So I\u2019m down in St. George for a business conference \u2013 the cushiest business conference ever \u2013 and I\u2019ve brought the family down with me. Yes, we\u2019re renegade parents – we yanked the kids out of school to have a Southern Utah adventure. Yesterday we went spelunking through Zion\u2019s Canyon and had a wonderful time. It\u2019s all good. <\/p>\n
We\u2019re no strangers to St. George. We lived down here for three years, and our twins were born here. I spent another year commuting down here from the Salt Lake area \u2013 not a good plan, by the way \u2013 so I have a pretty good sense of what I\u2019m talking about when I say that I don\u2019t fully understand why people think this place is paradise. <\/p>\n
Don\u2019t get me wrong. There are things about this area that are absolutely delightful. The landscape is remarkably unique \u2013 you\u2019re not going to find this kind of red rock country anywhere else \u2013 and the weather, at least in the spring and the fall, is much nicer than the freezing Salt Lake winters that seem to last from September through May. <\/p>\n
But St. George winters aren\u2019t heaven. It doesn\u2019t snow much, but it\u2019s still deathly cold, especially at nighttime. And the summers are unbearably brutal. Even after the sun goes down, you\u2019re lucky if the temperature drops down into the double digits. That made life especially difficult when my job was selling tickets to an outdoor amphitheatre where the patrons had to sit in sweltering heat to watch old warhorse musicals that don\u2019t make them feel any cooler. We did really well with frozen lemonade sales, though. <\/p>\n
The weather was a real sticking point for Mrs. Cornell, who comes from the great state of Washington, up past the Seattle area. St. George is sort of a Bizarro Washington \u2013 dry, hot, deserty where Washington is wet, humid, and lush. Mrs. Cornell was a good sport while we were here, but she was never climatologically suited for a place like this. <\/p>\n
And the city itself? Well, it\u2019s been one of the fastest growing cities in the nation for several years running, although that\u2019s slowed considerably in recent months with the dip in the housing market. But the city has no real character to it \u2013 it\u2019s sprawl and more sprawl. And while I\u2019m decidedly not an environmentalist, I\u2019m really bugged by the big black lava hill in the center of town that has a huge red gash in the side that was carved in the hill to make room for ugly condominiums. Come on, guys. Can\u2019t you do better than that?<\/p>\n
And then there\u2019s the restaurant issue. There aren\u2019t any good restaurants down here. No, that\u2019s not true \u2013 there are occasionally good restaurants down here, but they never last all that long. The only ones that thrive are the national chains \u2013 the Chilis and the Red Lobsters and the Applebeeses. I think that has to do with the hardcore Mormon influence. Most restaurants make most of their money off of booze, and the Mormon teetotalers are bad for business. I suppose I should start boozing it up to help matters, as I\u2019m part of the problem. <\/p>\n
I\u2019m not trying to be universally negative. There\u2019s much to love down here \u2013 especially the people. We\u2019ve made some of the best friends of our lives with St. Georgians. And the pace of life down here is just about right \u2013 very few folks wear ties unless they absolutely have to, and everyone seems genuinely cheerful. Those who are born and raised here find every excuse to stay here, and it\u2019s not really hard to see why. Once you get used to 110 degrees in the shade, you\u2019re a St. Georgian for life. <\/p>\n
And I should temper my restaurant criticisms, as they just opened the first In N Out Burger in Utah right on the city outskirts. That\u2019s reason enough to move back right there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SoI\u2019m down in St. George for a business conference \u2013 the cushiest business conference ever \u2013 and I\u2019ve brought the family down with me. Yes, we\u2019re renegade parents - we yanked the kids out of school to have a Southern Utah adventure. Yesterday we went spelunking through Zion\u2019s Canyon and had a wonderful time. It\u2019s ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4883,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270\/revisions\/4883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}