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May 17, 2010, a Monday
near Canyonlands National Park Needles District, Utah, USA
— Photographed along the Davis Canyon Road and went to town
We got up leisurely again this morning. I had a bowl of cereal and made instant coffee to go and J started a mug of tea steeping. We packed up the laundry and our computers and left in the Jeep around 7:30.

We took the moderate 4WD Davis Canyon Road to see if we could get in a good position to photograph North Sixshooter Peak with some of the puffy clouds behind it. We stopped at a location with some promise, but I didn't realize until hiking out a bit to get an interesting composition that the sun was directly behind us when looking at North Sixshooter Peak, and our long shadows got in the way of any interesting compositions. Not only that, but the clouds were moving fast and had largely vanished. I gave J an introduction to using tilt-shift lenses because she's been thinking about getting one. We continued heading up the road to scout it, then turned around to head back. We stopped so I could walk out to the edge of a small canyon, and on the way I walked by some nice Utah Daisies. I set up to photograph them (left), and J relaxed in some shade — the biting gnats and hot sun were too much for her and she was more than ready to leave.

We made it back to the paved UT-211 around 10:00 and took it east. Then we got on US-191 south.

We went to the Visitor Center in Monticello around 11:00. It was a nice facility and the friendly host gave us some good information about places to explore near the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park.

We went to a laundromat in town around 11:25 and started our laundry.

Then we went to The Peace Tree Juice Bar and Internet Café in Monticello for lunch and to use their WiFi. I got a Chicken Pesto Panini and J got a Veggie Panini. They were both delicious and came with some very tasty macaroni salad. We'd definitely go back there again for the food! The WiFi experience wasn't nearly as good. The connection was slow and spotty until they reset their router — then it was just slow. I left to go back to the laundromat to put the things in the dryers then returned. I went online using a very fast Verizon Broadband signal — one of the fastest connections I've ever had that way! Sans Digital emailed to let me know that they couldn't fix my TowerStor TS2UT and because they don't have a new one in stock (the model has been discontinued) they wanted to send me a TowerRAID TR2UT instead. I looked into it, and it has two trayless bays, USB and eSATA connectivity, and hardware RAID(0), RAID(1), JBOD, and BIG modes like the TS2UT. However, the power switch is on the rear of the unit and instead of a multi-position slider switch on the front to select the operating mode (RAID, JBOD, or BIG), it has four DIP switches on the back. The TowerRAID TR2UT will be a suitable replacement because I usually leave one of my external enclosure in RAID(0) mode and switch the other between RAID(0) and JBOD, so I told them to send me one.

I left again to take the laundry out of the driers, then stopped at Woody's (gas station) to fill up the Jeep at $3.279/gal.

I returned to the The Peace Tree Juice Bar and Internet Café and did more work online. We left around 3:00 to head "home."

We returned to the RV around 3:50 and the wind was blowing like crazy. I put away my laundry then downloaded the images I took this morning. I processed five images from yesterday for the blog.

We had dinner around 6:15 of a leftover steak fajita for me and a salad for both of us.

After dinner, I worked up a blog entry and did some computer work.