Dreams, Moments, Travels
Do you want to see someone stare in disbelief? Tell them you are driving from Phoenix to Los Angeles and back in one day. That is what Sonal Patel and I did this particular day. Our destination was Little India in Artesia, where we stocked up on things difficult to buy or transact over fax or phone. The photo is in the House of Spice warehouse.
The car’s windows were iced over, not just a little, but a good thick coating of ice had to be scraped off of them. We are in the San Juan Mountains, and finally, we are seeing heartfelt emotions from our travel guest. Arturo lights up with enthusiasm feeling like he’s discovering a place he could call home.
Do wild waters also turn the colors of fall?
This mountain range never fails to impress us and begs the question, “Why couldn’t your parents have left you a huge inheritance so you could live here not worrying about making money?” The simple answer would be that most of them are still alive.
The changing of the seasons is certainly appreciated. I don’t know how many times I’ve lamented in my writing how Arizona has two seasons: hot and not so hot, while everything else remains the same.
I can’t tell you which stream Caroline is standing in. We never noted it, nor did I note which roads we were traveling so this is a mystery river for now.
Good thing we take these selfies in front of all these signs, or we never know where we’ve been.
The drive up to the cliff dwellings high in the mountains at Mesa Verde National Park is a spectacular one.
Also spectacular is Cliff Palace. These ancestral Puebloan dwellings are well preserved and worth every effort to get out into another remote corner of America.
Some may marvel at the pyramids of Egypt, but I think these are just as worthy of our admiration. I’d imagine that some of these kivas had to be dug out of rock and that with primitive non-metal tools, it wasn’t the easiest of tasks, yet they persevered so they could bring order to their lives and evolve their cultures.
Out of Mesa Verde, we aimed for the Navajo Nation; it’s almost impossible not to pass through it. In this case, we were looking to take a quick look into Canyon de Chelly National Monument. Turns out that there are Jeep tours down there. I put it on the list of things to do in the future.
This is Mummy Cave and is off-limits to visitors. We can only look from afar. Even down on the canyon floor, you are restricted from getting too close.
The one good photo I was able to take of Mr. Camera-shy Arturo. We had a lot more driving ahead of us today as we were going to be driving down to Tucson to drop the kid after we all stopped at La Parrilla Suiza for some dinner before trekking north again so Caroline and I could go home.
Today’s adventure starts in Moab, Utah, at Arches National Park.
From the moment we first saw Delicate Arch in someone else’s photo, we knew we had to come see it for ourselves. It’s a lot bigger than I thought. I have another photo with Caroline standing below it, where you’d see that she’s tiny in comparison, but this is the better photo. I intended to take a selfie of us out there, but my vertigo got the best of me, and it turned out that Arturo also has a wicked fear of heights, so he was staying even further away from the edge than I was.
Horses among the pictographs tell us that these etchings in the rock are relatively modern as pre-Columbian contact Native Americans didn’t have horses in North America.
Landscape Arch was another big draw as it is razor-thin and feels like it could tumble to earth at any time.
Balanced Rock requires no effort in the world to see it other than getting yourself to the park, as it is right next to the road. How about another park?
Dead Horse Point State Park, which looks a lot like Canyonlands National Park if you ask me, was the next park.
That’s the Colorado River out there; someday, we should raft that thing.
We peeked into Canyonlands National Park rather quickly but will save it for another visit as 10 minutes here won’t do it justice.
Welcome to Bedrock, Colorado, where the Flintstones were filmed back in the early 1960s. Fred once bagged groceries here at the Bedrock Store while he was in high school and a couple of years before he met Wilma.