Day 15-- Making alternative plans

After leaving Zion, we drove across the desert of Utah and Arizona—crossing the Colorado River again at the Glen Canyon Dam & Lake Powell (which also looked incredibly low).

The desert was…pretty deserted. We drove for miles and miles and miles and saw very little in the way of civilization. Even when we would pass by small communities of houses, there looked to be nothing in the way of retail establishments. The mom in me was thinking “Where do these people get their groceries?” as well as “Can you imagine having to drive hundreds of miles to the nearest Target??!” The more thoughtful part of me was reflecting on the fact that much of this territory was Indian reservations and the fact that the government removed so many people from places like Georgia (full of trees, water, etc.) to these barren lands of sand, scrub bushes and rocky cliffs—and it made me a little bit sad.

We made a much anticipated stop late in the afternoon, just before crossing into Colorado—the Four Corners monument! The girls have been excited about this visit for months! We’d learned about it during our state study this year—it’s the only place in the United States where 4 states touch. Admittedly, it is a tourist trap—they charge $3 per person to get in to take a picture of this unique spot—and plenty of us did it! The girls enjoyed the opportunity to figure out how they could be in all four states at once. We also took the obligatory ‘pants picture’. And we took the opportunity to try Navaho ‘fry bread’—which was kind of a cross between a funnel cake and a big flat donut—yummy!

After the girls spent some of their money on souvenir bracelets, we loaded up the RV and headed toward our (planned) destination for the evening: Mesa Verde National Park. After driving up this little ‘hill’:
we found out that ‘someone’ had ‘somehow’ overbooked all of the full hookup sites for the evening. They offered us a complementary night’s stay in one of their non-hookup sites but after 5 days of that in Sequoia and Yosemite, we are pretty much done with ‘roughing it’. After we declined, they gave us some vague options for campgrounds back down at the bottom of the big hill and sent us on our way. (Someone at Aramark will be getting a strongly worded letter from me once we arrive home—I made those reservations MONTHS ago and they could have at least had the decency to email us before we went all the way up there to let us know about the problem—not to mention working on getting us an alternative site instead of just,”Sorry” and some vague directions to some campground that ‘earlier today had 2 full hookup spaces available’!!!)

Okay, little rant over—it actually really worked out for the best because we were not really going to be able to explore Mesa Verde much or at all so we decided to get a head start on Thursday’s driving and go to at least Durango or Pagosa Springs. After some furious searching online and through the campground books, we decided to eat dinner in Durango and spend the night in Pagosa Springs. After following “TomTom” on a wild goose chase to a steak house that we never found, we settled on dinner at this spot—which was some of the best BBQ we have ever had—Texas BBQ in Colorado—go figure?!

We arrived at our new campground, Elk River Resort, around 8 pm. We had time to walk around a little before dark and enjoy the river views and the girls learned how to play tether ball for the first time. A load of laundry and ‘real showers’ wrapped up the evening.