At Hanksville we stopped to mail postcards, and considered staying at this RV park, which looked only minorly worse than Broken Bow in Escalonte:

Also along the way we stopped at Capitol Reef state park, where you can see 1000-year-old petroglyphs like this one:

Here's the sky today: nice to see blue again

Here's what the rocks looked like around Capitol Reef (an old Mormon settlement, with an ancient schoolhouse too):

We arrived in Moab at 4pm and checked into Canyonlands RV park, which has a very nice little girl named Ellie living there (whom we met and whom Katie has not stopped talking. Hopefully we'll get to play with her tomorrow). Tomorrow we're off to see Arches National Park and hopefully an arch or two...

November 16: In Moab - Arches National Park

Tuesday we spent at Arches National Park and here's the best thing we learned: come in November!! The weather was crisp (highs around 56), but the tourists were Gone, and apparently there were crowds through October. This is a beautiful time to come, and the rangers have time to chat with you, and you can park anywhere you like, and camp too (no snow on the ground yet). Here are some pics:

Katie in front of Balanced Rock. It used to have a little "chip off the old block" nearby, a smaller version of itself, but that fell down in the 1970s. Makes you think, as you walk around this monster.

Delicate Arch, which Mark hiked to (looks like cowboy chaps)

The path Mark walked to get to Delicate Arch. Good thing Katie wasn't on it--I would have had a heart attack.

Katie and Mark in one of the Window Arches

A detail from the above picture, showing Katie waving. That's her dog Scruffy in her left hand.

This one is Landscape Arch, but it Should have been named Delicate Arch, because it's so thin in places (only 9 feet thick somewhere up there). It's span is Huge (like 300 feet across), and you used to be able to walk underneath, but in Sep 1991, a 160-ton chunk fell off from its center (right in front of hikers; one of them took a picture of it). No one got hit by it, but they could have been, so now you can't go underneath. The ranger says it will probably be gone in our lifetimes, so now's the time to see it.

That's a double arch--there's one in front and one to the side.

Mark is there somewhere (tiny)

Katie was reading the letters aloud, but not in order.

November 17: In Moab - Canyonlands National Park

Wednesday we hit Canyonlands NP, which was mostly turnouts (a few easy hikes, but lots of 4WD road to explore, which we didn't in our little CRV. I'm not sure it really qualifies as "high clearance." Here are pictures:




There was one arch we found that was easy to get to.

November 18: Leaving Moab

I love kitchy old tourist traps, if they're interesting enough, and this one was. We stopped at a rest stop below this enormous sign

and the gardener (who had no front teeth--that shoulda been a sign) told us that the place is a 14-room house that used to be a honky tonk in the 40s and somebody got stabbed so they lost their liquor license, etc. With a story that colorful, I couldn't not go. Turned out he gets paid for all the tourists he sends over there ("What? No teeth? Okay, that was Jim" said the woman behind the counter.) So it was never a honky- tonk, but it was a diner, and then a home. The guy just kept carving until he died in 1957 of a heart attack (from carving too much--he was doing it all with these old hand tools miners used to use--he was an ex-miner or something like that). Also he had a thing for FDR. You'll see, in the pictures below:

the outside--note bust of FDR carved into the mountain

Here's one of the larger rooms, with light coming from the windows. They had no electricity until after his death (running a diner with no electricity couldn't have been easy).

I loved the kitchen because it's exactly how they made it in the 50s. Since they had no electricity, they used a small deep fryer running on propane to cook with (you can't see it from these pics I think).

The wife put this in after her hubby's death (she lived another 20 years here, giving tours)

Yeah, he was an amateur taxidermist too. This was some poor mustang he found nearby.

The new owners are filling the front yard with all kinds of westerny antiques, a petting zoo with animals you're not allowed to pet, and stuff like this jeep covered in license plates and with wheels made of iron and steel scrap.