Ship of Fools

Day 14: Friday, April 1, 2016.
What an incredibly long day! We woke up in Tuba City, AZ, and we are ending our day in Glenwood Springs, CO. We have seen so many things in between! The first thing we saw was mountain lion road kill. I wanted to stop and take a picture, but then I decided that a picture of road kill was kind of, well, morbid. I also had this rather irrational fear that the mountain lion was just napping in a rather inconvenient spot and would wake up and pounce on me. But then when I got too far away, I really wished I had done it anyway. It was so weird seeing it on the side of the road like that. It was probably terrifying for whoever hit it, and i was glad it wasn't me. But it was such a beautiful creature, even in death.

As we got farther north, the landscape began to change. We were back in the Four Corners area, and the closer we got to Colorado, and the closer those distant white peaks became, the more I felt as though we were leaving the desert behind. Utah is an interesting place, though, and the landscape changed its mind a few more times before we arrived in Moab.  Moab is where we should have spent the night, and we are waaay off schedule, but I desperately wanted to see Arches National Park, even if it was just for an hour and a half.

As it turns out, 90 minutes is not a very long time when you're trying to see awesome things in the desert.  We had a quick tour of the visitor's center, but I promised the kids we would visit the gift shop AFTER we saw some cool rock formations. They were unimpressed, but we moved on. We didn't have time for much, but we were going to see Delicate Arch if it killed me. Delicate Arch is the most famous arch in the park, maybe even in the world (because, really, how many other arches have you heard of?). If you've ever seen a Utah license plate, that's the featured arch. So we drove all the way out to a spot where you could hike to a lookout to see the arch in the distance. There was no time for actual hiking. I have a 4 year old with me! This little walk was about as much hiking as we could handle. But it was a fun walk! There were rocks to climb over and things to see. It also took significantly longer than I had anticipated. When we realized how late it was, and that the Visitor's Center closed at 4:30 (WHY???), we hopped in the car for a mad dash back to entrance. Nona and Jack hopped out as I rolled past in the parking lot, and got there just in time to have the door shut in their faces. But Nona saved the day and got the guy to give us our badges anyway. She was not about to let her grandsons be denied their Junior Ranger badges two days in a row! We had to wait outside, and that meant no gift shop, which you would think was the biggest tragedy of the trip, but we got our Junior Ranger badges, and that was enough for me. And as it turns out, the tokens for Arches are sold online. So everything was awesome after we discovered that.

Photo Credit: Tucker Barg
He worked really hard on composing this shot.

Oh, wait.  Did I saw "awesome"? I meant "awful". Everything was awful. It was dinner time, and we were only as far as we were supposed to have gotten the night before. I had wanted to be almost to Denver by now. Also, Jackson was starting to complain about his ears when we arrived, but he was all-out crying about them now. No amount of "pinch and blow" seemed to help. We gave him a decongestant, and continued on our way. The best way to help him is to get him down to a lower altitude as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, we need to go up to get down. We found some Afrin in Fruita and that seems to be helping, though. It's strange to be driving past all these places I had intended to stop, and to know I had hotel reservations here, or there's a park I had wanted to visit there.  Someday, we will just have to come back and finish what we started. For now, I have to get my poor Jackson east of the Mile-High City without rupturing his eardrums.