Our day began in Moab, where we had breakfast at Eklecticafe (a fun place with good food — another Utah haven with vegetarian choices, organics, etc. — we quite liked it except for some reason the girl at the table next to us decided to have an in-depth discussion with someone who worked there about her recent medical procedure complete with bloody, vomity details… kind of spoiled my appetite!!), then we visited Lin Ottinger’s Rock Shop:

(Scott, is this where the guy wouldn’t let you bring in your coffee??)

We went there because we had a coupon for a free dinosaur bone, which we got. Awesome! It’s our first rock shop trip (we’ve seen dozens along our route, but we’ve never actually gone into one).

Anyway, then we went into Arches National Park! It was very exciting!! We saw so many great things even within our relatively limited time. For example… the Three Gossips!

A place where an arch probably used to be next to Sheep Rock! (They all fall down eventually, you know.)

Check out Sheep Rock!! It was one of my favorites of the day.

Balanced Rock!

Windows!!

Double Arch!

Of course, the iconic Delicate Arch!

And Brian’s personal favorite of the day, Skyline Arch!

We saw one of the handful of whiptail lizards (the only wildlife we observed today) we got to meet on the short trail up to Skyline Arch:

Yay. We agreed that Arches was one of the most beautiful and interesting places we’ve been on the entire trip. We hope to come back and hike more of the trails!

After all that, we left Arches and went up to I-70. I think we better get used to looking at this sign:

We’re going to be seeing it quite a bit over the next few days as we head home. When we first decided to go on this trip, we thought we would be able to enjoy a leisurely drive both out west and back east. Of course, we didn’t really count on getting sick in South Dakota!! So, we have to be back by Saturday at the latest so I have a few hours to recover before I teach on Sunday. Fortunately, Arches didn’t take as long as we had allotted for it, and we were able to eliminate a couple of other places we had hoped to visit on the return trip. In a way, I think it’s fitting that Arches was our final planned destination before heading home, since Utah started it all for us!

We drove through Utah and entered Colorado again before the debate started:

Tonight we’re in Georgetown, Colo., at the “uniquely western-themed” Super 8. It’s a perfectly nice place, but the woman at the desk acted like she was doing us a huge favor by honoring our reservation (and we all know how I feel about sub-par customer service). Hopefully we won’t become ill from the secondhand smoke fumes seeping from next door into our non-smoking room! Lovely!!

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