Almost to the end

I'm not sure if there will be any more posts after this. We've got nothing but driving ahead of us now, so I'm not sure if there will be anything worth posting.

We've had a great trip! We took our Michigan weather with us wherever we went. We had a total of two days that we considered hot and very little precipitation that affected our plans. We've been in 15 states so far and two more new ones to go before we reach home. We've experienced everything from snow to 95+ degree heat, altitudes from sea level to 10,000+ feet, visited more than 10 national parks and even got to see a big city or two. We got to meet people from all over the world and even met a few people from within 20 miles of where we live. In all that time we never even got on each others' nerves! (If you believe that, I've got a nice bridge I'll sell you...)

I've got close to 9000 pictures saved to the computer, so hopefully I'll have something to remember this trip by in years to come. My wife thinks I'm crazy, but it will give me something to do in my old age. "Where were we when we took this one???" heheheheh

Time to hit the sack - big travel day tomorrow!

Royal Gouge, er, Gorge...

The Durango & Silverton RR was the last planned activity for the trip, but while mapping the route home I realized that we would be passing fairly close to the Royal Gorge bridge. I'm not one to go rushing to every tourist trap around, but this sounded kind of cool, so I talked the family into seeing it. It turns out that they expect every family that visits the place to BUY the bridge, not just to take home a few pictures. I convinced my better half that it would be a bigger hassle to turn around than it would to pay the man, so I got to see it after all...

It is a pretty cool bridge in that you are encouraged to walk the span and take pictures. Regular cars can cross the bridge, but basically nothing bigger than a car is allowed. Most people just drive to the visitors' center and walk the bridge, but because our route allowed us to approach the bridge from one end and leave the bridge going in the other direction, Bev had the fine privilege of driving over the bridge. She was just soooooo excited! NOT!

For those that have never heard of the Royal Gorge bridge, it was built specifically for tourism. It is not terribly long, but the drop to the river below is over 1000 feet, making it the highest bridge in the world.



Along with the bridge itself, they have a bunch of other activities available. We didn't get to completely take advantage of the entry fee because we arrived fairly late in the day and we didn't have a lot of time to spend there. We did get to take the trolley to the bottom of the gorge. It takes about five minutes to go up or down and it gives you a neat perspective on just how deep the gorge is.


A view straight down from the bridge:


I noticed that they bragged about this guy doing a free rappel and I wondered if he climbed back to the bridge or if he cheated and just took the trolley back to the top...
I also noticed that they didn't brag about anyone setting a record free fall...


A view from the top - It's hard to capture just how high this bridge is.

ChooChoo!!

What a great day for a scenic train ride! The Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad has been operating continuously for over 125 years, and for good reason. The trip from Durango to Silverton follows a river as it wanders its' way along. Sometimes through a very narrow gorge and sometimes along broad expanses. It's a very nice ride all the way and getting pulled along by an antique steam engine just really tops off the whole experience. Some parts of the track feel like they haven't had much maintenance over the last 100 years or so, but I think that it helped make the trip just that much more authentic.

Once again I had fun taking bunches of pictures, although maybe not quite as much fun as in other places. The car we rode in had seats that faced the sides of the train, but the seats were so low that you had to stand up to see many of the good scenes. When I stood up, the roof of the car was low enough that I had to duck to see out. The end result was that I spent much of the trip in an awkward crouching position. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed the trip. Mom and the girls also enjoyed it. WhooWhoooooo!!!!

Oh, my Arches! (National Park)

We had a pretty good day at Arches National Park. We finally got to experience some warm Southwest weather, but fortunately for us it wasn't really a scorcher. The high was a bit over 90 degrees, but it wasn't very humid so it was bearable. The sun was pretty intense, though, so any shade was welcome.

This park has a lot of different rock structures and I again had fun trying to capture the different looks in pictures. Many of the arches are visible from the road, but there are some that require various amounts of hiking to see well. With the weather a bit hotter than we are used to, we didn't do all the hikes, but we still were able to visit quite a few arches. We even had a picnic lunch at one of the picnic tables that was tucked under a nice shade tree.

I guess we're about done with the various rock formations of the Colorado Plateau, the next stop is Durango Colorado and a ride on the Durango and Silverton RR. WOOHOO!!

Catching up on pictures

I managed to get a bunch of new pictures posted to my Flickr account. Check it out!

Pictures for:
-Bryce Canyon
-Trip from Capitol Reef NP to Natural Bridges National Monument
-Inside National Bridges National Monument
-Arches National Park

More fun with auto repairs (same song, second verse)

I think the bad shocks we had on the car ended up hurting the rear tires more than we realized. I happened to take a look at them when we were packing up on Friday morning and noticed that they were wearing very badly on the outside edges. One of them is close to showing cords through the rubber, so we are on the lookout for a tire shop that can get us set up with a pair of new tires. There was one tire shop where we were on Friday, but they didn't have any tires in our size. Towns that are big enough to have a tire shop are few and far between out here, so we called around a bit and found a shop near where we'll be on Monday. They happened to have a bunch of tires in stock that will work for us, so I guess we'll get to do some more car fixin' on Monday.

yay.

I'm not sure what the tires looked like when we had our shocks replaced a couple of weeks ago, but it seems to me they would have said something if they looked this bad at that time. I'm hoping that the damage to the tires was already done and what we are seeing now is abnormal wear because the tires were already damaged internally before the shocks were replaced...

A quick visit to Natural Arches National Monument

The last couple of days had us running ragged, so Saturday was made into an easy day. We slept in and then decided that our next destination would only be about four hours of driving. We took a route that allowed us to make a visit to Natural Arches National Monument. This spot is fairly unique in that it has one of the largest concentration of natural arches that you'll find anywhere in the world. It is a fairly small area compared to the other national parks that surround it, so it isn't very busy. We had a nice picnic lunch there, complete with a raven that desperately wanted us to look the other way for just a few minutes.

We ended the day in Monitcello, UT and spent a good bit of time swimming in the pool. The kids have been getting a bit burned out with all the park visiting and driving, so they really enjoyed the goof-off time. Tomorrows' goal is Arches National Park. Looking at the weather predictions it appears that we may actually have some hot weather to deal with. It would really be the first hot day of our whole trip! Anyone in Michigan feel sorry for us???

Here's just one quick picture of one of the arches in Natural Arches National Monument:


While driving around southern Utah we've been continuously surprised at the variety of rock formations. I suppose if you lived here it would all be commonplace, but for us Michiganders it seems like there is something new around every corner. I've got whole bunches of pictures for anyone who is interested in seeing them... heheheheh

This particular formation wasn't really all that spectacular, but as soon as I saw it it made me think of pictures that I've seen of a submarine performing an emergency surfacing maneuver. I wanted to post it here, so I found it and while I was resizing it I noticed that if you look near the base of the larger structure, you can see a gorilla face in the rock. Can you see it? Or is it just me? ;-)