On the 20th we were settled into my brother and SIL’s house, but they had to work that day (some people can’t take 4-week long vacations, apparently) so we had the day to play. I wanted to go caching. The kids wanted to go play at a park their aunt told them about. Guess who won?

Yes, absolutely we went to the park. Kendrah lagged behind after a stop at the restrooms so I gave her a moment of paparazzi fame by jumping out from behind a planter to get this photo.

And yeah, with her newly dyed hair, she sucked up the attention.

The kids climbed.

And then took the swings to new heights. They were having a great time, but it was hot and I was bored.

It was really hot and there was no place to sit and nothing to drink so I gave them some time but then said let’s go caching! I had loaded my GPS with a string of caches nearby but traffic was a bear and once the kids had stopped playing they realized how hot it was and wanted to drive around a bit so I drove to another trail with a long string of challenge caches, most of which I qualified for, in another town. I didn’t take my camera out because it wasn’t a very pretty place. Ok, it wasn’t even a nice place. When we got back to my brother and SILs and told her where we’d been she practically shrieked that no one goes to that town and most people drive far out of their way to avoid it and was surprised I’d gone there instead of staying in the nice part of her town. One good thing about being a tourist, you can see things you don’t normally see, and go places you don’t normally go. That’s pretty much what we did and I got a lot of cool caches so that’s all that matters, right?

The next day, my brother came up to our brother’s house to spend the day with us and we had a full, fun, and exciting day which will take several posts to convey so we’ll keep this one short and sweet and post about tomorrow on another day.

There was a lot of driving to do today as well. I had hoped to be able to spend some time in Yosemite but places and geocache sites kept drawing my attention away. For instance, this mass gravesite. At least that’s how I read it. Could have been the year it happened, I suppose.

It was kind of disappointing, actually. Not to mention impossible to park near. And then it was just an odd marker without much info. I’m sure it was tragic to someone, sometime.

Getting out of whatever town we happened to be in at the time (there were just so many), I had to laugh and get a picture while stopped at a red light. Let’s see. Decisions, decisions. Dance with the devil or have a Gospelfest?

We stopped at a grave of an unknown prospector.

All that is known about him, apparently, is that he was really short. Or died in the fetal position, hard to tell. I’m somewhat irreverent about such things.

What was important to me was the cache nearby, and the view. And what a view it was!

We saw more views along the way, too.

It was weird to see mountains and trees. It felt very much like home here as we made our way into Yosemite.

The rock cliff faces look solid but there were giant trees growing out of them, which fascinated me to no end.

And the swirly patterns in the rock faces was really fun.

The kids were hot so when we found water, we stopped to play a bit.

Things were pretty but nothing spectacular, and nothing that resembled photos I’ve seen of the place. We drove for hours trying to find some familiar landmarks, only finding one after a short walk to some restrooms. Since I’d just been aiming for the bathroom, I hadn’t taken my camera. Whatever.

So we continued on, stopping at the ranger station to ask about sites. Found out it’s about an hour’s hike to one place we wanted to see, a 45 minutes hike to another. We cruised on just seeing what we saw from teh car and regretting the day wasn’t longer. We did stop to say hi to a raven.

The raven was so hot it didn’t even fly away as we parked about 5 feet away and rolled down the windows and stuck cameras in its face.

It didn’t close its mouth one time while we were there, just stood there staring into the middle distance with mouth agape. I suspected it would have been okay riding around in the A/C car for a while. It looked so hot and miserable. We left it in peace after getting a shot of the sign nearby.

And, maybe the only photo of Yosemite that looked “right”:

After that we skedaddled to Roseville to my brother’s house before it got too terribly late!

(The blogging is slow going because I don’t want the trip to end for a second time, but I’m trying to get these last couple of days blogged. Since it’s almost 6 months later and now in the dead of winter, it’s fun to blog about hot sunny days, though, so here goes…)

Remember, when I last blogged, I mentioned how dark the campground was when he’d set up and how far away the bathrooms were? This is what I work up to discover: we’d camped directly across the road from one.

We hadn’t wanted to hang out on the mountain because we hadn’t eaten dinner the night before and we were really hungry for breakfast. So we packed up pretty quickly. Here’s a view of the mostly packed site with it’s various levels we’d navigated to set up the night before.

We were at about 8,000′ elevation so we got out our sweatshirts for the first time and enjoyed the tall mountain views. We seemed to be about halfway up Mt. Whitney but there were also other tall hills around so it was kind of like being in a crater. After so much open desert sky, waking up to this was enough to take our breath away.

We’d loaded our snackage bin in the bear box (it’s actually illegal to leave food in your car at this campground. Not just a bad idea, illegal. Which I suppose means that you might not only get your car destroyed by a bear you’ll get fined for it as well) so as soon as it was empty my little bears decided to take it literally and act like bears in a box.

Then we slowly cruised our way out of the campground, barely 10 hours after we’d cruised in.

More stuff we’d missed on the way in, due to it being really, really dark.

And then we broke from the trees and saw this.

Looking back from where we’d just been:

Doesn’t this view deserve a panorama shot?

And then, maybe one more?

As we came down from the mountain we entered a place called the Alabama Hills, which is famous(?) for the rock formations. We knew of one that we needed to get a photo of that gets repainted and you never know what it will look like when you get there. On July 19th, 2013, it looked like this:

The cafe we had breakfast at had paintings on the walls that showed other rocks and what they were named after, a football player, an alien, and other odd people and places. Some looked quite obvious and others were a bit more vague, but I enjoyed the use of imagination. I only got a few shots of the rocks and didn’t take the tour to see the ones with names, but you can see where a field of rocks like this would spark some crazy ideas.

The cafe was the most expensive meal of the trip (at least that I had to pay for). Our breakfast plus 2 giant cinnamon rolls to go was almost $40. That includes Quin getting a kid’s meal and then eating off Kendrah’s and my plates as well. It was tasty, but slow and expensive, more of a place to hang out than eat and run. There were a few groups of rock climbers getting ready to do their thing and some locals just watching the ebb and flow of humanity. I was impatient to keep moving as we had some driving to do since I was planning on arriving at my brother’s house before it got too late so I wasn’t an inconsiderate guest (um, last time I visited them I arrived after midnight and didn’t want a repeat performance).

With breakfast out of the way we made our way out of town, stopping at a mine shaft. I suspect it’s a movie prop and not a real one, but it had a cache in it so we went there.

The rest of the day — including Yosemite — will have to wait for another post.

We played in Death Valley long enough to get more pictures than I care to count, including this one of the moon.

Which made me think we should get a move on, since we still had some distance to travel to get to our campsite. I’d considered camping in Death Valley but all the free campsites are first-come, first-served, and have little to no facilities. The ones I could have paid for were well off the road I wanted to take, and I also didn’t want to deal with the late-night heat inside a tent with the kids. But we had a few more dunes to scamper down before we left.

A dead stick in Death Valley.

And a boy playing dead. In the shade, which was the only place you could touch the sand for more than a moment before it started to hurt.

Then, a few more scenic shots — I loved this place.

Then it was time to head on back down the road with Unhappy Frog. We were heading for the hills!

But before we got there, the kids were entranced by the landscape. I think they were salt flats, and the ground glittered as the sun dipped lower and lower in the sky. I allowed them to get out and run as I drove slowly beside them on the road. They ran and danced and twirled and while the photo doesn’t do it justice, they felt like they were dancing on diamonds or among stars.

I wasn’t sure where the camp ground was, exactly and I was getting antsy cause I dislike trying to find my site in the dark, shining my headlights into other people’s sites while I search so I was trying to hurry. I got the kids in the car again and only paused to capture some photos of the sun setting.

I knew we wouldn’t make it so I stopped briefly for a geocache, but I couldn’t find it within a minute or so and gave up and kept going.

We’d started this day at about 8,500′ elevation. Over the course of the day we’d gone to about 900′, then up to 9,000′. Down, down to below sea level in the Valley, and then following GeePS to our camp near Lone Pine, CA, we went up and up and up, switchbacking our way up a mountain. I hadn’t realized Mt. Whitney was so….tall. Our campsite was a bit over halfway up the 14,000′ high mountain.

We had no idea how tall it was because by the time we were out of the Valley, it was dark. Blind-fold dark, since there are no street lights, reflective signs, traffic, or any sign of civilization. We zig zagged up and up and went round and round the campground till we found our site. It was pitch black so I did not get any pictures of my parking job, which was awkward at best. The site was on three levels, parking, picknicking, and sleeping, so we had to haul stuff down uneven rocky stairs and pitch the tent in the dark. Good thing we’re so good at it by now.

What a long day with a lot of driving. The kids seemed dazed and confused and I knew it was bedtime. An hour after pulling in (and out, and back in, and out and back in again till I got it mostly right) we’d set up camp, walked a quarter mile to the bathrooms (well, pit toilet and no running water) and back, brushed our teeth and were in bed. I told the kids that if I have to get up in the night with anyone needing to pee, I was not walking that far and it would be the tree next to our tent that would be used. Course I was the only one that needed to. Ironic thing, 8 hours later when we woke up in the daylight, we saw a restroom about 50′ from our site. An hour later we’d broke camp, loaded the car and headed back down the mountain.

But that’s a story for another day.

Ah, Las Vegas. We drove through here to grab a couple of geocaches. This shoe photo qualified me for a virtual cache, but I also wanted to get a couple of traditionals, so we stopped here and found the container hidden in the statue’s left hind foot.

Then we drove to our first sighting of sand dunes. I figured we were getting close to Death Valley so I didn’t even slow down for this picture.

There’s a great deal of nothing in this part of Nevada. As far as the eye can see, there is nothing man-made but the road and an occasional strand of barbed wire strung up between metal posts that look like they’ve been there since the first World War. Still, the nothingness was interesting and different so I got another picture before driving on into more nothingness.

Oh, whoa. Ok, out in the middle of no where, and by that I mean, we’ve been driving for an hour and haven’t even seen another car, there is one building. It’s was HUGE. I think you could have fit 3 Costco warehouses inside it. And, well, we didn’t stop at it.

That wasn’t the kind of nothingness we wanted to see. We drove on. There is no one out here but us and the sun.

It was blistering hot.

And really, really lonely. We loved it. Just a straight road coming and going, and a lizard that would not stop talking. You also can see my murano glass pendant my friend sent me after her trip to Italy, the blue tag granting us access to Custer State Park in SD, and the orange tag allowing us into Dead Horse Point State Park in Utah. You can also see Jack, the Nuvi I borrowed so Kendrah could use it to guide us to wacky roadside attractions while I used GeePS to guide us to geocaches.

And of course, Unhappy Frog was with us. So… we weren’t really lonely inside the car, but outside it was desolate.

We arrived in Death Valley. No guard shack was there to check our National Parks permit and we just drove on in. Signs warned us to not use our A/C as we traversed the Valley so we rolled down the windows, blasted the stereo instead of the A/C and watched the scenery fly by. Which was almost as interesting as watching sweat droplets form on the backs of our hands. Weird! Weirder was when we stopped at a rest area. I was nervous about a pit toilet in the heat but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected. While I waited my turn, I had to laugh at the pee chart they had posted in a kiosk outside the toilets.

Thankfully we were well hydrated (we went through between 3 and 5 gallons of drinks each day, I’ve never bought so much juice or so many bags of ice in my life) and after the break we jumped back in and continued on.

And on.

The sand dunes were gorgeous! Stopping at a parking area there was the first time we’d seen people for hours, and there were a lot of people here. By then, 30 people seemed like a lot. It wasn’t, like, Disneyland lot, but after being alone for so long, it seemed crowded.

The bits without people was absolutely gorgeous.

The kids, who thought 104 in Utah was too hot, ran up and down the dunes. I heard that it was about 120 degrees at the time. The sand that got between my feet and sandals was so hot I had to shake it out with each step. It felt like heaven there. I had a bottle of juice in one hand and my camera in the other as I wandered around capturing the antics of my kids.

Here’s Kendrah trying to block the sun.

People stopped to stare at the kids as they ran and flopped in the sand. No one else moved at more than a snail’s pace in that heat.

It was fun and I have a few more pictures to share, but it will have to wait for another post.

Today was the day to leave the comforts of Mom and Dad’s house and pool, and head off to see new places. Yes, there were a lot of rocks in the trunk of my car, thanks for asking.

There were a couple of virtual caches I wanted to stop at, but we didn’t have a lot of time for stops as this was one of our biggest driving days we had planned. We wanted to drive in Nevada and through Death Valley and make it to our camp site in Lone Pine, CA before nightfall. Dreaming. There was a lot to see, and our first stop was Ash Fork, AZ.

We found our caches and stopped at a little museum to use their restroom and browse for a few minutes. The lady there asked if we were going to be taking Route 66, since Ash Fork is a jumping on/off place for Route 66. I said, “No, we came all this way just to see Ash Fork.” She started dumbly at me for a moment and then found her voice to stutter, “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard anyone say that before.”

We continued on, but after a while took a side trip for another geocache and found ourselves on Route 66. It’s an interesting place we found ourselves.

Loved, loved, loved the marquee on this drive-in.

We drove on Route 66 for a time, past a brothel with scantily clad mannequins waving from a second floor balcony, then turned left to get back to the main road we’d been on. Along the way Kendrah yelled, “Stop and get a photo, Mom! That cloud makes that mountain look like an erupting volcano!” And, seriously, how can I resist something like that? I pulled over and got this shot.

We stopped at this sign for Chloride because there was a cache there. We didn’t go into town although it sounded interesting, but like I said, lotta road ahead of us.

Thankfully there was another cache up ahead — a girl’s gotta pee once in a while, you know? — so we stopped here. Unfortunately there were no restrooms, but there were cool bridges.

And grasshoppers the side of small birds! Can you see it? It’s well cammoed with the branch.

We took some time under the bridge….um, you know, looking around and …stuff…. and then had a bit of target practice. Under the bridge was a few degrees cooler, which makes a difference when it’s over 100. Wish I had a temperature gauge on this trip! Back in Colorado Springs, my sister had said that Death Valley might get closed down because the temps for this week were supposed to get over 130. We were semi-prepared with an alternate route.

We shot our way out of the park with bridges and no rest rooms (well, sorta).

And made our way back to the road, feeling quite refreshed but ready for blasting A/C.

We made our way to Hoover Dam. What a site that is. We drove to the Nevada side, parked and walked up to the bridge overlooking the dam and walked back to Arizona, but we didn’t get all the way across before Kendrah decided she was having heat stroke and a dizzying case of vertigo. I took her picture anyway.

And made her wait while I looked down.

And get more photos of the dam. La la la la.

Fine, ok, let’s go back to the car. Oh, wait, one more photo.

The artsy railing and walkway were interesting. There were a lot of people sweating with us here and I had to wait for people to slowly move out of my way to get photos.

Then, from the comfort of the car’s A/C interior, we drove across the dam itself and got a few photos from a different perspective. In the first photo, you can see the bridge we’d been standing on earlier. Waaaaayyyyy up there.

We were too late to take a tour at the M&M factory (they close at noon) but we stopped for a wander through the cactus garden.

We went into the factory and approached a sample station. The woman behind the partition asked, “Milk, white or dark?” I said, “Oh, yes please!” She stood there for a moment just looking at me so I said, “Um, okay, uh, milk.” She handed me a sample that might have filled one M&M shell on a warm day and I thanked her and we moved on. Not impressed with the store offerings, I didn’t even buy a postcard, but we did get some photos outside.

Feeling pressed for time, we headed for another cache or two, but that will have to wait for part 2.

Day 15 was another lazy day, playing with rocks and swimming and playing cards. Kendrah went to work with Gramma for a time, too. My car had been in the shop since we arrived to get the oil changed and the brakes fixed, and it was done about the time dad’s car started acting funny. So we took the opportunity to get his car in the shop while I could drive them wherever we needed to go, which happened the next day. It was another day to go out and play, and we headed to Jerome, AZ. On the way we stopped at the hang glider launch site dad had taken me to last year and I wanted to show the kids.

The pitch of the ramp into oblivion is very steep. Dad is not about to throw Quin off, he’s hanging on to him and keeping them both safe. Really!

On the way back down the mountain, I stopped to capture this butterfly chowing down on the flower’s nectar.

Jerome is an interesting place. On one side you have the ghost town and the other side you have the tourist town. You are welcomed to spend money on either side. We hit the ghost town first.

While tempted, we did not spend any money here.

The bees and the hummingbirds loves the feeders out front of the main shop in the ghost town. We opted to not take the tour and instead just looked around on our own a bit, before moving on to the tourist side.

We wandered the streets and in and out of shops, photographing things of interest and buying postcards.

Quin was being exceptionally unhappy today so I couldn’t resist laughing when I saw this book. I don’t think “Vacationing” was on the list, but it should have been on Quin’s.

Somewhere along the way, Quin set down Ribbert and didn’t pick him back up. Which made me unhappy.

But I didn’t notice, either and we moved on to the copper shop. Jerome got it’s beginnings as a copper mine site so copper still plays a huge part in the tourist aspect.

I really liked this piece, and saw the price tag as $15. I told Dad I’d be more tempted if it was $5 instead. He looked closer at it and said, “That actually is $45, I think.” We looked at it again and realized we were both wrong. This piece of copper, which was about 12″ tall and maybe 10″ wide was really marked $95. We decided if I thought $15 was too much, we’d pass on paying $95, although I do think they are really cool.

The one with desert scenes were awesome, too, I didn’t even look at the price.

After browsing and doing a bit of drooling, we moved on to a mine site with historical interest.

But the real draw was the 1,900′ deep shaft that had a glass cover you could stand on. Oh yeah, baby. 1,900′ is DEEP!

And I mean, really deep!

This was a plaque that showed how deep it was compared to some famous landmark buildings around the world. It’s deep.

I might have mentioned that.

The rusty metal items intrigued me and I started thinking about which photos I’d want to make a puzzle with.

My mom looked like she was in jail, but she was so happy to see us it’s hard to tell.

Quin had to pose:

After that we made our way home again. I got a picture of a flower in their yard.

But flowers can’t hold appeal for long when there’s a pool nearby.

It got really dark in the pool room and then it started raining so hard it sounded like a herd of elephants dancing on the roof. The thunder and lightening (and sometimes rain) had been hitting off and on the whole time we were there, but this time it was a monsoon. I had to go outside and get a picture of the river flowing down the road.

The next day, Kendrah went back to work with Gramma, and dad took Quin and I plinking. We loaded the gun, ammo and target and headed off into the boonies.

The gun was too big for Quin and it was fun to see him try to hold it and shoot it.

But he hit the target, as did dad and I.

The tree was also hit. That was fun! We shot till the gun jammed and then we gathered the spent shells, target, and all our other stuff, and packed it out.

We stopped to get a picture of some water.

Then, since it was our last day to be able to do so, we hit the pool after mom and Kendrah got home.

Tomorrow we’ll be leaving mom and dad’s house and heading to Nevada and California via Death Valley.

Day 13 of our road trip wasn’t a road trip kind of day, but a day we stayed at “home”, playing with the rocks we’d collected the day before, which involved cutting some, polishing some with a sander, and tossing some in the tumbler. The kids enjoyed cutting the rocks up in my Dad’s shop, especially Quin who spent several hours at it.

The next day was another out-n-about day. We decided to visit Montezuma’s Well and then continue on to see some weird things in Sedona. We had hardly even got out of town before we stopped for a geocache near this funny frog rock.

Then we stopped to photograph what is supposed to be the world’s largest kokopelli. The roads made it too complicated to get close so this was the best I could do. I cropped out the Starbucks sign that seemed to tower over it, because the kokopelli really was huge. Unless you had that to compare it to.

After that we found our way to the Well. It was blistering hot but we made the trek to the Well and most of the way around it in order to get the information we needed to claim the earthcache there. It’s a fascinating place. The well is the only water around and over 1.6 million gallons of water flows through it daily, but no one, even scuba divers, have been able to determine where the water is coming from. Ancient Indians created irrigation systems from the well for their crops.

They also build homes between the water and the ground.

And maybe they had better success at catching lizards than Kendrah did.

Remember that frog rock we stopped at earlier? We saw this one — even without paint it reminded us all of a giant bullfrog. Can you see it?

The kids and I needed our pictures taken as part of the cache requirements. It was hot and they weren’t too agreeable but we managed to get a few shots. This is us trying to look like we’re having fun.

We actually were, it was just too hot for them.

The paddle cactus struck my fancy, the way it grew in a line along the top of the rock, without touching it.

Here’s another view of the underground structures.

And a shot of the irrigation ditch.

Then it was time to move on to other sites and sights.

Sedona is pretty famous for the red rocks all over the place. It was also pretty green!

We stopped at a Ranger Station / Visitor’s Center and killed some time in the A/C building, watching a movie and doing a scavenger hunt.

And letting Ribbert go for a ride on some statues.

One of the rocks we were searching for was the coffeepot –

And, closer:

We stopped by a viewpoint near the airport that gave us a lovely panoramic view of the town and surrounding rocks.

Quin found some green rocks and needed to pose by them.

By then, it was seriously time for a special treat for our mouths instead of just having them for our eyes. We stopped at the Red Planet Diner and placed an order for root beer floats and milkshakes.

Then, time to hit the road again! We took this trail to a huge sinkhole that had collasped. There were caches to find and amazing things to look at!

Sedona is home to the only McDonalds in the world that does not have golden arches. Here, they are teal blue and we just had to stop and get a picture of it.

On the way back home, we stopped at a roadside shop that was a rambling conglomeration of interesting things. I think this is a place you shop when you want something that no one else has, or for something as a gift for someone that has everything. It was a fun, eclectic assortment of decorative items, mostly displayed outside. My camera had a great time, so I will show you a tiny bit of what I saw there.

Don’t act surprised at this next photo. You know he couldn’t resist.

The inside of the pots was almost as interesting as the outside. There were stacks of these pots all over the place.

Funny thing about this buffalo horns marked $10 each. There was another basket nearby with buffalo horns that were polished and trimmed and beautiful that were marked $9 each. Huh.

After spending a lot of time there it was time to head back home, catching a couple more shots before leaving Sedona.

Time to go swimming!

We spent our first day with my parents at their house, just resting, playing and catching up. And, yeah, swimming in their pool. The next day, however, we wanted to do some rock hounding so we’d have time to cut and polish them (polishing can take 4 to 5 days) so we headed off to Burro Creek, where the best rocks of the type Dad recommended could be found. Along the way we stopped to photograph the Joshua trees.

They are an unpleasant species both close up and from a distance, but pretty cool at the same time.

As always to our northwest eyes, cactus are pretty awesome.

Quin got into the spirit of things and wanted to hug a cactus, but I insisted on a picture first, before he got all bloody. He was very careful, though and only pretended.

I have to tell you about these cows. They were meandering along the road, completely unconcerned there was barely enough room for all of us there. See that black one? That cow was a hoot! It acted like a black lab puppy, pouncing down toward the car with it’s hindquarters in the air, then dashing off like we’d thrown it a stick to fetch. Then it would turn and do it all again till they all finally decided to get off the road so we could pass. Too cute.

On our way there, we passed through the town of Yarnell. You’ve probably heard of the 19 firefighters that were killed fighting a blaze there, which was the deadliest day for firefighters since September 11th, 2001, and there hasn’t been that many deaths of firefighters fighting a wildfire in 80 years. The fire had been completely contained just the day before, and several disaster relief crews were still out there helping with the townfolk who had lost their homes. The desert was pretty barren and you could still see the red fire retardant across the rocks and a couple of burned out shells of homes, sheds and boats. A lot of devastation. For the duration of our visit to Arizona, we couldn’t go anywhere without being asked to buy a bumper sticker or t-shirt or just plain donate money to the cause. Even though I’m cynical about how much of that money goes to actually help anyone, it was nice to see nearby towns rallying together.

Later, Quin was trying to say something about the fire retardant we’d seen, but he couldn’t remember exactly what it was called. He said, “You know, Mom, that stuff that makes fire stupid?”

On to the rocks!

Here in Washington, the coolest rock around is an agate, which is found on our rocky ocean/bay shores. They are small. Everything else is gray or black or brown and sometimes almost white and then ooh, ooh, you might find some crushed lava rocks in a driveway or garden. That’s about as exotic as you get, rocks that are just….rocks. But there! Woo!

Pretty rocks with NAMES! My dad knew them, but I forgot them. We were looking for white rocks with red streaks, but the kids and I went a little crazy picking up everything that had any color other than rock color. The trunk was heavily loaded before we finally made our way back home. I will probably not be sharing just how many of those rocks found their way into my car and were hauled home, but I suspect my gas mileage dropped a bit on the last half of our journey.

Then, it was time to stop picking up rocks and just carry my camera so there was still room to pack our stuff around the rocks. I was drawn to the cactus again.

And, as always, cows. I can’t resist a cute cow face even if it’s attached to a cow that looked willing to charge and ram the car.

Back to my folks house to sort rocks, and relax!

Today’s goal was to get from Dead Horse Point State Park to my parent’s house in Arizona. I enjoyed seeing the landscapes and how different the terrain was compared to home. Coming into Monument Valley was really amazing.

We drove and drove and it took forever for it to get closer, but it did.

Then it was really close!

Then it was gone, behind us, and we had Arizona before us.

One of the roadside attractions was seeing the Elephant Legs. The kids weren’t much interested in anything but getting to Gramma and Bapas, but I swerved to a stop, stuck the camera out the window, got this shot, and got back on the road.

There were things I wanted to see. Indian jewelry stands, dinosaur tracks, and any and all scenery. We stopped at the second jewelry shack and I bought a cheap pair of lapis lazuli earrings, then we went on to the dinosaur tracks.

We opted to not take the toothless old Indian woman’s offer of a tour and instead just wandered the land and kept an eye on the other guides so we’d know approximately where to stop to see the tracks and prints ourselves without having to listen to slurred and accented speech reminding us how big a tip we should leave.

I bought another cheap pair of earrings, these made of pearls. The deaf old woman was charging $4 for them. I had 3 ones and a twenty in my wallet so I handed her the larger bill. She didn’t have change so I offered instead the 3 dollar bills and she smiled in a way that should have showed off every one of her teeth if she’d had any and nodded happily. Sold.

We continued on, happy with our experiences and purchase till we needed to stop again, this time at a virtual cache about this bridge, which I wanted to photograph.

Ribbert joined the fun and sat on the info plaque we needed to claim the find.

There were two Earthcaches in a National Park that I wanted to stop for since I had a National Park Pass and all. I wasn’t really sure what kind of info they wanted or where I should get it, but I got lots of photos and came up with apparently the right answers.

It was beautiful but there was a storm brewing outside, and one in the car as the kids were pretty impatient with reaching our destination.

We stayed in the car the rest of the day except for when I had to stop and get gas. Under the overpass, they had carved out deer shapes in an interesting “ancient Indian cave painting” style. On the lead deer, someone had attached a red pompom on it’s nose. That was pretty funny, but unfortunately there was no place to stop for a photo.

Drove along a freshly graveled road as we neared my folk’s town. People were driving crazy-fast on it and one large pickup kicked up a rock that hit dead center in my line of vision and chipped my windshield. Oh well. Kept on going and eventually made the kids and grandparents extremely happy by finally arriving to where we’ll stay for a week.