Funny Day, Looking for Laughter and Finding it There. Sunny Day, Braiding Wild Flowers and Leaves in My Hair.

A petroglyph hand print.

Today I'm going to talk about my birthday. I turned 54 on the first Tuesday of our vacation. It wasn't the best day, because I was exhausted. Some of it was that I had a period on and off for over a month before we went on vacation, with the the migraines that accompanied them, we also had been doing more activities over the last few days than we had in years and years, and then we woke up at 5 am that morning, and Coadster was up writing a paper in the very small room we were staying until the wee hours of the morning the night before.

Anyway, I was very tired, which meant that it wasn't the best birthday I've ever had, but I can't feel sorry for myself, because it was still filled with hiking and reading, and petroglyphs, and eating good food, and ice cream and ended with a beautiful sunset and a gigantic rising full moon. So, really, my birthday wasn't bad, it was more that my attitude was not the best for all of the wonder I was shown.

We got up at 5 am so we could drive the hour and fifteen minutes to get to Canyonlands. It was incredible there. We did three smaller hikes. The first one took us to the cowboy site, where you could see what their camps looked like back in the day.

As usual, we also took some goofy photos with leaning trees.

All of the hikes in the Needles section of Canyonlands were cool.

We climbed ladders to reach the slick rock on the top of the hike.

And the slick rock didn't disappoint.

Like I said, I was lucky as hell to get to do this on my birthday with friends and family.

I even tried to do one of those inspirational yoga poses the kids are always doing...With wildly different results than the cool kids. Oh, so not graceful.

We found funky rocks to climb on, around, and inside.

The clouds also contributed to the beauty of the scenery.

On the way back to town, we stopped at Newspaper Wall to te see the Petroglyphs.

Some of them were over 2,000 years old.

Once we got back to Moab, John and our friends wanted to go mountain biking, and I decided to skip that. When I get tired, I'm even more clumsy than usual, and I didn't want to end up in the hospital on my birthday, so I stayed back at our place with Coadster. I read 50 pages of my book and took a well needed nap.

Later in the evening, we went out for Mexican food and margaritas. Both of which were really, really good.

Instead of birthday cake, we stopped for ice cream - my drug of choice.

Then we all went back to Arches to check out the sunset. This was the hike that John missed the morning before, so he got to see most of it. He had a Summer cold that was making him super tired too, so we thought a mellow hike was best.

Double Arches was even more beautiful with the sun setting behind them.

There weren't as many people there as the time before, so we were even able to climb up into the arch for John to get a photo.

We ended another day with a beautiful sunset and moon rise. Even with a tired/bad attitude, I realized just how damn lucky I was to be at these beautiful and sacred places on my 54th birthday.