7-3-2015 4th of July in St. George, UT

7-3-2015 ST. GEORGE, UTAH

On the subject of “What to do over the 4th,” votes were tossed into the hat including our usual favorite, Flagstaff, where we’ve been several times for their 3 hour long parade and festivities in the local parks.  Rob’s research brought up St. George, Utah for the parade, craft fair and jazz festival in the park biergarten (in UTAH?!).  Lindy’s reply is ,”YUP!”  So we returned from the MSRA Cruise-In in St. Paul, spent just enough time (one week) recovering from the fever and cold I caught there, packed up Bee and embarked on the fairly short trip (~180 miles).  Logistically short, yes.  About 20 miles from our final destination, however, road construction brought us to a halt.  They are building a new bridge (Do it in the Summer or don’t do it at all, as we often say in the Midwest.) through the mountains and so it was an hour to travel the last few miles.  The tall red rocky crags were most beautiful,

if a little intimidating, with the tiny trickle of the Virgin River snaking its way far, far below.  Bee kept her cool in the 110F heat on the climb, always a little worrisome, and here we are at Temple View RV Resort, sitting on our porch, sipping a cold brew with a fine… er… view of the temple.

Why is it called St. George?  First, Joseph Smith started all that Mormon hullabaloo and he was the first President of the Mormon Church.  When he died, Brigham Young picked up the torch and agreed to export the troublesome Mormons out of the Midwest (mostly Illinois) and head out west.  Thus, the Emigrant Trail was born.  When I say “emigrant” it is because the Mormons were actually leaving the USA.  They settled in the Utah territory.  Joseph Smith’s cousin, George, was instrumental in the creation of St. George, or “Dixie” as it was nicknamed.  He and his buddies, apostles, were sent here with their wives (epistles) and 300 families to begin colonizing the area and start raising cotton crops (thus, “Dixie”), to supply themselves and to market the rest. George was called the “Potato Saint,” because he convinced people to eat raw unpeeled potatoes to fight scurvy, which apparently worked, all that vitamin A, don’tchaknow.  So at least one story says that St. George was named after George, Joseph Smith’s cousin.  They all call each other “saint,” which I kinda like.  Saint Krauser has a nice ring to it.

Today, we saw dinosaur tracks at the Dinosaur Discovery Site.  A guy named Sheldon Johnson was tilling his farm land and he had removed about 20 feet of rock layers (Would you have given up?) when some of them split open laterally.  Between the layers were all these footprints and fish bone

T. Rex (R) just for comparison

fossils, skeletons and even leaves and branches.  They hit the jackpot with this and now, for a fee of course, you can walk through their small museum to see it all up close and personal.  The dating on some artifacts indicate ages in the millions of years, in some cases 70-250 million years old.  Makes you kinda wonder why Adam and Eve got such a late start, eh?

Rob (on the R with the hat)

We’ve been scouting out the town and trying to figure out where we’ll situate ourselves for the grand parade tomorrow.  While doing this the sky turned rather black.  By the time we got back to Bee, we had ourselves a storm, rain and big hail.  The rv site we were originally going to choose, next to the one we are in, was submerged under a foot of water.  We got soaked to the bone battening down the hatches.  We even pulled the Jeepster up under the awning as much as possible to try to preclude hail damage.  I was a bit frightened.  Over the thunder, amid the gale force winds, Rob shouted frantically, “You want a beer?!”  “Well… yeah.  What’s a little hail?”

Hail to the Jeep