Greetings from Utah!

If you ever get a chance to travel this part of the world – even for a week – you really should.  These National Parks are all huge, with nice roads, great places to pull off and eat or hike, explanatory plaques at each stop. Every single solitary visitor center is a museum of some sort. Besides the obligatory brochures everywhere and the gift shop, there is always a display. We’ve been stopping whenever we can. At one of the stops, we saw a huge paleontology exhibit. Utah is the place to find dinosaurs!

Arches National Park and Canyonland have some of the most breathtaking views you will ever see. You can see many of the arches from the road, which was good because it was so blinking hot, we went on very few of the walks. Canyonland is full of canyons, which you can see as you go down the very steep hills. Sometimes you can even drive into them and look up – absolutely stunning.

We drove to Kanab UT to see the Best Friends Animal Shelter. We would really like to volunteer there but I am not sure when. We are thinking about leaving a little earlier next year and going out to the Black Hills. Definitely see Mt Rushmore and maybe even Yellowstone before it implodes. But we need to set a slower pace. We are getting good at the setup and breakdown of our camping trailer, but we just have not allowed ourselves enough time in each place to do more than scratch the surface. So our days are a bit frantic.

Lake Powell was one of the nicest places we have stayed so far. Definitely a desert landscape, but well cared for and we had a view of the lake. You could rent a houseboat and stay on the water for a whole week if you wanted! Or rent an RV. That seems to be very popular out here. Every other Class C is from CruiseAmerica, Best Time, El Monte, or Road Bear. Lots of things to see and do in the area, including a restaurant and home build right into the rocks.

And don’t expect to ever know what time it is. Utah and Arizona have two different time zones, and not all of AZ participates in Daylight Savings. So we went back and forth between three different times zones all the time we were there. Verizon was a little iffy in spots, so the three phones and the truck never agreed with each other.

We are now at the Grand Canyon RV resort, home of the Grand Canyon Railroad.   Sites are a little tight, but the internet is good! And it has cooled down majorly. We went from 96 to 66 – it’s 61 right now – and raining. It’s going to rain most of the week, but we are still going to see the Canyon and Bearizona. There are petroglyphs in the area, so we will see those too. Those are actually all over the place, it’s not hard to get to see them.

We need to do some maintenance on the trailer as well. We have just been kinda throwing things in cabinets. Now that we have some downtime (we will be here 4 more nights), we can take things apart and put them back neatly. Plus we have had some trim come loose. Can’t blame Grand Design, they are all things we have knocked into or not secured properly before moving.

Carlos, our repeat foreign exchange student,  is doing well. To my surprise, Rocky and the cats remembered him. He has the pullout bed with a memory foam topper and says it is very comfortable. PC the cat sleeps with him:-)