2014 Roadtrip Day 3 / Dec 27: Zion National Park - Provo - Lehi

The This was possibly one of the longest nights of our lives according to Tal and I have to admit he is right. Did not expect the temperature to drop so drastically, it was -9F at its lowest. Our sleeping bags was not built for this kind of weather - if I remember correctly, it was only good up to around 10F.

Our tent was more like a summer tent with vents so that was not good for us. The only separation between us and the ground was just the tarp and I bought a twin size comforter but did not help much. Milo actually went inside Tal's sleeping bag and slept with him by his feet. Since there's extra space where the feet is, Tal said that's why it's always cold. My feet was frozen most of the night and it was hard to get them warm. I tried to get Matthew to sleep with me but he was fussy so he goes and sleep by himself on the bed.The heater was literally life saver as we took turn to warm up our feet and rotate between the doggies, thank goodness Tal brought it!

Poor Tal, he had worse time than me, he couldn't get comfortable at all and he even wrapped his face with one of his thermals to keep himself warm. He didn't get as much sleep as I did. This was also the first time I felt claustrophobic because of the sleeping bag. We had the mummy ones and I would zip it all the way to my head and there were several times that I woke up gasping for air as if I couldn't breathe - it's also because my hands were on the inside and I wasn't able to quickly open up the bag. It was not a good feeling at all.

In the middle of the night, I needed to pee and there was no way I was going to walk all the way to the restroom, I didn't think I'd hold it for that long. It was cold and I was desperate so I just went behind the tree. I only wore my flip flop with socks of course and to my amazement, the stars were so bright and the skies looked like they were lit by them - it was so beautiful! I only managed to admire this during the 4-5 secs when I ran out to pee. After that it was just too cold so I went back inside the tent to warm up.

Before the sun came out, I started making soup for breakfast. Thank goodness for the rice cooker - I was able to boil the water and pour in sachet of instant soup that we got from Israel. This really warmed us up. I also managed to make fried rice - brought some eggs and leftover rice with us, this was heavenly on a freezing day like this.

After breakfast, we couldn't sleep anymore and went outside then realized the sun has already came out. To my astonishment, my car was frozen too! Didn't think that it would happen to it:

It was good to get out of the tent and stretch. The doggies went to do their business and we thought we should start packing our stuff and be on our way. We didn't even bother to go deeper inside the park, just did our business and off we go. My car happily started with no glitches but I couldn't spray the windshield because the fluids were frozen! So I just used a piece of cloth to scrape the ice off, it wasn't that hard.

We see small chunks of snow here and there but as we move north toward I-15 the landscape changed drastically to this! It was just beautiful to see everything blanketed in white powdery flakes.

Only an hour into our drive we're back to civilization and the first thing we saw that prompted us to exit the freeway was Panda Express at Cedar City! Haha good ol chinese food does the trick to get us back on track. We got our food from the drive thru and ate in the parking lot. It was freezing but I was really excited to see snow, I just went outside to grab some water from the trunk and almost slipped from the ice.

We continued on to Lehi carefully with icy and snowy road condition, total drive was around 3 hours from CC. Gotta say the ploughers did a great job on clearing out the snow to make our drives safer.