DAY 17 – Moab to Vernal (217 miles driven, 2.49 miles walked)
Breakfast has been included with a lot of the hotels we have stayed at on this trip which is userful when you are about to spend a full day in a park.
As you can imagine the quality is variable running from a stale, cling-film wrapped, pain au chocolat chocolate crossaints in San Francisco to the full spread we had in Moab.
One interesting thing is what you are offered to put on your toast. Marmalade doesn’t seem to be a thing here but jam jelly is of which the most popular flavour seems to be grape.
This morning, however, I was intrigued to find a pot of strawberry flavoured Philadelphia cream cheese as an option and thought I would give it a go. Turns out, and I don’t know why I was surprised by this finding, but it takes very much like strawberry cheesecake. Not unpleasant but I think I’ll stick to it as a pudding!
We left the lovely Moab and made our way to our next destination of Vernal. We immediately went through Lions Park a canyon that hugs the Colorado river. It was attractive but after yesterday’s heavy rain the road was covered in brown silt and at one point stones to drive over so Helen had to be very careful as she picked our way through.
As we crossed the Colorado the landscape changed from red to white rocks almost immediately – the change was quite stark. After that we joined a road running through a prairie lined with heather of green, yellow and red.
The park we were heading for today, the Dinosaur National Monument, was a small but interesting one. The main attraction here is a vast building that houses the side of a small hill packed with dinosaur bones (shown in the header). Since the place was first discovered in the early 20th century thousands of bones have been uncovered and complete skeletons. Most of this has been swept up and taken elsewhere but what remains here is still pretty impressive.
The other attraction within the park were more Native American petroglyphs. The one on the right looks very much like a visitor from outer space and you can see how Erich von Däniken might have got a couple of books out of the thesis that mankind had help from spaceman to push along our progress.
In total we will have covered over 2,500 miles by the time we reach our final destination in Salt Lake City. Today we crossed the state line into our fifth of six states visited. By the end of the week we will have visited, albeit briefly in some cases:
- California
- Arizona
- Utah
- Colorado
- Nevada
- Wyoming (coming soon!)
We take it in turns to do the driving while the passenger drinks in the view. We are covering a lot of miles that would feel a chore in the UK but here with so much to see and so little traffic on the roads it really doesn’t feel that way.
Nevertheless it can be tiring but our hire car has got our backs. If you drive over the rumble strips at the side of the road the car beeps and a message pops up on the console saying you should take a break from driving! This would be great but it takes no account of how long you have been driving and you can get it after ten minutes at the wheel. It means well I guess!