I started out from Bryce Canyon with a nice clean car, top down in a pleasant temperature, I went first a bit down the road into the park, but a long line of slow motorcycles and other vehicles, and no indication of anything exciting coming up made me decide to go back.

Still being curious why so many people come here, I passed by the airport for a scenic airplane ride to the canyon, but the flights would only be later in the afternoon and I did not want to wait.

On the way out of the airport, a deer was blocking the road, but he was no danger to my nice clean car at the speed I was going, and he made himself scarce. I looked around for other car destroyers, but he was all alone in the field, it seemed.

Driving down 12 at about 55 mph, I noticed that my GPS was not on the dash. I probably left it in the glove compartment at the last stop. I opened the dash and it was not there. Thinking someone had stolen it, I looked once more and saw that it had slipped to the corner of the glove compartment door. Unfortunately, that was too much looking, and I had my wheels off the pavement going through the scrubbery, rocks, and dirt at high speed. I tried to steer straight but it was too late. Bozo was spinning back onto the road towards the other side with the drop-off. Believing I had lost it, I decided to use the AutoX maxim of both feet in. I ended up in the ditch at the other side of the road, backwards and under a steep angle.

I got a lift to the nearest store quickly, and called a tow truck, but it took the tow truck half an hour to arrive, then another half hour for the sheriff to arrive, and another hour to get the car out of the ditch, examine it, do paperwork, and drive back to the towing place. Then some more hours to get a stone removed from behind the brake disk that was making a racket. I did manage to roughly rewash the car and get the worst dirt out of the interior in the mean time. (I was showered with stuff when the car was plowing through the scrubbery.)

Bottom line, the car is now again a mess and has a long dent across the passenger door, door handle, and door sill. Good points are that we are both alive and operating as before. Let's call that, possible good points.

When finally on the road again, I encountered some rain and overhung skies I might have avoided should I have decided to keep the car on the road. I outdrove the rain top-down.

Hwy 12 is gorgeous even under cloudy skies. The sides of the roads are full of cows. (I think that, since the road does not absorb water itself, the sides of the roads contain more water, hence tastier scrubbery.) I stopped to photograph a couple of cows standing side by side munching away, but then a big camper and a 18 wheeler showed up and one cow decided to cross to the other side, causing the trunk to honk it, and it all became a mess, so I skipped it. I made some pictures of later examples.

The sun started coming back, turning 12 into a feast of colors. At some stage, you are driving on a two-lane wide ridge way up, with colorful big mountain ranges below you at both sides. Undescribable. No pictures of course; even if there was a place to stop, how do you photograph that?

Stopped driving fairly early at Torrey to get the dirt off me and have a drink. They looked strange at my appearance, but rented me a room.

Pictures (click for larger size):