Day 3: A slight change of plan

The original plan for today was to travel up to Dinosaur, Co but things didn't pan out quite as we expected, however let's recount things in chronological order.

We Breakfasted in Moab, Ut before returning to Arches National Park to continue yesterday's sightseeing. It is a truly beautiful and breathtaking place and we spent the morning driving through the park stopping frequently to walk out to the many viewpoints. In true US National Parks Service style most major sights are easily reached via well built paths only a short walk from the frequent roadside car parks. This is a boon as, although we enjoy a good walk, 30% is still recovering from her broken foot.


I amused myself giving new names to the rock formations and congratulated myself on "the proud sheep", "the dragon" and "the chameleon" but then things got out of hand and a ranger asked me to leave after a particularly prominent column was christened "mademoiselle's pleasurer"*.

After lunch we took our leave of Arches and started out for Dinosaur some 200 miles away. The I 70 soon took us out of Utah's canyons and desert and before long we were on route 139 taking in Colorado's farm lands, mountains and valleys.

We had planned to stay in Dinosaur and take a brief detour through the Dinosaur National Monument. The Dinosaur Quarry is closed until October 2011 when the new Visitor Centre will open so we knew that the main feature was "out of order". It was therefore a fairly easy decision to push on to Vernal when we found that both Dinosaur and Jensen had no accommodation available. Dinosaur incidentally is a rats arse of a place where the most attractive feature was a yard full of scrap cars. Talk about trading on a name, avoid it all costs!

So here we are in Vernal and tomorrow will see us drive nearly 250 miles to Jackson Wy; the entrance to the Grand Tetons National Park.
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* this may not be true

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