If you get caught in a thunderstorm you should crouch down on the balls of your feet with your heels touching. Or, take shelter in your car. You should not, however, get your jeans snagged on a root on top of a canyon and think “Damn, this is it. This is how I get struck by lightning. I knew it.”

We rushed to get the dogs out of the quickly flooding tent, subsequently realizing that they were the only things preventing it from flying over the cliff. Crap. Okay, quick, load our boxes of food in there so it will weigh it down. Crap. Now I’m hungry.

After we got the pups and ourselves safe into the car I started laughing hysterically. Rob looked at me incredulously, “This is funny to you?” As unfunny as the situation was, this was a defining moment for us. With a nod and a “one-two-three,” we were able to follow through and work together perfectly despite all this panic. I was also proud of myself because instead of whining about how cold and wet I didn’t want to be, I sucked it up and took control. Rob is the more experienced one so I usually go to him to figure out what needs to be done, but as the morning came and the rain stayed, I noticed that Rob was too cranky from a gearshift poking him all night. So, I let him sleep and hustled the mud and washout by myself. It was a little win for independent me.

So the storm that came through Utah that night was originally a tropical storm that had also devastated Arizona, and because all of Utah is sand with nowhere to go, most of the roads were washed out. Even one of the major highway was blocked – we had no chance off-road. For majority of Utah we stayed on alternative paved roads and secondary highways, which is really boring. Fortunately, along the highway you do find some cool sights and we found ourselves “camping” at one, the San Rafael Reef. This time we wised up and figured we could use the shelving system we had in the trunk as a bed, that way we could all sleep comfortably. In the middle of the night, I moved to the curb.