Can you smell that? That's nature.

Back in April, Lauralee planned a trip for us to Arches National Park. I haven't spent much time in any of the national parks, so I was excited for this trip.

We were planning to camp at Arches because the campsites there are nice and have running water. We were going down during a 'non-peak' time, and we figured we'd be able to find a campsite there relatively easily. Well, we got off to a rough start when we got down there and found that a) only a few campsites were open and b) the open sites were already full. We got a list of nearby campsites and quickly discovered that the sites at Arches are the only ones with running water. After some frantic searching, we finally came across a pretty nice site. It was centrally located between Canyonlands and Arches and served us well.

Here I am at our campsite. Starting the fire was more difficult than I had anticipated due to the high winds, the cold, and my lack of kindling. Thankfully, Laura had brought some magazines with her; when she was done reading a page or an ad, she'd tear it out and let me use in to kindle the flames. What can I say? I'm not a very experienced camper.

Canyonlands is full of ... well ... canyons. Lots and lots of canyons. Here's one of them.

Here's another canyon. Laura is contemplating the mysteries of life.

Here we are in Arches, right? Wrong. We're still in Canyonlands. Nobody told Canyonlands that there's a special park just for arches.

Here's the special park for Arches.

This is Balancing Rock. We actually met a guy from England who was afraid to stand by it. After he left, his girlfriend told us he was afraid it was going to fall on him.

Two! Two! Two arches in one!

Landscape Arch is looking pretty sickly these days. A huge chunk fell off a few years ago and geologists wonder how much longer before the rest of it collapses.

We experienced some bad weather on this trip. The first day was beautiful, but each subsequent day got a little worse. On this day it got cold and windy and rained a little bit as we set up our picnic lunch.

We wanted to hike to Delicate Arch hike when the light was best for photographs and when the weather was cooperative. We ended up putting it off until the morning of our last day. As we pulled into the park, a downpour began. At this point, I was willing to call it a good trip and head home, but Lauralee convinced me that you can't drive all the way down to Arches and not hike to Delicate Arch. We drove up to the trail head and the rain did let up some. There were several other groups starting the hike so we thought 'what the heck, we're not the only crazy ones.' Off we went. I've never been to Delicate Arch before. It's a moderately strenuous hike, but was worse thanks to the cold, the rain, and the heavy winds. However, we did make it.

The winds at the top were immense. It was enough to blow you off balance.

Still, it was an awesome experience. Since the weather was so bad, we got to spend a few minutes up there by ourselves, which is pretty rare for a landmark so popular.

There were lots of other funny/weird experiences on this trip, including:

• Our adventures cooking over a campfire (we're both rookies)
• Our super-loud, quarrelsome, non quiet time abiding campsite neighbors on one side
• Our super-annoying, guitar-playing campsite neighbors on the other side
• The bikes we lugged down there but never rode (except one time to the dumpster)

It was a fun trip. I'm glad Laura made me hike to Delicate Arch.