9 is 6 Upside-down

We semi-woke up when the sun hit our eyes. For those of you who read last year's adventure in the bbow know that our back bedroom has a design flaw - a skylight right above our bed. This is a most obnoxious deterrent to sleeping in. Ridiculous!

Anyway, Gary looked at his watch and thot it said 9:00 AM and we were late. He woke me, got up, and started coffee. I told him we needed to get our boat towels from the laundry and pay the office for laundry services. When he got to the laundry room he found our boat towels folded and in a smart little plastic bag. Thank you laundry elves!

Back at the bbow he put eye drops in his eyes, which are really bothering him with this head cold, and then discovered it was really 6 AM. What a shock! He crawled back in bed and got another hour of sleep. We're not moving very fast this morning. Ya think??

We were all kinda loopy this morning but finally got on our way to Canyonlands National Park. We entered in the Needles District. Boy, did we ever make a good call last nite skipping that entrance to the south. Guess what - it's a dirt 4-wheel drive only road. The bbow would have been sadly out of its element. Good call!

Our first stop was the visitors center to get an idea of what we want to see and do here. Basically there are three sections of the park: Island in the Sky, The Maze and The Needles. These parts are divided by the confluence of the Colorado and Green River.

We also learned there are 5 typical rock formations found in the park: needles, fin, mushroom, pinnacle and arch. We saw examples of each as we drove.

We drove out to the fartherest stop first called Big Spring Canyon Overlook. Taryn used some of her pent up rock climbing energies here and there were some amazing views.

We hiked out onto some slick rock near Squaw Flat and got a great view of The Needles in the distance. Many of these areas are only accessible by 4-wheel drive. We didn't know this prior to getting here.

There is a viewpoint called The Wooden Shoe Overlook that looks out at an arch in the shape of a wooden shoe. No kidding! But a real highlight was stopping at the Roadside Ruins where we were able to see an actual ancient Indian grain storage ruin tucked up under a rock. That was incredible. It reminded me of a very large swallow's nest. I wouldn't be surprised if they used that as their design model.

We didn't realize that so much of the park is either 4-wheel drive access only or a significant hike. Gary is quite sick with a head cold and it is well over 100 degrees so we were not in any kind of condition to try much.

We decided to call it a day and move on to Moab for the nite. This is quite unusual for us since we tend to pack our days to the very limit, but that's where we're at.

On our way out of the park Taryn went down with a severe headache. She was miserable and we didn't quite know what to do beyond the Tylenol so we kept moving.

We did make a stop at Wilson Arch - a magnificent tribute to our cat and personal favorite of ours, but Taryn was too sick to even get up and look at it so we regrettably went on. So sad!

It was around 6 PM when we pulled into the Moab KOA. This is a "resort" that Taryn would love - pool, mini golf, game room, evening ice cream social - she missed them all. She was really sick and slept thru dinner till nearly 9 pm, but when she woke up her headache was gone and we were so thankful. I went to the KOA store and got her chicken soup and 7-up. She ate a lite dinner and we watched some 24 before bed.

Gary worked on our route quite a bit tonite and looks like we will be getting home a few days later than I thot. The plan is to start our day at Arches, cut into a piece of Colorado and then end back in Vernel Utah.