Rather than starting out by jumping right into all the excitement, I'm going to start out slowly. Very slowly, actually. When we got to Moab, we discovered that UPS had lost Mark's bike. Well, that was certainly disappointing, but, fortunately, Moab is not a boring town, so we managed to find fun things to do around town.

Yes, you have to read about it! No fair jumping to the exciting part.

It turned out that Mark's friend, Sara, was in town, so we visited all the tourist sites. (I never really understood how or why she got there. Maybe she'll insert something here to explain it for me.) I should note that the main reason for putting this page in is to show you the photos, so please click on some of the better ones!

Here's Arches National Park, just outside of Moab. Everybody takes photos of Delicate Arch, and, I'll admit, we did too, but ours is at least unusual. (Perhaps because it's illegal? We're not sure.)

In Arches, we didn't do anything all that exciting. In fact, we mostly just took photos. Here's Mark taking one, and me sitting on the lower arch of Double Arch:

We also tried some sport climbing. I'd actually never clipped a bolt before, so that was pretty exciting for me. Mark isn't exactly a sport climber, either. However, we rose to the challege, and we both pulled on quickdraws and tried a heel hook above our heads. Hopefully, I'll get some photos of that. Mark's been trying pretty hard to get me to not put in the best photo, but I'll try to get something in here. (The best one is him belaying off the trunk of the car.)

Well, by this time, we were getting pretty annoyed at UPS... In fact, let me just pause for a moment to advertise FexEx. UPS sucks for mailing bikes. The guys at Poison Spider said that about 1/3 of the people who mail them bikes using UPS have serious complaints with them. (ie: Mangled or lost.) Use FexEx, they're a bit more expensive, but, apparently, they kick ass over UPS.

Okay, back to our story. We were getting annoyed at UPS, so we rented a bike for Mark and tried out the slickrock trail. This is, of course, one of the things that makes Moab famous. From what I hear, it makes it a bit too famous. One guy at Poison Spider said that during the peak of the season, you have to wait in line to get on the trail! Ouch!

Well, winter isn't the MTBing season there, so we had nice cool weather and three other people on the trail. We didn't run out of water, since the weather was actually nice, and we didn't get annoyed at crowds. Why do people come here any other time?

For those who have never heard of slickrock, look it up on AltaVista. There's lots of stuff out there. Okay, we'll even toss in a photo of us on the trail. Needless to say, it is a totally different sport than MTBing in upstate New York. It's fun!!

After that, we gave up. UPS was not working, so Mark rented a bike for 12 days. Poison Spider had good bikes, so we weren't too worried about the switch. So, off we went...