June 8

We wake up after just a few hours of sleep and we immediately keep going towards the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary. Once again, however, we take a wrong turn and we end up at the Indian General Store of some random indian reservation. We stop there to ask for directions on how to get to the Animal Sanctuary and they tell us that the only way to get there is to drive through the Zion national park, which is supposed to be a very beautiful drive. Before getting back on the road, we decide to take a little break in order to explore the Indian General Store. The store contains a lot of weird and probably fake indian items, such as traditional clothes, hats, and extremely expensive wooden carved sticks, which Jeremy challenges Lyyli to break. He bets $10 that she wont be able to berak it, but he then immediately cancel the bet as he realizes that she is actually willing to accept the challenge and that she is even likely to suceed. Later on, as we look into the food section of the general store, we eventually find out about the existence of an actual fruit called Huckleberry, one of Jeremy's nicknames. We also take the time to look at some very interesting embalmed animals, including non-existant ones, such as bunnies with horns, birds with bunny heads and horns, and of course also the infamous werewolf which essentialy consists of the ass of a dear to witch an additional mouth and eyes had been strategically positioned so as to make it look like an ugly scary face.
To our surprise, the Indian General Store also features an extremely small and ridiculous bunch of buildings which somehow tries to replicate a town in the far-west. The town also features a farm in the back, which we could access for an overpriced fee of $3 per person. Although the whole thing was extremely easy to infiltrate, for some unexplicable reasons, we actually decide to pay for it. We get in and check out the animals in the farm, which includes: the oldest, slowest and probably also the smelliest donkey in the world, two extremely cute lamas that we suspect were however completely retarded, a very boring poney which pretended to be a horse, a semi-dead rabbit which was of absolute no intereste to us and a bunch of deers that were just hanging around. So we hang out with the animals for a while, looking at the beautiful deers, shouting at the old donkey, playing with the lamas and feeding them with some carrots, which they wolud only eat if given through the mouth. At some point, however, we get excessively bored about the whole animal thing, and we realize that the time has come for us to leave for Zion National park.

On the way to Zion national park, we stop at another park on the road in order to look at what Jeremy described to be mooses, although we later found out that they were merely elks and some other long horned cattles. Jeremy challenges Lyyli to get into the cage were the animals are being kept. Consistently with the 'yes' pact, Lyyli starts climbing up the fence, although she eventually has to give up as she realizes that the fence is an extremely weak piece of shit and is probably not gonna hold her weight.
Yet, as we are checking out the fake mooses from outside the fences, we run into an old guy who was giving away 3 kittens for free. Lyyli starts to freak out, claiming that we should take one of these kittens along with us. In fact, Lyyli is a convinced cat lover, and as every cat lover, she was an easy prey to the cuteness of these kittens. In addition, Lyyli had recently suffered the loss of Nouche, her former and incredibly amazing cat, so she took it as a sign of the Tao that we ran into these kittens just on the same day in which we were supposed to get rid of Tomatha. Strangely enough, Lyyli's arguments eventually managed to convince us, so we decide to get one of these kittens to guard our RV as a replacement of Tomatha.
And thus comes our new member of the crew: a little black kitten with a very strong sense for freedom but a very bad sense of orientation. As a matter of fact, Lyyli originally wanted to get one of the small stripped kittens, but as soon as she opened the cage, the little black kitten ran away to escape for a better life. This is why we decided to take her instead, because she is a fugitive. As the kitten was completely covered in dirt, we went to clean her in the bathroom, an expericience which most likely amounted to her first encounter with water and as a result of which she once again tried to escape. In order to prevent any further escapades, we thus put the kitten into a cookie box, which kindof played the role of a cage, and which was later positioned next to the passenger seat in the RV, so that Tomatha woudn't notice her being there and will thus not try to kill her right away. What we did not realize by then, however, is that the cookie box was right next to where all the fumes are meant to come out of the RV. As a result of the toxicity of these fumes, the brain of the kitten has probably been strongly and negatively affected, which may or may not be the actual factor leading to the extreme stupidity of this kitten. This notwithstanding, given that she has spent the first months of her life in close contact with an extremely aggressive pitbull who was constantly trying to kill her, the cute little black kitten has eventually turned itself into a feroce beast who does not fear anyone and is always trying to attack anything that comes sufficiently close to her, regardless of the fact that she is too really weak to actually harm anyone.

We keep going and we finally reach Zion national park. At the entrance of the park, they make us pay $40 (as opposed to the standard $20) because they claim that given the width of the RV, they will have to clear out the tunnel in order for pigpen to go through. We subsequently realizes that it was absolutely not neceassary to clear the tunnel because of us, since the tunnel was wide enough for pigpen to go through, and because an actual truck was just in front of us so they wolud have had to cleanr the tunnel anyways. The money was however completely worth it, since Zion is in fact an amazingly beautiful national park, with lots of beautiful sceneries made up of red rocks, white clay, and interesting trees. As we are driving up the hill, however, Jeremy keeps crying like a baby because he doesn't wanna separate from Tomatha which he supposedly loves so much. We eventually start worrying that, if Jeremy keeps crying that much, he's probably gonna have pigpen run into an accident. So we decide to stop in order to explore the park, with the excuse that we saw some cool mountain goats that we wanted to check out from a closer point of view. Jeremy goes by himself and mainly hangs out with Tomatha, as he thought it would be the last time he would ever be able to spend with her. We suspect that he was actually hoping that she would run away into the wilderness, so that he wouldnt have to give her up to the pound, but we actually have no evidence about that. In the meanwhile, Lyyli, Christy, Matt and Triet-ly go explore the surroundings together with the little black cat which travels in the cookie box. Triet-ly is very excited to be in this beautiful and natural landscape and she eventually ends up climbing up a huge rock in spite of her broken ankle. Lyyli just plays with her new kitten, while Matt and Christie act as the official photographers and try to take pictures of the whole thing.

Once again, we keep going and we finally arrive to the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary. The place is really amazing and it seems to be more like a pet's paradise than a pound. They however tell us that they cannot get Tomatha because all their dogs live together and a pitbull such as Tomatha would not be able to get along with any other dog.
We are therefore stuck with both Tomatha and a small little kitten in the RV. So we stop at the closest pet store in order to buy a new leash and a musle for Tomatha and a new leash for the kitten, but only because they didn't have a musle for the kitten. Then we tie the kitten to the cookie box and we tie Tomatha to the other side of the RV. The situation is however extremely dangerous, as Tomatha keeps attempting to kill the kitten who lives in the cookie box while the kitten keeps trying to kill tamata who is tied to the fridge.

As we are getting late on the schedule, we decide to drive straight to our next destination: the Gran Canyon. Matt is in charge of the driving and enjoy driving like a crazy racing car. Pigpen hardly makes it to the top as the points on the carburator are starting to go bad, but Jeremy mainly blames it on Matt terrible pigpen driving skills. We arrive to the Gran Canyon just before sunset. We go and explore a little bit around, trying to take as many pictures as possible of the beautiful sunset, before it gets too dark. We then go and hang out for a while in the lodge, drinking beer while looking at the Gran Canyon in the darkness and desperately trying to warm ourselves up with the fire. Everyone is kindof miserable and wants to leave, except for Jeremy who wants to sleep there in order to be able to explore the Gran Canyon tomorrow during the day. We eventually manage to convince him to leave, so we drive to the next gas station in order to fill up pigpen, but as the gas station was closed, we slowly make it back to the exact same spot as we were before we left, and we fall asleep there.