Day 17 – Wednesday, August 5 (Drive to the Grand Canyon)

We awoke today to pack and drive our second shortest distance of the trip, 350 miles from Moab to the Grand Canyon – this after the two longest driving days, of 560 miles a piece (our average is 450). The clouds took the brunt of the sun’s heat, blessing us with shade as we stowed, folded and secured everything. The WiFi at the campsite was spotty, and Vicki needed to pay our monthly bills online, so we drove the 10 miles south into Moab and set up shop in the parking lot of the Daily Grind, enjoying coffee and smoothies while Vicki made sure our bill collectors were satisfied. After she finished, I uploaded a few of our pictures and we got away at 11.

I asked the woman at the coffee shop how she got to Moab. She said it was a long story involving an ex, and that she was originally from Canada, but that she had some great friends and had gotten used to the heat. She also told me that early October wasn’t a bad time to visit – with highs merely in the 80’s. From what we saw, the heat of August did not seem to deter many people from hiking, taking pictures, and seeing the Arches.

One thing I haven’t included much about in this blog is the all-star international cast of tourists from Europe and Asia we have seen since crossing the Mississippi – both at the parks and in the campgrounds. Lots of French, British, Italian, German, Swiss, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Indian, and some other languages we can’t place. Many of them fly to the west coast and rent Class C RV’s, then make a three-week odyssey through the signature national parks in the west. It’s fun to hear all of the different languages as we hike and sightsee.

Joy read the travel blogs and has decreed them boring beyond belief. I will, in deference to her, forego the usual tallying of the altitudes and statistics of this trip, although her opinion in this matter smacks of someone who watches more movies than engine temps and fuel gages while traveling. I will say that we climbed from 4500 to 7500 feet on this trip, and that we have no more high mountain passes to navigate from here on out.

We drove today through the usual road construction, one-lane sections and dirt roads, but take those little snags in stride by now as part of the package. At the border of Utah and Arizona, we passed through Monument Valley – littered with more buttes (tall and narrow) and mesas (short and wider) than you could shake a stick at, as well as a lot of flea market looking roadside stands offering trinkets for tourists passing though on desolate 163, where the closest thing to civilization for a hundred miles was a town called Mexican Hat on the San Juan River, named after a rock formation nearby.

In Arizona, the landscape turned to rolling, grey desert as we drove through collections of dwellings with names like Kayenta, Tsegi, Cow Springs, Rare Metals, and Tuba City (State 3A Football Champs a few years back, the faded sign proclaimed), where we filled up. Along the way, we drove through a couple of combination sandstorm/rainstorms – and I can’t explain them other than using those words (but there was more sand than rain). We also saw lots of poverty along the road. We made a bathroom pit stop at a McD’s in Kayenta and saw a couple of dogs herding a dozen sheep through the parking lot (filled with beat up pickup trucks and Escalades (with out of state tags). We saw few trees and even less grass. And most rivers and creeks in this area of the country are called “washes” because the only time water flows in them is after a rare rain.

We arrived at the park entrance around 5:30 and took our first look at the vast, hazy canyon a couple of hours before sunset, as a thunderstorm rolled in from the west. We learned that the park sticks with Pacific Standard Time when Daylight Savings Time is in effect, so we gained yet another hour on this leg of the trip, the farthest west we will travel. We drove 30 miles or so along the rim, stopping once more for pictures, before finding the campsite in Grand Canyon Village and setting up in a hurry moments before the rainstorm hit - driven sideways by the wind! We also learned that our reefer is not working – so we transferred everything to the cooler.

The rain didn’t last for long, and we enjoyed a good supper and the sound of the crickets as we relaxed, caught up on reading and planned our next day. We hadn’t yet adjusted to the new time zone, so we climbed into our bags early - the low got down to the mid-60s, a veritable ice age after the fires of Moab.

Day 14 – Sunday, August 2 (Drive to Arches National Park (Moab, Utah) through five mountain passes)

Today was another big driving day. One of the tent campers said that the park rangers had driven trucks along the perimeter of the camp while beating a large sheet of metal to drive away a grizzly bear around one in the morning. We will be glad to get out of bear country. We packed out and headed south by 9:30, our typical departure time (it takes us about 2 hours to shower, eat breakfast and break down the trailer).

Eli is getting a little tired of the picture taking. After driving slowly south through another 10 miles of road construction (very bumpy dirt road), we stopped at a turnoff to get a family picture in front of the Grand Tetons while the morning sun painted them up. He told us all that Hell is a bus ride to Heaven – with the Devil as the driver, stopping to take pictures at a billion places along the way. We got a chuckle and he got no more picture stops the rest of the 560 miles to Moab, Utah (although Vicki did take a few out of the window).

After celebrating two high mountain pass crossings from the Black Hills to Yellowstone, today we took on five 7,000 plus passes – with style. After we passed through beautiful Jackson (and got a precious few moments of WiFi connection time at a McDonald’s), Wyoming kissed us good-bye just south of Afton on Highway 89 at the 7,610 foot Salt River Pass. Then we crossed the southeast corner of Idaho, but not before the van pulled us across 7,000 foot Geneva Pass east of Montpelier. We crossed into Utah, drove south along Bear Lake on the Oregon Trail Historic Highway, got some gas at Garden City and climbed up 7,500 foot Bear Lake pass. Then just before we entered Brigham City, we crossed over the 7,000 foot Sardine Pass, and hit our first four lane highway in over 200 miles.

We drove south along I-15 along the eastern shore of the Great Salt Lake, and hit 70 mph (the speed limit was 75) after averaging 40 mph for over five hours in the mountains. Twenty years ago, in the summer of 1989, Vicki and I drove our little Honda Accord for three weeks along I- 80 from San Diego to our next duty station in Newport, Rhode Island, stopping for a couple of hours in Salt Lake City to see the Mormon Tabernacle. Little did we know we would get to drive across 80 (on 15) on a hit summer a couple of decades later with Joy and Eli on a similar summer odyssey.

South of Provo, we turned southeast on Highway 6 and began a relentless 40 mile climb to 7,500 foot Soldier Summit, our last hill of the day. Along the way, we noticed that the air conditioning was not working any longer – and the temp was 101 degrees. We rolled down the windows and enjoyed the fresh, hot Utah mountain air! We were low on gas and when I say there was nothing for miles I mean that in the sense of the wild west. At the summit, we thanked God for a gas station and poured 24 gallons into the belly of the beast. But here’s a bit of travel trivia: we got the second best gas mileage of the trip (21 mpg) on this day of five mountain pass crossings. Lots of downhill plunges in second gear account for that number.

After supper at Wendy’s in Price, we drove the last 100 miles through a desolate, lonely country where houses were scarce and the landscape harsh and forbidding. A post card here says “Howdy from the Middle of Nowhere” and they’re not kidding. At the Arches National Park, we learned that this area was one of the last to be settled by non-native people – in the 1890’s – because it took us that long to find anyone crazy enough to want to live here.

We pulled into our campsite around 9:30, set up quickly as usual and crashed hard. It was 70 or so outside, and we had an idea the next day would be hot, but we were glad to be done with traveling for a couple of days.