Today we made our way to Zion National Park. We arrived at our hotel in Hurricane before 2pm, so we spent the afternoon and evening at Zion National Park. They have this great service at Zion where there is a free shuttle that takes you into the park and to all the different stops in the park, and it leaves roughly every 7 minutes. One of the stops was called Weeping Rock. This is a place where the water is just seeping out of the rock, and it looks and feels like it's raining when you're under it. This water has been in the rock for thousands of years before it makes its way out. Because of this water, there is a lot of greenery in the canyon, which is odd because we're in the middle ... read more

Today is the first day of our 2-week road trip. Our first stop is Boise, Idaho. It took about 8 hours to get here. However, that was 8 hours of travelling through a bunch of hilly, brown landscape. It was a bit of a boring drive, but we played the State License Plate Game and the Number Sign Game, which occupied our time for most of the trip. We were pleasantly surprised with how many state license plates we have seen already-- 8 different states (including Georgia!) before we even reached I-90!! Upon arriving in Boise, we currently have found 27 states, including Maine, Florida, and Hawaii! Because of the time zone change, that we weren't really taking into consideration, we didn't arrive at our hotel until 8pm. So, we haven't done much in Boise, except ... read more

We got to visit Andrew at Oxford today! It was so great having him show us around. We even got to go into some colleges that we'd normally not get to go in. And, we got to go in a couple colleges for free because we were with him. That is definitely the best way to tour the university. He explained the college system to us and it's very different from what we're used to. The first difference is that the university is made up of several different colleges (over 30) and you apply to a specific college and not the university. However, as a graduate student, you apply to your department, and if they select you, you can say what your first choice for a college would be. Then, that college decides if they want ... read more

This morning, we met Mr. Davis on base for the flight tower tour. Mark, the person you gave us the tour, was running late from his meeting, so we weren't up in the tower when the first 2 planes took off. Those were F-15E's and they took off at the same time. We were still able to see it from the ground and it was pretty cool. They had the afterburners on, so it was really loud. You could feel the vibrations inside you. When Mark pulled up a few minutes later, he told us that we had to hurry up the tower because they were holding the last two planes for us. We definitely couldn't have gone in the tower without him. After you enter the main door, you have to get permission to open ... read more

Our day started our kind of late. We decided to go to Capel Manor Gardens. It was a little further away, but Joey offered to drive. It took us a lot longer to get there than it was to return because our GPS was set to pedestrian, so it avoided the highways. Whoops! The main reason why we wanted to go to this garden was because it had a maze, which is something Joey and I really wanted to do. The rest of the garden was really interesting, but the maze was the coolest thing by far. In the middle of the maze was a lookout tower, so you could kind of look down on the maze. While we were there, there were 3 boys who were timing each other on how fast they could make ... read more