at the site, though - and the signal for cell phone and Internet use is very weak. There is Wi-Fi included with our site, but so far, it doesn't seem much better than the Verizon signal. It will be a challenge to complete the blog entries each day as pictures take forever to download.

Following our set-up and reading the information about the area, we took a drive to the park entrance. The views kept getting better and better with each bend in the road:

We arrived at the park entrance and spent a lot of time at the Visitors Center which was just inside the gate. The model of the park shows the road we will be taking today as we spend the entire day in Zion National Park:

Actually, we will parking our Jeep at the Visitors Center and taking the shuttle bus through the park. This is the recommended way to see the park as it is a free bus and it stops at many places along the road. The park service added this free shuttle as a result of limited parking areas within the park and the massive traffic jams that were being caused by the volume of traffic.

We are looking forward to our day in Zion National Park and we hope to have some great photos for tomorrow...