Snap by Snap Volume 2

We are home again.  After sleeping 10 hours, I woke to find Mark in the living room watching Geronimo starring Matt Damon, filmed in Monument Valley, of course. I have this sneaking suspicion that we'll be watching westerns for a while. Yesterday we drove 650 miles and had such problems with sleepiness that I began to suspect we had exhaust fumes coming into the car from some awful damage we'd done to the car in our off-roading. But maybe it was just the miles and miles of corn and the lack of red rocks at the road's end. We drove almost 3300 miles on this trip, and it seems like we've seen just about every variety of land - farmland, plains, mountain peaks, forests, and desert. We had rain, hail, snow, wind, and heat. We've crossed many rivers to count, most of them multiple times (Wabash, Mississippi, Kaskaskia, Kansas, Republican, Rio Grande, San Juan River, Animas, Colorado, Eagle, Blue, Platte, and Green).  What an awesome country we live in. It is good to ...

It's official. The $40 I saved last night on the hotel room was NOT worth it. Too bad. I probably slept more in  the car today than I did last night in the hotel. To think I used to be able to make it on a two week wilderness trip sleeping on the ground or on the floor of the bus along the way. I'm a wimp now. When we stepped out of the car at the first rest stop of the day, we knew we were back to business as usual. The humidity was like a wall, the air thick. Dry heat is as real as wind chill, don't let anyone tell you differently! A storm brewed up to our south and for a while we considered stopping early to avoid the walnut size hail that was supposedly ahead of us, but decided to make a run for it. Hey, if the motorcyclists in shirt sleeves could make it, we could, right? In the end we beat the storm to Salina, Kansas - but the high winds were no fun to drive in, even with our relatively low profile Altima. And speaking of our car - either I have had a few too may chee...

We enjoyed a beautiful drive today from Rifle to Colorado Springs, Colorado. Not many pictures of the beautiful drive along a narrow canyon, since it was hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. The Colorado River kept us company the whole way through the gorge portion of the drive, often showing off with wild rapids and whitewater. There was also a bike path along the highway with many dedicated bikers - Colorado is big for bikers evidently - we've seen so many people training on all sorts of terrain. Today's off-highway route also included several ski resort towns and driving over several peaks. We crossed the Continental Divide (again) via the Hoosier Pass - how appropriate! We met up with our Indiana friends, the Becker family, at Garden of the Gods, which is a city park at the edge of Colorado Springs. This park is basically a beautiful and unique landscape to explore - much like a state park in many ways, with a visitor's center, informative movie, and hiking trails. ...

Before we left Moab today, we finished our petroglyph hunt from the night before, and of course petroglyph hunting always seems to coincide with slowly destroying the underside of our car. We found two sites in a row, but the one petroglyph I especially wanted to find was called the Birthing Rock and was off of a (you guessed it) gravel road. The problem was, we just could not find it. We eyed every boulder that was down off the road, and I guess-timated our location. No luck. We looked for telltale paths to boulders. We squinted. We binoc'ed. Still no luck. I was ready to give up when Mark wondered if we'd really gone the entire 1.7 miles we were supposed to. He suggested that we go back and remeasure. Sure enough, we had gone 1.5 miles, not 1.7, and there at 1.7 was a huge, obvious rock in plain view. All that squinting, oh bother.  The extremely obvious Birthing Stone This petroglyph is named for this image, that of a baby being born, supposedly feet first. My picture of it ...

This was our kind of day. We slept in until 9:30 without meaning to, went to breakfast in Moab, then made our way out to Canyonlands National Park. After stopping at the visitor's center (very small), we began our drive out, deciding to stop and see Mesa Arch.  I know that in looking at our pictures you might begin to think, "Oh, no, another rock picture!!!" Believe me, our photography skills really don't do it justice. Seeing it in person is such a rich experience. The sheer size of these sculptures is humbling - they are majestic. And then as you get out in this landscape and walk along, you find that there is much more to see than you realized from a distance. Maybe that's why I take so many flower pictures, and why it sometimes takes us a very long time to walk a mile. Wildflowers bloom and grow on sand or rock, cacti surprise you with brilliant blooms, and juniper wood logs become artistic sculptures. Prickly Pear Cactus Every photo has more desert life hidin...

Since we've had quite a few long days on this trip, today we decided to take it a little more leisurely. We got out to Arches National Park by 10:30 and began with the visitor's center. We didn't stay long but it really is a very nice center. Their display on local birds helped us to finally find out the name of the birds that buzzed us in Mesa Verde. They are not swallows, but White Throated Swifts - and they are absolutely made for speed. They rarely seem to land, which is why we don't have a picture of one!  We did the short trails to several arches, which were beautiful. Our favorite was landscape arch,which is the longest arch span in the world.  In 1991, tourists were there filming when a huge chunk of the arch fell, leaving the narrowest portion of the span just 6 feet thick. They have now closed the trail beneath the arch.  Landscape Arch - widest span in the world. As we trooped along the trails to these wonders, we were constantly passing other tourists coming...

John Wayne and Henry Fonda are just a couple of the movie stars who helped make the monuments of Monument Valley famous the world over. When we visited today, there were indeed visitors there from all over the world. The Navajo Nation owns the land the monuments are on, and they run the show. So we paid our $15 bucks, enjoyed the view from the visitor center terraces, had a nice lunch in the restaurant with a great view of the monuments, and then set out to see what we could see. If you look at the picture below, there's a little road snaking through the landscape. You may drive this road at your own risk, or you may take a jeep tour (which had been recommended to us). At $60 person, we decided to skip the jeep tour and risk our car's suspension for a closer view of . . . The Big Rocks. The road to the monuments unpaved - and that is an understatement. We barely made it a quarter of a mile when we got tired of looking in our rearview mirror for the pieces we were sure were fall...