It was a five-day trip, with two of the days spent mostly driving I-70. Last Wednesday, August 7th, the twins and I set off around 10:30 am -- or maybe it was 10:45 -- it was supposed to have been 9:30 -- oh well -- and drove to Grand Junction, where we met Dad at the airport. We realized too late that it would have made more sense (read: been a lot cheaper) to have picked Dad up at the Denver airport, but I'm kind of glad we did it this way. It was really fun to drive for 250 miles and have Dad waiting for us at the end of the trip. And then we drove on to Fruita, to our first hotel. It was a good thing this was the first hotel, because it was really not very exciting -- yet the twins loved it! Because it was a hotel! And hotels are fun! Even though this was not a fun hotel at all. It was clean, though, and the TV worked, and there was a tiny free breakfast, and it was a quick walk from a Walgreens where I had to buy a toothbrush because I had forgotten to pack mine. Unfortunately there are no restaurants in Fruita, so we drove back to Grand Junction to eat dinner at Denny's. To get there, we drove through our first "sight": the Colorado National Monument. It was quite lovely, but it was also a winding 22-mile road, which made us very late for dinner. But Denny's is open late, so no worries.
Thursday, we got an early start and drove across the border to Utah, dropped down for a brief stop at the (formerly ghost) town of Cisco (it seems to have people living there now), and then on to Moab through some beautiful scenery, 90 miles in all.In Moab we ate lunch at the highly-recommended (by us) Moab Diner, which has delicious milkshakes and delicious everything else we tried. And good service. And not too expensive. Seriously, check it out the next time you're in Moab!
While we were eating I said to Rocket Boy, "You know, it seems a shame to just drive down to the Four Corners without seeing any of Utah's National Parks. What if we made a quick stop at Arches?" RB agreed, so we headed over there (it's like 5 minutes from Moab) and spent maybe 90 minutes in the park. What an awesome place! Definitely worth more than 90 minutes. I took lots of photos and it's very hard to choose just one. The only downside of our visit was that it was over 90 degrees at the time, and hiking around the rock formations in that heat was challenging. I'd like to go back in April or November.
The afternoon was dwindling and we still had a long way to go to reach our next hotel. So around 3 pm we left the park and headed down Highway 191 for 130 miles to Mexican Hat, in Navajoland, where we spent the night at the San Juan Inn. We had stayed here before, when we visited the Four Corners area with my mother back in April, 2003, but I hadn't remembered much about it. In fact, my only memory was that my mother had ordered a Navajo Taco for dinner in the adjoining restaurant and liked it so much that the next morning she tried to order more fry bread for breakfast. But the waitress said sternly, "No fry bread in the morning," and my mother was sorry. I noticed that fry bread is now available in the morning too, but (perhaps superstitiously) I didn't order it. Rocket Boy and I did both have (vegetarian) Navajo Tacos for dinner, and both twins ate some of mine and pronounced it delicious.
Anyway, the San Juan Inn is a very cool place to stay, my favorite hotel of the trip -- and I say that even though it was terribly hot there and the A/C didn't work well, so I was hot all night and didn't sleep well. I still loved it. I splurged on a room with three beds, since the twins are almost too big to share a bed happily, and this may have been part of the problem: the A/C couldn't handle the larger room. The inn is right by the San Juan River, and you can sit out on patio furniture and look at the river and read, which is what I did after dinner until it got dark. The twins stayed in the room and played with their stupid devices, but Rocket Boy came and joined me by the river. Just sublime.
The next morning after breakfast we drove to Valley of the Gods, also known as the poor man's Monument Valley because it's free (for MV you have to pay a tour guide). I was nervous about going there because it's just BLM land and we read that the roads are not good. But the roads are fine (I guess they're maybe not so great after a rain), and the rock formations are amazing. The whole area seemed very green, too, which we weren't expecting. It was so lovely. We didn't spend too long there -- didn't do the whole drive -- because we were worried about getting to the Four Corners monument too late. So after half an hour or so, we turned around, retraced our steps to the highway, and were off to the Four Corners.
I had read that the lines to take pictures at the Four Corners monument were terribly long in the summer, so I was worried. I don't know what was so special about the day we were there -- maybe a little too close to the first day of school? -- but there were only about three people in line! Everyone still more or less obeyed the rules, though, only three or so photos per group, and everyone very nicely took photos for the group before or after them. The twins were really impressed by the whole experience. Then we walked around, visiting the four states, and looked at all the booths that rim the edges of the monument. Kid B chose a handpainted magnet and the artist showed him how he decorates the magnets with glitter. It was getting windy, with a few drops of rain, so we said goodbye to the monument and headed for Cortez.I don't know how I got this idea, but when I was making our various hotel reservations I had the impression that Cortez was kind of a cool little town, something like Moab. And it isn't. It seemed fairly depressed, actually. We couldn't find anywhere to eat lunch except Denny's, so that was our second Denny's meal of the trip. After eating, we went to Mesa Verde National Park and signed up for a tour the next morning, since it was already too late for a tour that day. We retreated to our hotel (the Best Western), which was all the twins really wanted to do anyway. I had splurged on this hotel too, and gotten a room that included a little living room with a sofa bed, so Kid A happily slept on that. This hotel had very good WiFi, which was convenient since our iPad had just gotten unlocked (long long story) and needed to be wiped and restarted.
Saturday morning we got up early, ate the free breakfast, and were checked out and on our way by 8:45 am. We drove to Mesa Verde and went to the Cliff Palace area, where Rocket Boy and the twins checked in for their 10 am tour. I had decided not to accompany them when I found out it involved climbing ladders. I figured I'd hang out at the museum instead. But after dropping them off, I thought, do I really want to come all this way and not see anything? So I stopped at the parking for the Soda Canyon Overlook Trail and hiked the 1.2 mile round trip to see good views of Balcony House. It was a very pleasant hike, though hot, and afterwards I found out that the rest of the family had hiked only about a quarter mile!
After lunch at the Far View Terrace, we got back on the road, drove back through Cortez, and headed for Grand Junction. I somehow couldn't bear the thought of driving back through Utah again, so we took Highway 491 to Highway 141 through Uravan, which turned out to be a great choice. We started out in kind of an agricultural area (where they grow a lot of pinto beans), but ended up in the middle of more crazy rock formations, and until the very end of the 205 miles there was almost no one on the road with us. We made good time and checked into our hotel in Grand Junction around 6 pm.
This last hotel was called the Mesa Inn, and it was cheap and kind of tired. Lots of smokers (our room smelled slightly of smoke and I think it was coming from the air intake), lots of old people on a budget. The people in the room above us sounded like elephants. But it had a very nice pool, and our room was a few feet from the pool! We saw our neighbor using it as we left for our anniversary dinner at the Village Inn (see photo), but when we got back it was empty, so we all went in. It wasn't heated, but the air temperature was still around 90 degrees, so the water felt heavenly. I didn't want to get out, spent maybe 45 minutes in there, swimming slowly back and forth. Also, the air conditioner in our room was the best of the trip and I slept very well. And in the morning there were DOUGHNUTS with the free breakfast! (I don't like doughnuts, but the twins were in heaven.) The twins declared this hotel the best of the trip, even though they had to share a bed.After we finished breakfast we loaded up the car and took Rocket Boy back to the Grand Junction airport. It was really sad to say goodbye to him, especially since that meant I had to start driving back to Boulder. It took me seven hours to drive the 250 miles, complete with heavy rain over Vail Pass and an unbelievable traffic jam on I-70 (Sunday afternoon right before school starting, yeah, it was expected). We got home a little after 4 pm and I was almost dizzy with fatigue by then. It's taken me a few days to recover and I'm still longing for the weekend when I can sleep in later than 7:15. But it was an awesome trip. Worth every penny. I hope we can take some more trips like this one over the next few years.
