Hummingbird at the Thunderbird

Today got off to a bad start.

We were up at 6am for a 6.50 departure to Antelope Canyon, only to be told it had been cancelled due to bad weather! We could have had another (very much needed) hour in bed.

The weather is dreadful here, it's monsoon season (which we didn't know they had around here) so the trip was cancelled due to a high risk of flash flooding. The nature of Antelope canyon means it would have been really muddy too.

We left the hotel at 8am, passing the Glen Canyon Dam that we visited yesterday.
That's when we found out that some of the roads we should be travelling today are flooded. Plus, the main road into Las Vegas is closed for the next 3 days!!!! Our route has had to be modified, which extends our journey time tomorrow but at least we will still be able to get there. We won't be able to visit Zion National Park as that has been closed also due to flooding & a landslide, so we have been asked to be ready for 7am to get on the road to Vegas.
We would all rather be in Vegas earlier than later so we all agreed.

As we travelled through Utah, we stopped at Kanab, another popular filming location for westerns. 'The outlaw Josey Wales' was one of the later films I recognised (from a long list). The six million dollar man and Grizzly Adams were also filmed there.
We stayed at a restaurant called the 'Thunderbird'.

As you will notice from the sign on the blip, they serve 'ho made pies'.
The story behind this is great.
A married couple bought the land and set up a service station. The wife used to bake and she would give truckers a piece of pie when they stopped.
Such was their popularity that they added a cafe to the service station. But, this was during world war 2 when timber was scarce. So the husband used scrap bits of timber to make a sign, but he didn't have enough room to write 'homemade' so it was shortened to 'ho made'!

The husband died in 1961, and when the water rights were threatened, the wife needed something more to lay claim to the land. So she opened a 9 hole golf course and by 1966 also had a 66 room motel!
She continued to bake until her death in 1992; her family have continued to run the business to this day.

There was some controversy over the name a few years ago (we all know what a ho is!), but rather than change the name, they bit the bullet, embraced the connotations and opened a gift shop. I particularly liked the 'SL,UT' tshirt (which stands for Salt Lake, Utah).

We were joined for lunch by a family of hummingbirds; they were fantastic to see, especially as we've never seen them up close before.

We are staying overnight at Bryce Canyon, another wonder of the Colorado plateau. Here we saw an intricate landscape of rock pillars (known as Hoodoo's). The hoodoos create a maze of ever changing forms and colours, ranging from bright orange to pale pink.
This was another WOW place to visit and unlike the Grand Canyon, we were able to hike down into the valley below (getting back up was arduous, especially given the altitude). I really wanted to blip this today, but I liked the story behind the restaurant and I don't want to post rock photos every day!!