Hello from Monument Valley, UT
Drafted: Tuesday June 29, 2023 (First post of this travelogue)
First comment, I am not sure when this travelogue blog will get posted. That part of my website lost database connections in early June and I have not had to time to work on it since. Update: the links have been fixed, but this post was lost in the inner workings for the computer {grin}. I have now posted it (3/16/2024) and backdated it to 6/29/2023.
Second comment, this trip was planned using our truck and trailer. We left Evergreen Monday morning (6/26) but quickly encountered overheating problems with the truck. We returned home and decided to travel in the Mazda instead. That caused a flurry of reservation cancellations and making of new reservations.
Third comment, I don’t think there is anything major with the truck, but it does give me a reason to replace all the major cooling components and upgrade the radiator.
We are in Monument Valley and staying at the Goulding Lodge (link to Google Maps)
{google_map}37.0081 -110.2114{/google_map}
[recall you can zoom in and out once you go to map]
Now for the travelogue. We left Evergreen (again) on Tuesday and drove to Grand Junction where we stayed in a Holiday Inn property. Wednesday, we drove to Monument Valley. We took a favorite route via Moab on highway 128. This is a beautiful canyon with lots of BLM campgrounds. We scoped out those that would handle our size trailer. As a side note, this was going to be the second stop with our trailer if the plan had worked out. We ate a quick lunch in Moab and got out of there as quickly as we could (Moab is a real tourist trap with all kinds of off-road vehicles buzzing around town). We arrived in Monument Valley in the late afternoon.
We have been through Monument Valley several times and are always amazed at the spectacular beauty. However, we have never stayed in the valley. We had reserved a camp spot at the KOA, but then made arrangements to stay at the Goulding Lodge. Since we had to make the reservations last minute, we had to reserve an apartment. That turned out to be great as we were basically by ourselves, away from the maddening rush.
On Thursday we drove the loop in actual park. It was several miles of rather rough road, but fantastic beauty.
Here are a few pictures.
This is our cabin in Monument Valley
That is all for this post.