Charting our “Year On The Road” RV adventure across America after Month 7
As another milestone rolls around, it’s time to update our ongoing Map of the whole trip and tot up our latest mileage chart.
The 259-mile route from Tucson, Arizona, to Las Cruces, New Mexico
On face value, this has been our least-traveled month, at least in RV terms. We have driven a scant 259 miles in our Winnebago Indefatigable (or Fati for short), starting a month ago in Tucson, Arizona, and reaching Las Cruces in New Mexico, a simple journey almost entirely on Interstate 10. Not the stuff of traveling legend, especially compared to our hectic first two months, when we covered fully 3,849 miles from Florida to Wyoming.
How our Road Atlas looks after seven months of our RV adventure. Our overall route in Fati is shown in yellow, with all our various side-trips in Nippy show in pink
The larger view of the past month’s travels, showing our steady 259-mile easterly progress from Arizona into New Mexico
Even by the standards of the last 3 months (869, 579 and 545 miles respectively), it is a slim return. But the fact is we are now spending longer in specific places (like Tucson and Las Cruces) and doing more of our actual journeying by car (our faithful Ford Fiesta, Nippy). We learned our lesson several months ago, after Fati suffered several mechanical issues with our hectic pace, that it was better to reach a destination from which we could explore by car in all directions, and this last month has been the perfect example of that.
Because, while our RV mileage is WAY down, our travel in Nippy has increased substantially. In month 6, she chalked up a whopping 1,927 miles, and in month 7 we have added an even-more-whopping 2,884, which included long-distance trips to Silver City, White Sands and, especially, Santa Fe. But, with Nippy getting a good 45 miles to the gallon on longer drives, and gas prices in New Mexico the cheapest since we left home ($2.25/gallon on our most recent fill-up), it is an economical and strategic success.
The wide, open and inviting mountain roads of New Mexico, as seen from Nippy’s front window!
What all this means is that we have now traveled 7,312 miles in Fati and a humongous 18,150 in Nippy, for a total of 25,462 miles since we left home.
Next up, we turn south for Texas and a long tour down the western half of the state as far as the Gulf Coast. Probably more miles for Fati than Nippy, but you never know…!
Today marks seven months since we locked the door to our house in Florida and set off for a year-long adventure in an RV. Here’s what we learned during the past month:
Time spent in the bathroom is sacred time, at home or in an RV. But if you’re really just sitting there playing Wordscape on the phone for forty minutes, you deserve the scorn you get when you’re found out.
Simon now knows the bathroom isn’t the right place to play Wordscape.
Get an electric skillet with a cover, and get it before you even set off on your trip. What strange and wonderful wizardry that allows you make an entire meal in one appliance! Gone are your days of flipping one burger or one pancake in the Instant Pot set to Saute. Life has meaning again!
You’ll never run out of conversation when you travel. The only time we’re quiet when we’re touring is when we’re burned out from so much talking. Some of the most compelling conversations we’ve had have come from seeing places – usually very small towns or areas where housing is spread far apart – that make us feel our privilege in ways we never did before. Not financial privilege, specifically, but the privilege of opportunity. And we wonder, are the people happy and content? Do they love their freedom and their solitude? Is this their desired life? Or has opportunity been denied to them? We come at it with our life-experience bias, and talk our way around to wider possibilities.
Visiting the desert during dry season is disorienting, and it’s hard to get used to seeing rivers and creeks with no water in them. As Mark Twain said, “Until I came to New Mexico I never realized how much beauty water adds to a river.”
Remember back in the early months, when you struggled to keep the fridge cold? Yeah, well, it’s winter now, and your fridge has become a freezer.
Literally (and we do mean literally) every restaurant in Hatch, New Mexico closes at 3 p.m. Plan accordingly or you’ll be eating “Mexican food” from the Village Market grocery store deli.
The Green Chili Stew from Village Market’s deli is pretty good!
Arizona and New Mexico have more mountains than we expected, and some of them are whoppers. Check your preconceptions at the border when you enter a new state. Surprises await!
We knew the desert gets cold at night, but really? 21F? That’s not cold, that’s Arctic! Unplug the water hose from spigot; drain water lines; wear a shirt, pants, and socks to bed; and add your robe to the five layers of blankets you already have on the bed. Oh, and your coffee or tea the next morning will be cold within three minutes. Welcome to winter.
Walmarts in New Mexico have loads of Mexican candy right before Christmas. Taste-testing results? Mixed.
With so much mountain driving behind us, Simon now has a quiet confidence while driving Fati, without relaxing his guard or taking safety for granted. Susan can sit in the passenger seat without gripping the arm rests for dear life. As of right now, this single minute, assuming nothing, travel is an absolute pleasure.
Posole (Mexican pork and hominy stew) is a gift from God. Eat it and know you are loved!
Posting this story has become an annual Thanksgiving tradition. It happened several years ago. There are no photos because some things should never be seen.
It’s 4 a.m. and I should be sleeping soundly, getting my energy back after two days of cooking in preparation for the big Thanksgiving feast tomorrow (today). Instead, I’m sitting at my computer, counting down 10 minutes, because that’s how long it takes Lysol to kill food-borne pathogens.
All I had to do was empty the brine bucket at 3 a.m., six hours after immersing what will surely be a glorious turkey when it’s cooked to 170 degrees (just to be sure) and presented lovingly to my family. A quick bleaching of the sink, return the turkey to the fridge, and Bob’s your uncle; off to sleepy-land again.
I knew the brine bucket was full. Like, really full. So I was careful, because, as we all know, cross contamination is an ugly thing. The plastic bag I put the bucket on in the fridge, however, had other ideas.
The brine sloshed out of the bucket onto the plastic bag, the plastic bag hit the floor, and a poultry-infused mess splattered everywhere. It left a trail from the refrigerator to the sink, soaking the kitchen floor. It drained down my shirt, into my underwear, down my legs, and all over the counter. A literal trail of horror and unhappiness.
There may be some among you who would do a quick mop-up and think no more of it. That’s not me. Every single drop of cross-contamination welled up around me, like oceans of food-borne illness waiting to happen.
The bleach bottle was in the laundry room, which meant tracking brine through two rooms, cross-contaminating one-quarter of the downstairs portion of my home. But there was no escaping it. I had to do it, and I had to keep track of every single thing my hands, my feet, and my shirt touched during the round-trip journey.
The next hour was spent bleaching the floor, the sink, the counters, my feet, the faucet, the refrigerator, and the laundry tub.
My clothes, of course, had to come off, and I had to wash myself with hot, soapy water to avoid further cross-contamination. All I had was laundry soap, but it would have to do. Mercifully, the tablecloth I was going to launder was still on the washing machine, so I wrapped up in it, just in case anyone came out of their bedroom to see what the hell I was doing. The only thing that would make this night worse was to have my loved ones watch me run through the house naked.
I didn’t want to wake Simon by opening my underwear drawer once I reached the bedroom, so I rooted through the laundry basket, but only found a pair of his old tighty whities. The ones he wears when he’s doing sweaty yard work. They would have to do. I grabbed a clean shirt, put it on, and went back to sanitizing.
Bleach is good, but Lysol is better. I should own stock in Lysol. Just the smell of it makes me relax, and since the required 5 minutes it takes bleach to kill salmonella had passed and the floor was almost dry, it was time to put my best friend to work.
Methodically, like a woman who knows what she’s doing (the kind of woman who wouldn’t have filled that damned brine bucket up to the top in the first place), I sprayed my microscopic enemies and took pleasure in hearing the last of them die.
So, that’s how I came to be sitting at my computer wearing my husband’s underwear, with Lysol all over my feet. It should only take one or two episodes of Are You Being Served to get me back to sleep again, but there are some things you know you’re going to live again and again in your nightmares for several years to come.
I CAN chuckle appreciatively at the fact that the clean shirt I am wearing reads, Nevertheless, She Persisted, but you can be damned sure I’m getting a bigger turkey-brine bucket on Friday.
Happy Thanksgiving. I wish each and every one of you a blessed day and a safe, healthy meal.
May 14, 2023 seems like a long time ago. In fact, it is just 7,053 miles ago. That’s the 6-month distance we have covered in our “A Year On The Road” RV adventure since leaving home in Florida.
From that original departure point to November 14, we have traveled through 18 states and totaled a mind-boggling 22,319 miles when you add in the mileage we have covered in our little Ford Fiesta, Nippy, as well as that 7,053 in RV Indefatigable (or Fati for short).
This isn’t quite 6 months, as Google won’t allow additional destinations after Lake Havasu in Arizona, but it should show the most recent part of the trip, to current spot Tucson (see below)
The last month has added 545 miles to Fati’s total but also 1,927 to Nippy’s. That means Nippy has now piled up a whopping 15,266 miles to date, so she is proving a real workhorse.
Of course, we should have gone even further afield, as we scrapped plans to head out to Washington and Oregon after reaching Glacier National Park in Montana, but we think that is still a pretty respectable total.
Below are two maps showing just the last month of our travels, from Kingman in Arizona to Tucson, via sparkling Lake Havasu City, Hope, Goodyear and Mesa (with 3 weeks in the greater Phoenix area in all):
From Kingman in northern Arizona, we traveled down the extreme west part of the state before reaching Interstate 10 and heading east to Mesa and then Tucson, with a week in between in Goodyear
And this shows the more detailed version, highlighting an overnight stop in tiny Hope and the (rather confusing) route through and around Phoenix before reaching the chic Voyager RV resort in east Tucson
Today marks six months since we locked the door to our house in Florida and set off for a year-long adventure in an RV. Here’s what we learned during the past month:
Know your limitations. No matter how much you want to camp overnight in the middle of the desert at Quartzsite, when the ground temperature is 107 and you don’t have the ability to run at least one air conditioner (never mind your fridge) it’s time to re-think things. The fact there’s no one else out there and the locals are complaining about the heat are hints, too. Find a way to get the “flavor” of the experience and book that night in a campground with hookups.
Know the difference between a true limitation and fear.
When you can’t change the situation, change the inner dialogue. Yeah, yeah, we’ve all heard that, but the worst that can happen if you give it a try is that you’ll be right where you were before you tried. Start with “You can do this! You’re awesome, and you’re going to feel fantastic about yourself when you get through it! Go you!” and add to it as needed. Be your own giddy cheerleader.
Have a dear friend who texts you and says, “YOU CAN DO HARD THINGS!” That reminder is priceless. (Thank you, Katie!)
You’re going to see a lot of signs in the Southwest that read, “Watch For Rattlesnakes.” It will occur to you at some point that you don’t actually know how to watch for rattlesnakes.
Sedona, Arizona will get straight to the heart of whatever you’re struggling with. Don’t believe in spiritualism or an afterlife or any of that crap? Too bad. Sedona, Arizona has news for you, and even though it might take months or years of sitting with what it’s telling you, Sedona is going to tell you. Do believe in all that crap? You’ll get there quicker.
There is so much more history in the American West than we ever imagined, especially in Arizona. It’s astonishing to discover places like Tuzigoot and Casa Grande, which had vibrant, thriving communities more than a thousand years ago. It’s so much more than just “cowboys and Indians.”
If you clean up the dust in the morning, you won’t have to dust again until noon, and again before dinner, and once more before bedtime, and when you get up to pee at night, and it’s like that every single day, because there is so much more dust out West than we ever thought possible.
Your understanding of “be flexible” will change. At first, it meant you might drive further on any given day than you thought you would, or you’d have dinner out rather than cooking in, or you’d have to figure out how to stop that annoying whistling sound through the window when you move from one campground to the next. Now, it’s a philosophy for life. Combined with “forget about blame and focus only on a solution,” it’s pretty powerful.
Wave at everyone when you’re taking a stroll around the campground, and when one of them comes knocking on your door and asks you over for drinks, go. Oh, the happy evenings sharing travel stories! It’ll make leaving the campground very, very hard when it’s time to move on, and there will be tears, but those memories from the trip will be among your best.
When you hit that half-way mark in your Year on the Road, it’ll feel like you’ve been away from home forever, and also that it’s all gone so fast. On to the next six months!
Having just hit the 5-month mark on our grand RV adventure, it is especially illuminating to see that we had by FAR our lowest month for mileage in Fati, with just 474 miles covered from Fillmore in Utah to Kingman here in Arizona.
Month 5 – picking up in Fillmore, Utah, and traveling to Kingman, Arizona
Showing more detail of our Month 5 route from Utah, through Nevada, to Arizona
The main reason for such a low total for the full month (as opposed to the 868 miles in Month 4 and the mind-boggling 2,504 we travelled in the first month!) was because we spent two full weeks in one location (Laughlin, Nevada) , and used our tow car, Nippy, for our more extensive travelling once we were settled.
We haven’t been sluggards, though. Our mileage in Nippy was a whopping 3,718 for this month, which included trips from Cedar City to the Grand Canyon (North Rim) and Palm Springs from Laughlin, as well as our just-completed 779-mile 3-day round-trip from Kingman to the Grand Canyon (South Rim), Monument Valley and Flagstaff.
Fati and Nippy in our current campground, the Blake Ranch RV Resort in Kingman, AZ
Highlights of the last month include Las Vegas, the Mojave Desert, both North and South visitor centers of the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River, Monument Valley, and the city of Flagstaff, which really caught our attention, in addition to a fascinating section of Route 66.
When all added up, we have travelled 6,403 miles from home in Florida in Fati, and another 13,339 sight-seeing in Nippy from our various RV campgrounds.
The first 4 months – from home in Florida to Fillmore, Utah, a total of 5,929 miles
That’s a total of 19,742 miles in and around the US since we left home. And we’re still hungry for more! We do still have another 7 months to explore this half (or two-thirds) of the country, though, and the next month will include more iconic stop-overs, notably Lake Havasu and London Bridge, the RV Mecca of Quartzite, Phoenix, Sedona and Tucson. Stay tuned…
“Go to Oatman and see the wild burros, but don’t take your dog out of the car or they’ll bite its head and rip its scalp off,” the tourism representative in Laughlin, Nevada told us. How could we pass up something that local and unique? We might never get the chance to meet murder donkeys again, so, with the agreement Ruthie would stay safely in Nippy, off we went.
The burro’s face in the upper left-hand corner represents what’s to come.
Oatman, Arizona, 30 miles from our campground in Laughlin, Nevada, has two claims to fame. First, it was the place where Clark Gable and his bride, Carole Lombard, spent their honeymoon night. Second are its wild burros, who wander through the tiny town at will, entering stores, begging tourists for snacks, and weighing up your dog’s potential as their next hearty meal.
There are signs everywhere warning tourists about this penchant for bloodshed, but that didn’t stop some people from walking their tiny canines right down the town’s only street, like sadists waving tasty cakes under the noses of starving insane asylum inmates. And it was clear the burros weren’t shy about partaking, should the opportunity present itself. You could see it in their eyes.
The first burros we met before reaching town were friendly. A mama and her baby gave us passing glances, while their companion had no problem at all coming straight up to the car to see if anything other than raw dog meat was on offer.
The specimens in town were pushy bastards, happy to pose for photos but even happier to kick each other, bite each other, and act in all manner of unsociable ways if they thought it would get them to the front of the line with tourists who were handing out hay pellets the size of a human fist, which could be purchased by the bagful in several of the stores.
Tourist does not like pushing!
With Ruthie and her fuzzy scalp locked securely in the car (with all the windows cracked to let the breeze in and a promise we’d be back in just a few minutes), we headed to the Saloon, which the visitor center lady said was a “must see,” but stopped short of telling us why. “I don’t want to spoil it for you,” she said.
It didn’t help that there were three saloons, and we didn’t know which one she meant. The first one we popped our heads into was quirky, but reasonably so.
The second one, however, was the most outrageous example we’d ever seen of bars that encourage their patrons to staple dollar bills to the walls. This place was literally covered in money; nearly $400K, in total, we were told.
What the actual…!
Dollar bills were hanging in their thousands from the rafters, stapled to the doors and the walls, and crammed onto every available surface, not just in the bar, but in what appeared to be four or five rooms, a stairway, and probably upstairs too, though we didn’t make it that far.
We’re pretty sure this was the saloon the visitor center lady meant.
If there was a freakier bar in town than this one, we probably didn’t want to see it.
There is a room covered in dollar bills beyond this one. Maybe there are two. It was hard to tell.
The new Mr. and Mrs. Gable’s fame didn’t hold a candle to all that cash, but their names were immortalized on a hand-painted plank nailed above the doorway leading to the hotel rooms, which created an uncomfortable mental image of them climbing the stairs on the way to celebrating their wedding night.
We took some photos, made all the appropriate “Oh, my God” noises, purchased two ice cream cones, and headed back to Ruthie, whose fur was all intact, even if her attitude wasn’t. She hates being left, we hate leaving her, but there are times when it’s for her own good, and we felt virtuous as we enjoyed our cones, congratulating ourselves for having saved her life, even though she’ll never know it.
She did get the bottom of each of our cones, so life was good!
You’re tired of reading about canyons, we’re tired of writing about canyons, so it’s time for some Vegas, baby! Almost.
Interstate 15 made for a very long day’s journey from Cedar City to North Las Vegas, with the added “thrill” of the Virgin River Gorge, a pass through the mountains that was so intense Susan had to drive Nippy through it while Simon hooted and hollered and had a hellofa great time taking the gorge’s grades in Fati. Sometimes you have to split up to keep everyone’s sanity intact.
There are no photos of this pass, of course, since Simon’s full focus had to be on the road and Susan’s was on praying for Simon’s safety. He was perfectly safe, as he knew he would be, and we made camp for four days in Vegas once we put the gorge behind us.
Our view of the Strip out Fati’s living room window.
The sunsets were spectacular!
Valley of Fire State Park had been our goal for this leg of the trip, and we originally intended to spend three nights in a campground inside the park. Unbeknownst to us, Valley of Fire began a reservation system two days prior to our visit (it had been first-come), and we missed our window of opportunity. In the end, it did us a favor. It would have been a challenge getting Fati into the campground.
Instead, we visited in Nippy and spent a lovely afternoon enjoying the outstanding crimson Aztec Sandstone hills and pale limestone cliffs that were laid down and risen up during the Jurassic and Paleozoic eras, respectively. During the Mesozoic Era, 20 million years ago, this area was a sea.
We’ll only show you a small snapshot, since you’ve already seen more rocks than any blog should make its readers endure.
The color of that sand!“Yikes!”
Petroglyphs in Valley of Fire were more recognizable as human than most we’d seen.
Hoover Dam was sort of on the way back to Vegas, so we took a little detour to see this human-made marvel of engineering. To say the guard at the security gate was “unhelpful” when we asked if there was a parking area before the dam would be an understatement. “It’s too complicated,” he said, and waved us through.
The answer to our question is “Yes.” The Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge just beyond the security gates not only had a parking lot, it had the premier view of the Hoover Dam for those who enjoy high places suspended over an 890-foot drop to the Colorado River.
Dam that’s big!
The next day offered perfect blue-sky weather for a trip out to Red Rock Canyon, which featured the best Visitor Center we’d seen so far, and a feature-packed scenic drive that hit every high note. But I’m going to run screaming from the room if I have to post many more photos of rocks, so here are three, and we can only highly encourage you to put this superb park on your itinerary next time you’re in Nevada. It’s lovely.
This isn’t a mural, it’s a wall of windows in the Visitor Center that looks out onto the park. How fabulous is that?
This isn’t a rock, but this lady rocks! We got the impression she’s a dog walker who’s taking her charges on a field trip.
Climbers (smack in the middle of this photo) who are much more adventurous than us. We watched them scale what seemed to be a flat wall.
Our third full day was intended to be a work day “at home,” but the lure of the Strip was too strong. We decided to check it out during the day, then return for its famous after-dark personality in the evening.
Simon had the brilliant idea of booking Ruthie for a grooming at PetSmart, which would buy us about two hours of free time to go into a few casinos for the atmosphere, and give her some spa time for a bath, tooth brushing, and nail trim. Bellagio was our goal, and we’d fit in Cesar’s Palace and the Venetian if we could.
Bellagio’s lobby.
Simon risking it all on one pull of the handle (not really; we didn’t actually gamble at all, though Simon probably would have had he not been offered the choice between this, or buying $6 coffees nearly every day. Susan’s no fun when she goes all financially practical).
In the end, we only had time for Bellagio, but we did get to see the fountain show, which was probably worth our time. It only does two musical numbers, the first of which was the National Anthem, and the second was the hauntingly beautiful Con te partirò (Time to Say Goodbye), sung by Andrea Bocelli and Sara Brightman.
We kept trying to time our Selfie for the biggest water bursts, but never knew when they would happen.
The Sphere opened on September 29, 2023, but they were doing “rehearsals” while we were there.
The black “arm” sticking up is the X-Scream thrill ride at the top of the Strat. It rocks forward and backward, dangling riders 866 feet above the Strip and suspending them there until they pass out cold. No, wait, that would just be me (Susan). Other people seem to love it.
New York, New York hotel and casino
Outside MGM Grand. So many lights and video ads!
Ruthie often lays down in the back seat while we’re touring, but she was riveted along the Strip.
The famous pawn shop from television’sPawn Stars.
Even more captivating than the casinos were the bizarre sights we kept seeing, so we’ll share a few of them with you and hope they brighten your day, as they did ours.
Is that a selling point?
His mother must be so proud!
Mattresses with no credit check? The promise you didn’t know you needed.
Mickey, NOOOOOOOO!!!
Ummmm…well….okay, then!
We were ready to leave Las Vegas when the time came. Little did we know we’d have an even more bizarre town waiting for us at our next stop.
When it comes to mind-blowing scenery, Utah looks at all the other states and says, “Hold my beer.”
From its gargantuan red-rock mountains that glow as if lit from within to world-class National Parks featuring formations you can hardly get your head around, Utah takes the WPM (Wows Per Minute) and cranks them up to eleven.
Warning: There will be a lot of photos of rocks in this blog. Get coffee or tea, or something stronger. We’ll wait.
After a Wallydocking in a Walmart parking lot the night before, our next stop was a golf course campground in Payson, Utah, where we parked Fati for four days, two of which we spent 150 miles away with a couple of nights in a Green River hotel within striking distance of Arches National Park, Moab, and Canyonlands National Park.
The drive to Green River was every bit as scenic as anything we would see beyond the paid-for side of a National Park entry gate. Highway 6 goes through the Wasatch Mountains, delighting us with a dazzling array of towering rock formations in endless shades of red; rolling yellow hillsides; and bare-rock mountain tops.
What planet are those rocks from? Otherworldly.
Before checking in to the hotel for two nights, we made a detour to the charmingly named Goblin Valley State Park, a three-square-mile valley filled with adorable Entrada sandstone “goblins.” Their official name is “hoodoos,” but the formations that don’t look like giant potatoes do have a sense of bulbous-headed gremlins about them.
As we drove down the road toward the park, one rock feature in particular caught our attention. From far away, it looked like the Ritz Carlton hotel in Orlando. Closer up, it morphed into the Jedi Temple from the Star Wars movies. Ancient, abandoned, filled with a quiet sadness, it told a story that spoke to something in Susan’s psyche in a way other mountains had not.
Ritz Carlton Orlando or ginormous rock structure? You decide!
Is it just Susan that sees the Jedi Temple? It’s okay to say if it’s just Susan…
Once in the park, the temperature was too hot for Ruthie to go hiking for long, but we spent some time wandering the first of three valleys, and felt we’d more than gotten our money’s worth.
If these are goblins, that last photo is the Jedi Temple. Don’t argue with me (I mean, Susan) about this!
Tiny people giving some perspective to the scale of this place.
From the valley floor to the heights of a butte far above the Colorado River, Canyonlands National Park was our next stop, for its Islands in the Sky scenic drive.
By now you know this sort of territory is pure bliss for one of us and extremely challenging for the other, but we didn’t come all this way not to see these spectacular parks, so we each enjoyed the views from within our personal comfort zones.
Click on photo for video
Click on photo for video
The road you see in the second video, above, is the Shafer Trail, and it’s not a walking trail. It’s a crazy-person driving trail, and we have reliably heard that one man’s wife nearly jumped out of their truck from pure fear when they mistakenly took that road instead of the tourist-friendly scenic drive. Thrill seeker? This is your road!
Simon will post a video of that road in use on our YouTube channel (Veness Travel Media), so be sure to look for it soon (and subscribe!). You may want to put on brown pants before you watch, because…d@mn!
We’ll let you enjoy the overlooks as we saw them.
Islands in the Sky mesa is 1000 feet down from where we were standing, and this canyon is another 1600 feet down. A trail leads to the bottom of the canyon, but we didn’t take it (as if we have to say that!).
It’s like the earth just shattered.
The next morning we set off for the town of Moab, just on the edge of Arches National Park. We couldn’t enter the park until 3 p.m. due to its timed-entry reservation system, and our time was later than we would have liked. We had previously scored a morning entry for another date, but had to give it up when we changed our original itinerary.
But the Moab Visitor Center lady not only showed us how to modify our reservation on our phone, which got us in an hour earlier, she also recommended we visit Potash Canyon until our entry time arrived. And golly Bob howdy, were we ever thankful for her recommendation!
Just driving through the canyon was scenic enough.
This gives you an idea of how high the canyon walls are. The people on the side of the road are looking at something pretty special, and we’ll join them in a minute.
The Potash Road drive was a “trip back in time,” to use a very overused phrase. Turnouts along the road allowed people to stop and admire the petroglyphs etched into the sandstone mountainside, primarily by the Freemont tribe, between 600 and 1300 A.D.
The petroglyphs here were mainly markers of time, but also included bears, snakes, bighorn sheep, and other figures.
Warriors in these petroglyphs are holding shields. Some are also holding hands, showing how the people formed human chains to round up whatever animals they were hunting.
You can just make out the human figures dressed in horned headgear and what look like triangular costumes.
Further along we found Poison Spider Dinosaur Track site, where a scramble up the boulders rewarded scramblers with up-close views of dinosaur tracks left during the Jurassic era. It was much too hot for a long hike, and Ruthie couldn’t even do a short hike over those boulders, so we experienced the footprints through our binoculars, and snapped a photo of the ones that were easiest to see from the parking area.
The two small, white things that look like three-toed prints on the right-hand side of the rock facing outward are dino footprints.
It’s hard to make out amid all the boulders, but see that flat slab that looks like concrete, standing upright, facing forward (smack in the middle of the photo), to the left of the darkest part of the canyon-side and above smaller white/gray boulders? There are lots of tracks from a small dino on that slab. You can see why Ruthie (and we!) couldn’t quite get to them.
When our Arches timed entry arrived, we made the winding trip up to the plateau from which the park’s features could be seen. We’ll leave you to enjoy the highlights…
This is taken from about 500+ feet above the bottom of this little canyon. You can just make out a lighter-colored hiking trail leading down to the bottom.
We stopped for a bite of lunch with a view. Two of us were happy. One of us was not.
This famous formation is Balancing Rock. It’s near-neighbor, Chip (as in, Chip off the ol’ block) toppled over in 1974.
The broken “pedestal” to the right of Balancing Rock is where Chip used to be.
We did make the long, hot, uphill walk to the arch. Here, we’re just starting to wear out.
There are signs everywhere telling people to stay off the delicate sandstone. Naturally, that rule doesn’t apply to SOME people, like those nature-wreckers on the far right side of the inner arch. Don’t be them!
Because he can’t help himself.
This is Double Arch. It looks pretty big from here, but…
…it’s huge. You probably can’t see them in the photo, but there are people climbing on the rocks inside the arches. That’s how big it is.
We spent a long time in the park, doing little hikes and marveling at the immensity of it all. But something even more immense was on our radar, if we could just make it happen.
Highlighting our fourth month on the road and the route so far – all 5,929 miles of it
After three months of fairly hectic traveling, our four-month mark shows that we have come the shortest distance for any month of the grand RV trip to date, from Wheatland in Wyoming to Fillmore in Utah (via what looks like a strange detour to Declo in Idaho, but which was the best way to see some of Idaho without putting too many miles on our RV).
Our mileage for Month Four was therefore just 868 miles, compared to 1,318 last month, 1,239 in Month Two and a whirlwind 2,504 in the opening month.
The total distance in Indefatigable (or Fati for short) since we left Orlando is now 5,929 miles.
The slower pace has been deliberate, of course. We realized that we were trying to pack too much in to this crazy 10-wheeled adventure and we have purposely changed both our itinerary and our pace of travel to avoid the mental and physical breakdowns we experienced in the first two months.
The key has been to identify an area that allows us to explore in multiple directions for a week or so, and then use our tow car, Nippy, to do more of the exploration.
To that end, we have actually gone an additional 9,621 miles in Nippy in those four months, almost 3,000 of them in the past month alone. That total includes a spur-of-the-moment trip into Canada from Montana, our overnight excursion to Rocky Mountain State Park in Colorado and an extensive day trip to the Flaming Gorge in Utah, both from Wyoming.
Our total mileage for the trip so far is therefore a whopping 15,550, or 3,887.5 a month!
The next month could see us top that record for Nippy, too, as we plan on basing ourselves in southern Nevada for trips into Southern California. As ever, this is an – ahem – moveable feast, but you can be sure to read all about it here!
Veness Travel Media 