This morning we had a shorter drive to Zion National Park. We started out the visit with a short uphill hike to a view of the Zion Canyon. It was a fun rough trail, but we learned this is not what the rest of the park was like. After driving through two tunnels to get to the main section of the park there was nowhere to park. We had to park outside the park and walk in to take a shuttle through the park (the park is so jammed with visitors that if everyone drove their own cars, the place would be a huge traffic jam).We felt like we were in a theme park, with the paved "hiking" trails - pretty much all the place was missing was a monorail and a giant mouse. The views looked nice but we couldn't really see them from the shuttle. We headed to a popular hike and apparently everyone else did also. We couldn't really pay attention to the scenery while dodging the other hikers, who were all headed to the river to swim. So basically we didn't enjoy ourselves too much in this main section - the crowds were massive, the heat was oppressive, and the other people were just basically irritating.I think that perhaps we spend one day too many in the desert and we were just a little bit fried. We left and drove to another section of the park with a scenic drive up to an overlook of a huge canyon, and a complete lack of crowds, which was a nice change.

We headed to the Festival City of the US, Cedar City to camp for the night. There weren't any festivals in town this evening and our campsite was about ten feet by ten feet and jammed in among a ton of other sites, most of which were mercifully empty.