Cole realized that he had lost his phone, potentially while running and playing Frisbee the night before, so we swept our camp site after packing up and found nothing. He eventually found it packed in his tent in the evening.
We arrived at Best Friends about 30 minutes early, so we visited their gift shop. I bought a cat tee-shirt for myself, and a Dog Town tee-shirt for my parents. Then we headed off to Dog Town for our morning of service at one of the puppy buildings. Apparently they get a lot of homeless puppies from the nearby Najavo communities.
In the puppy area, we first received a quick introduction and then we deep-cleaned the indoor and outdoor dog runs. Once we had set all the runs back up, we each got to take a puppy out for a walk. I had made it clear that I'm not too comfortable around dogs, so they gave me a puppy to walk by itself plus a volunteer to accompany me on the walk. My puppy was fine - it completely ignored me and just pulled me down the trail behind it. However, I do not see what everyone else loved about the puppies - yes, they are cute, but they are also rather annoying and tiresome.
We had our (vegetarian) lunch of hummus, olives, lettuce, peppers, avocados, and pitas on the patio at the Village. After lunch we went to an older part of Dog Town and worked for what seemed like forever cleaning up outdoor dog runs and weeding along the perimeters of these runs. The heat and back-breaking labour made this a particularly hard three hours.
Once we were finally done weeding and cleaning, we finished our time at Best Friends with a tour of the pig and horse area. This was not originally part of our schedule, but one of the participants was really persistent in asking about seeing the horses, so Best Friends was able to make it happen. We first walked along the horse section. Apparently many of the horses at Best Friends were abused by their previous owners, so they are now being retrained using a less controlling and intimidating technique. Then we were shown a few different types of pigs, and I was actually really impressed with the pigs. They are smarter and more loving than I had ever imagined to be possible.
We finally left Best Friends for our drive to Zion National Park around 4:30pm. When we arrived, there was no space left at either of the Zion National Park camp grounds (and we had not reserved any sites since this trip was thrown together at the last minute when we opted not to visit Mission: Wolf due to the weather), so we camped at the Quality Inn camp ground in Springdale for $105 a night. However, our group was very excited about the 6 minute shower this price included for each of us.
Most people showered while Tommy, Cole, and I cooked Thanksgiving dinner (mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberries) plus fajita chicken. After eating dinner and cleaning up, I prepared breakfast and lunch for Thursday, called JT, showered for 12 minutes (since Emily gave me an extra token she had purchased but did not use), and then finally went to sleep at 11.
Our site at Ponderosa Grove
Puppies at Best Friends (photo by Tommy Vinyard)
Finally at Zion! (photo by Tommy Vinyard)
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