Day 33 – 4/15/16
5.7 map / ?? (I forgot to turn on) GPS miles
501.2 / 542.5 miles total

We are totally winning at this trail. Three nights in a row in hotels and no zero days!  

When we woke up and looked out the window this morning all we saw was grey and a fresh dusting snow on the hillsides all around town. The forecast for today and tonight: snowing and gusts up to 55mph. A zero was definitely tempting us, but we really didn’t want to take yet another day off.
Scheming how to stay out of the cold, we came up with an awesome plan: walk ~6 miles into Bryce National Park, then take the free shuttle bus out to Ruby’s Inn, a hotel just outside the park boundary for the night! 

We were loving this plan, but also stuck in Tropic waiting for Joey’s new shoes to be delivered. He ordered them from Zappos (free overnight delivery) like 5 days ago and asked them to be sent via USPS General Delivery. But Zappos messed up and sent them UPS, which won’t deliver to General Delivery to a post office. After some phone calls yesterday he thought he had it straightened out for delivery at the motel today, but knew better than to trust it was truly straightened out. 

After our motel checkout we moved to loiter at the coffee shop for a while. A couple of hours later we went back to the motel to check if the shoes had been delivered, but the office was closed. Uh oh, how will the shoes get delivered if the office is closed?? 

So we moved to the pizza place and ordered a 10″ pizza to share as it snowed outside. Long after eating we finally saw the big brown UPS truck roll on by. Joey and Bubs jumped up and ran outside to chase down the driver. He had pulled into the Post Office to deliver some PO Box packages and Joey and Bubs accosted him for the shoes. The box was on the truck, still addressed for General Delivery, meaning, if we hadn’t chased down the truck, the shoes wouldn’t have gotten delivered. Hooray!

And this all happened just in time for us to hike the 6 miles and catch the shuttle bus to tonight’s hotel, which is a bizarre little city with neon lights and a traffic light and crowded with tourists. It’s also really fancy: there are throw pillows and conditioner. We again hot tubbed in our underwear.