We ran away from home again...

Vickie and I ran away from home again last weekend.  It seems like we need to get away from everything once in a while, and Easter weekend was a good time to do it.  It was also LDS General Conference, which is broadcast on the radio in Utah, so we could listen while we were driving.  We are multitaskers by choice and necessity.  Actually, one of the Sunday morning talks was about the best description of what it means to be a Christian that I have heard.  Here is the link to that talk, and here's a picture of the Conference Center.

Anyway, since Utah is such a beautiful place to live, we decided to see a part of the state that neither of us had ever been before.  The little town of Boulder is about as far away from anywhere as one can get.  It was the last town in the United States to get its mail by mule train, for example; that didn't end until 1939!  Even now, there is only one road in and out of Boulder, Utah Highway 12.  As it turns out, Highway 12, a National Scenic Byway, is one of the most spectacular roads in the country, passing through some of the most incredible parts of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.  In one spot between Escalante and Boulder, the road lies right on top of a rocky ridge, with a fall of several hundred feet on either side of the road!  Here's an interesting shot in Red Canyon, between Bryce Canyon and Escalante.

Our avowed destination on the trip was to eat at the Hell's Backbone Grill, a small restaurant in Boulder.  For several years in a row, it has been judged by Salt Lake Magazine the best place to eat in Southern Utah.  We agree!  The owners and operators are two women who moved to Boulder and opened their dream of an organic restaurant using local fruits, vegetables, eggs, and meat.  The cuisine tends to the Southwest, utilizing chiles in almost everything, including the chocolate-chile cream pot for dessert!  Vickie's sister Janet gave us a copy of the cookbook put out by the restaurant, and a sampling of their recipes convinced us that we had to eat there.  It was truly worth the trip.

After our meal, we spent the night in Escalante, then hiked the Lower Calf Creek Falls trail to Lower Calf Creek Falls, 126 feet high, and a beautiful spot after an incredible 3.5-mile hike in.  Besides the red and white Navajo Sandstone, there are interesting pictographs from the Fremont Indian culture.  It's an amazing place.  It was a reasonable hike, though challenging for Vickie's two artificial knees, and well worth the effort.  The only problem was that it is very sandy, and we managed to get enough sand in the lens of one of our cameras that it may not be fixable.  Oh well...  Here are some pictures we took with the other camera:

After we got the sand out of our socks, we took off for home.  Between Escalante and the freeway back to Salt Lake, you pass the turnoff to Bryce Canyon National Park.  So we decided to take a look.  This time of year, there is still a lot of snow at Bryce, since the canyon rim in the park ranges between about 8000 and 9100 feet in elevation.  We weren't disappointed - the snow was about two feet deep.  Still, it makes for spectacular pictures.  Here are a few:

It was a great trip, and we're back home refreshed and ready to tackle the world again!

The classic April Fool's joke

       It's the day the French call, for some reason I've never fathomed, Poissons d'Avril ("April Fish").  And nobody really knows how it started, or when or where.  But it's clear that a lot of people have a lot of fun with it, as you can see from some of the classic pranks related in this Wikipedia article.

       The classic April Fool's prank in Vickie's family is one that I had a hand in.  Here's the background:  Vickie's youngest brother Bruce has been an inveterate prankster all his life, and always targeted his mother, usually successfully.  She desperately wanted to catch him unaware some April 1, and was finally presented her chance five years ago.

       In late March and early April of 2005, nearly the entire Muir family was on a cruise to the Orient.  On April 1, we were supposed to dock in Hong Kong, which had been a part of the People's Republic of China since 1999.  On the way in to the port, we saw a couple very ominous-looking little gunboats flying the Chinese flag shadowing our cruise ship.  They met up with our ship, and two officers boarded, then went (presumably) to talk with the ship's officers.  Now, in order to understand the prank, you need to know that Vickie's brother John has started and successfully run several internet-security companies, and that Bruce is part-owner of a business that installs internet systems in buildings in California and some places overseas, so both of them are constantly and deeply involved in internet security issues in a variety of settings and locations.

       At Vickie's mother's request, her brothers Mark and John and I contrived to set up Bruce by convincing him that he was about to be arrested by the Chinese government for obscure violations of Chinese internet law.  So we wrote the following note and contrived to have it delivered to the mailboxes outside John and Bruce's staterooms:

____________________________________________________________________________

State Ministry for Internal Security
Peoples Republic of China

31 March 2005

To:  Sapphire Princess/Security

Question for Identified Passenger

Dear Sir:

During passport control, following person flagged and requested to (1) answer question below and (2) submit to question/detain at District Prefecture #4, 729-731 Lotus Harbor Road upon disembarkation. 

Warning:  If passenger disembark in Hong Kong, must report immediately to District Prefecture.

Bruce Robert Muir          USA
John Richard Muir          USA
Li We Quan                 USA
Robert Arthur Sims         Australia
Sergei Illyich Suvarov     Russia

Question, please to answer complete in writing:

1. Name of Company and Purpose
2. How long
3. Duty of Job
4. Business relationships with Taiwan companies in last 2 years
5. Purpose in Peoples Republic of China
6. Peoples to meet in Hong Kong
7. Experience of Internet Security Damage
8. Security Classification

Feng Qin Cho
Assistant Prefect - Security

____________________________________________________________________________

       John immediately went to Bruce's stateroom to express his concern about what might happen to them - and Bruce took the bait.  He spent the next four hours or so laboriously writing out answers to all the questions, all the while trying anxiously to consult with John on what might happen once we reached Hong Kong.  Somehow the phrase "question/detain" had him worried!  He was seriously considering staying on the ship in Hong Kong harbor rather than face the tender mercies of District Prefecture #4.  In fact, after finally finishing all his lengthy answers to the questions, he asked Vickie's father to help him talk with the Purser's staff to see if his answers would be satisfactory.  Dick went to the Purser's Office with Bruce and just before they arrived, finally told Bruce what was happening.  He tried to get back at the perpetrators by arranging with the stewards to short-sheet all our beds that night, but all agreed that Bruce had finally met his match in the April Fool's prank business.
       Incidentally, it was on this trip that Mark and I had the discussions that led to the founding of GreenFire, our advanced geothermal company that is (with any luck at all) about to be funded.  It's almost (but not quite) as fun as writing letters for the Chinese State Ministry of Internal Security!