Home Again

This is the concluding blog for this trip. A trip which has been spectacular for the scenery, but also enjoyable for the new friends we have made and the old friends we have visited and still remember. We have driven 5800 miles in the van, and towed the trailer for 2800 of those miles. As well as our lovely week with friends in Florida, we have explored parts of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Arizona and California. The highlights are all mentioned in previous blogs.
Well, it's Friday and we have now arrived home, had a shower, sleep and got ourselves turned around.
The journey home was largely uneventful, though long. The most impressive thing was the view from the plane as we flew across Utah. The sun was low and cast stark shadows of all the mountains. This made the ground relief stand out dramatically. Red cliffs and canyons were amazing. We could see the long line of National Reef and what looked like Zion Canyon.
The long distances between terminals and train stations, the poor directions and signposting, the cattle market of Kings Cross (no seats), no where to buy a meal and sit was appalling after the relative peace and comfort of American air terminals will keep us as fully paid up members of the Grumpy Old Club for months.
We are about to leave to collect our caravan and spend the holiday weekend in Yorkshire.
We are planning our next trip to the States, probably in September, but don't yet have a clear idea of our itinerary, which is quite exciting really. We have a blog address, but it is still almost empty: http://roadblog61.blogspot.com

In Banning

Although we have reached our final destination for this trip we have not left the country yet, so although for the last few days we have been cleaning the trailer and truck, we have also been finding a bit of time for looking around the place. Yesterday we took an evening tour round the San Bernadino Mountains, to a place called Idyllwild and watched the sunset, We climbed to over 6000 feet on tortuous mountain roads, with breathtaking views. It made for a lovely evening.
A piece of good news, California State Parks provide a Disability Pass, so we thougth we would try and get one, so armed with Sally's Blue Badge we went to a local State Park. After a lot of discussion between a very friendly Ranger, her immediate boss (who said no) and her top boss (who said yes), Sally and I have been able to get a 50% discount pass for California State Parks. This will mean a very considerable saving when we return in the Fall, as S.P. campgrounds cost anything up to $45 p.n. normally!

Au Revoir à Nouveau

We have travelled quickly from Oak Creek Canyon to our final destination. Travelling through Arizona was spectacular, especially the drop from Prescott to Congress, which was similar to the Mokee Dugway, but at least the road was paved. We drove on through Quartzite (ate there, but the poor woman could not cook a steak) and then dropped into California and found a lovely County Park on the banks of the Colorado, in Blythe (Mayflower County Park). After an overnight stay we got permission to wash the trailer, ashing it with the muddy waters of the Colorado. We then set out on the last leg to get to the KOA in Banning. We will stay here for a week and then put the trailer into storage here.
The gas prices went from $3.69 to $4.29 when we changed state and the weather has been abysmal, storm on Monday Tuesday and Wednesday (very windy, some rain, but temperature below 60 all the time.
No More pictures I am afraid as I knocked the camera off the table and it seems to have stopped working - permanently.

Oak Creek canyon

After leaving the Painted Desert we travelled West on the I 40 (ex route 66) to Winslow (made famous by the Eagles song) and camped at the Homoluvi Ruins State Park (they do have some strange names). This was a very basic, no facility, windy, open and expensive campground, which we do not recommend.
From Winslow we travelled about 30 miles to Meteor Crater, one of the wonderful natural features that I have wanted to visit for many years. 50,000 years ago a meteor 150 feet across crashed into Arizona making a crater nearly a mile wide and 350 feet deep. We climbed to the rim and looked down on a very impressive sight. We also had the chance to find out more about meteors and meteorites. It was a fascinating morning.
We drove on through the desert to Flagstaff. We were impressed by the number of volcanic cones that could be seen, straight ahead was the bulk of the San Francisco Mountains, near Flagstaff. There we turned south towards Sedona. Following the advice of our friends Dorothy and John we took the 89 South. This runs quite normally until it hits Oak Creek Canyon. The road goes into it from the top, north end, as a nice flat normal road, then via a switchback it drops 800ft over 1000yards (as the crow files) into a narrow canyon, no more that 200yards wide, with 800ft walls. The amazing thing is that the canyon is full of ponderosa pine trees, it is a forest in the middle of a desert. It has a lovely winding stream which becomes a river and alongside the river, it the middle of the forest is a lovely campground. As soon as we arrived we found all sorts of new birds flying around the place. We have seen Acorn Woodpeckers, Bullocks Orioles, Redstart, Robins, Stellar Jay, Cow Birds, to name a few. I have even managed to get some good photos of many of these birds. We even hung out our Hummingbird feeder and lo and behold within minutes we had hummingbirds feeding. Needless to say we have stayed here for four days, instead of our original two and had a lovely time, we have also met a few really nice people as well. Today, Saturday, we took a short trip down the canyon, only to be surprised by the scale and beauty of the rock walls on either side, as well as the large number of people out for the day (This place is one of the few places in Arizona that you can picnic in the trees and swim in a river). We are now preparing to make the last leg of our journey, from here to Banning in California, which we think will take us three days.

The Painted Desert

On Sunday we left the Canyon De Chelly and drove south to visit The Painted Desert and The Petrified Forest National Park. The only way to get to the nearby campground was to enter the North end of the park, drive through the park , along the scnic route and out the South end of the Park, where there is a free campground. So we stopped and saw some of the attractions there. We were amazed at the rock forms and colours of The Painted Desert, mostly soft strata of many diferent colours, white, bluish, red, pink and purple could be seen. We were surprised to learn that much of the white/grey layer was bentonite, which is what they make cat litter from.
We camped in the somewhat exposed free campground, and were surprised to find that the next door trailer was owned by a very nice English couple, who had also bought their own trailer and truck and were doing the same thing as us. Except they tour for six months at a time and having explored the West Coast are now moving towards the East Coast. So we had a fair old chin wag in the evening. They actually come from York, just down the road from us!

The weather had taken a turn for the worse and it was very windy (gusts up to 57m.ph.), which was not very nice. However, after another coffee time with our English neighbours, we set out to look at the Petrified Forest bit of the National Park. It was amazing to see lots of tree trunks that had been growing 225 million years ago just lying round on the ground. The trees having grown, fallen down, been buried in mud, which has turned to rock, come back to the surface and been laid bare in our time. We also saw some more bizarre rock formations.


After travelling through the park we moved further west to Winslow and camped at the Homoluvi Ruins State Park, a very open, but pleasant, if pricy, campground.

Canyon De Chelly

Because the valley itself is sacred you can only go with Indian Guides, however there are couple of Rim Drives, which take you on a tour of a number of overlooks. It is about a 40 mile drive, but you can look down over the cliffs into the valleys and see the cliff dwellings as well as the nice flat valley floor up to 1000ft below. The most dramatic of the overlooks is at Spider rock, which is an 800ft spire, which stands alone on the valley floor. Quite an amazing sight.

The Road to Canyon De Chelly

The problem with seeing all these wonderful sights is that words fail you, so descriptions on the blog are a) difficult but unworthy of the visual experience, so the blog appears a little thin on description.
However on Saturday we bade farewell to Monument Valley and took the shortish journey to Canyon De Chelly (pronounce d'shay) across some more amazing countryside, through desert and past mountains. We actually passed 5 stumps of volcanic plugs, where the lava/basalt which filled the centre of a volcano had been left when the surrounding rock (probably ash) had been eroded away. These plugs rise up to 250 feet above the rest of the area and are quite impressive. The largest we passed was Church Rock, which does look like a church. We drove down through some narrow passages through the rocks and round the edge of sand dunes, finally descending into a valley which was at the entrance to Canyon De Chelly National Park. There is a campground here which is free, no hook ups, but then you can't expect everything. We stayed here a couple of nights so that we could visit the Canyon De Chelly.

Touring Monument Valley

I got up early to photograph the valley at dawn. There was a spectacular view of the dawn from our trailer. I sat out and drank my morning coffee and watched the sun come up, it was fabulous.


We got an early breakfast and decided to do the 17mile drive as early as possible, so that the light was better and it was not as crowded. We set off, and boy was the road bumpy! We could only go very slowly. It is an unpaved road, but with huge rocks stuck in it, often we had to pick a way on the road using the wrong side to try and find a smoother path (little luck with that though). The views are spectacular and awesome and huge and grand and mostly indescribable, as indeed the pictures will not be able to show adequately what there is to see, we sort of drove round in a daze, just trying to take it all in. We took about three hours and were back at the trailer in time for lunch. But it was worth the wait (only about 54 years in my case).
In the afternoon we relaxed, then went for a meal to Gouldings, a trading post in Monument Valley. It was where many of the film stars stayed when they were filming in Monument Valley.
John Ford directed 9 films there, many with John Wayne, including his first - Stagecoach, others included The Searchers, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Monument Valley was also used to film The Eiger Sanction and Thelma and Louise.
We went along with some people we had met at the campground. They are all members of RV Forum.Net and they were very welcoming towards us.
The meal was so so, but the place was great.

Arriving in Monument Valley

On Wednesday morning we decided to travel the 25 miles to Monument Valley, so that we could get set up there in order to see the sunset and the dawn actually in the valley. The campground(?) is a flatish piece of land overlooking many of the famous buttes and you park anywhere, but there is no water or electricity. We chose a site quite near the edge of the park, so that we could nicely see Monument Valley from our trailer window, it was perfect until an RV pulls up, squeezes between us and the edge, completely obscuring our view. There was of course plenty of space elsewhere, but this couple had chosen to park in front of us, about 10feet away! Before they could set up we asked them if they would move back a little, quite politely. They said this was the only flat bit (untrue) and would not move. We pointed out that they could move along just a few feet and we could all see the view. They said that they could not understand what we were saying as they were foreign (German). Well we got so angry, Sally called them something quite rude. We decided that we would move, so we re hitched the trailer and moved a few feet up, re-levelled the trailer and set up again, boy were we fuming! They thought this quite funny and made several remarks that were not helpful. We then ignored them. Bah! There are some very selfish people in this world!
Anyway that evening I spent some time taking photos of the sunset. We were at last here in Monument Valley, really the main goal of this road trip.

Gooseneck, The Mokee Dugway, Muley Point and the Natural Bridges Park

By a stange quirk of fate we were forced to move on from the Cadilac Ranch, i.e. we had not booked an extension to our stay and they were full up. So we uprooted ourselves and moved on to The Gooseneck State Park. The name gooseneck refers to the encised meanders in the San Juan River, which has spectacularly cut down through many layers of sandstone. We camped on the cliff top, above the meanders, 1200 feet above the river! From where we were you could see several meanders and at the bottom the, by now, green San Juan River. Sally has real difficulites with heights, so had great trouble going to the edge, but was quite confident when there was a wall or railings between her and the drop, so she was able to enjoy the view as well. She was reasonably happy even though we were camped only a few feet from the drop.

As we had arrived there in plenty of time we decided that we would attempt some other items on our tourist agenda:
Moki Dugway.
Before we could visit elsewhere we had to climb the Moki Dugway.
Part of the backdrop to our local scenery is a massive mesa, called Cedar Edge Mesa. It runs for perhaps 30 miles and is 1200 feet high. It has almost sheer cliff sides. However in the 1950's Uranium Ore was mined on the Mesa top, and had to be taken to Mexican Hat (at the bottom) for initial processing, so they built a road. It is paved along the top of the mesa, it is paved at the bottom of the mesa, but they dug a narrow, unpaved, twisty road out of the side of the 1200ft cliff to carry the ore down. It twists and turns through a series of switchbacks, there are no guard rails, it has a gravel surface and is steep. What an adventure! I was really impressed by Sally as she grittted her teeth and stuck in there as we ascended this mammoth cliff. I tried where possible to drive on the cliff face side, rather than the correct side of the road, but when a car came down we had to go to the correct place on the road, which even made me feel worried. But the view was amazing.
Muley Point
We eventually got to the top and stopped to enjoy the view which extended Eastwards over the Valley of The Gods and you could see the Durango mountains away in Colorado. Well done Sally. Once we had got to the top of the Mesa we took a little side road to the southern most tip of the Mesa to Muley Point. From here, 1200 feet above the landscape we could see the meanders of the San Juan, a further 1200 ft. just below us and away in the distance the buttes of Monument Valley. What a stupendous view.
Natural Bridge National Park.
From Muley point we rejoined the road and sped along the top of the mesa to a small National Park called Natural Bridge N.P. Here in the steep canyons cut by streams were a number of incised meanders which had cut deep into the rocks. The meanders had cut back and worn away at the little bit of land on the inside of the loop, until they had cut their way through, taking a short cut for the water, but leaving a bridge of rock. The end result was imilar to Arches, but made in a different way. We saw three of the natural bridges by following a 9 mile scenic tour. Two of them are over 200 feet wide. I walked down to one of them, it was quite spectacular.
After our visit there we returned to our trailer, this time coming back down the Moki Dugway. This time we were dry camping, no water, no electricty. Fortunately no problems, just great and breathtaking scenery. What a fabulous day of sightseeing.

Valley Of The Gods

Just up the road from Bluff is an unpaved road which travels for about 17 miles round a valley. It is called the Valley of The Gods, also known as The Little Monument Valley. It runs through a whole area of buttes, mesas and needles. Many of them have a name, some don't, our favourites were the Stting Hen and The Rooster, hopefully you will be able to see them in the photos. The trip left us with an overpowering sense of awe as we picked our way through the valley, looking at great heights and vertiginous drops. Along the way we saw a lot of desert plants, some of them known at home, the Daisy and Allysum, being two.
We returned to the trailer tired out, so had to go and eat at the local Twin Rocks Trading Post, which was OK, but meant I didn't have to cook.

Downhill - Gathering Pace

There is a sort of feeling that you get as you ride up to the start of a roller coaster - tension, anticipation, holding of breath. There is the sound of clanking chains as the car is ratcheted up the track, you can look down and see where you are going to go. But it is not until you reach the top and hurtle down the other side that you know that all the slow drag up to the top was a prelude to something more tense, more exciting, more breathtaking. So it has been with our adventure this spring. We have been travelling through the Mid West - Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico and we have really enjoyed ourselves. But all the time, in the back of our minds, growing with every mile we drew nearer, has been the anticipation of The Big Country - the scenery of the the Colorado Plateau, the buttes, the mesas, the red rock, the canyons, the cloudless skies and starlit nights. That tension reached its max as we drove across the Continental Divide and we started downhill, slowly at first, through the badlands of North West New Mexico. We held the anticipation by resting in Farmington. But today we let go and raced down into that vast expanse of land that is the Four Corners Area. Within minutes of leaving the campground we could see the tall elegance of Ship Rock, a Volcanic plug that stands by the entrance to that wonderful scenery, like the Princess Castle stands over the Enchanted Kingdom at Disney. Even at our closest approach (7 miles away) it stood massively towering above the plains. From nowhere it reaches 1550 feet in the air, taller than the Empire Sate Building. Having passed that (though we could see it for another 40 miles) we rushed on down through unexpected turns and switchbacks of the approaches to Patora Peak. One moment driving on level ground, the next plunging into canyons and ravines that only revealed themselves seconds before. Past rock faces of infinite variety, with strata at every possible angle. We had been to The Garden of The Gods (Colorado Springs), we are going to visit The Valley of The Gods, but this must surely be the Sandpit of the Gods. Driving on for about an hour, with a growing sense of excitement, we arrived at The Four Corners Monument. This was the place we didn't visit in 2003 and wished we had. We had 8 years of anticipation to release as we wandered round the new installation (you can't call it a building) which screams "This is the Heartland, Soul and Centre Of America". The place where the great mass of people who inhabit, and have inhabited, America have reached for - even if they did not know of its existence, the immigrant nature of it's peoples which aspires to be somewhere better. All those to the East of it live with the tension that it is the place to go to. Those to the West have conquered it and relax in the confidence of having gone beyond it. We were just happy to have been able to have experienced being there, as we played in the sun and the cold wind, on the little metal plate that signifies the spot where four states meet.
From there, we dropped down to the San Juan River, which like the Rio Grande in New Mexico, will be our guide through this area of The Four Corners. It is difficult to define it by State, as already we had passed from New Mexico to Arizona, back into New Mexico to get to the Four Corners Monument, then into Colorado to cross the San Juan. Following the San Juan River we drove into Utah. For a while we crossed level plains, with cattle and sagebrush. On the horizon we could see behind us, to the East, the great Mesa Verde, beyond that the snow covered tops of the mountains behind Durango. To the North East the Ute Mountains, to the North we could see the snow covered mountains above Monticello. To the South, Patora Peak was dropping below the horizon. To the West the horizon appeared level, but again, as we travelled we drove past great, long, barriers of rock with weird outcroppings and needles with cap stones. We passed shallow caves, some with remains of dwellings inside. Our goal for today was Bluff, we knew that it had a nice small campground. It is a small village built on the banks of the San Juan River, behind it, to the North, is a protective wall of red rock, hence the name, Bluff. We arrived at about 4.00. There was a lady there to greet us, ask us if we had a reservation (no!). She said that she had just had a cancellation and could take us, giving us a spot where we have a view over the river valley. As it happens if we had called ahead we would have been told that it was full, so there you are.
We parked and set up and sat and relaxed. My first thought was, we have at last arrived, this campground feels like home, we are now in the Monument Valley area, we can relax and enjoy it.
Strangely the tension of traveling to somewhere had lifted. As though we were at the bottom of our roller coaster ride, just gliding smoothly to a stop. Ready now to see and enjoy this fabulous part of America. We had a quick kip, went for a great steak in the local (and only) steakhouse, had a game of Rummikub in the evening and went to bed contented, having as yet, made no decision about what we would do tomorrow. That is another day.