Moab, Utah

Good morning, my friends. So nice to meet up with you here in Utah. As I mentioned in my previous post, we were up and out of the campground early yesterday morning in order to get through the construction zone before it closed to one lane. It was still dark when we pulled out at 6:09 a.m. We were nearly to the bottom of the hill before we were able to see the pinkish sunrise.

It's a beautiful drive down that hill. It was too dark for pictures yesterday, and we saw more bighorn sheep as we descended. Reaching the bottom of the hill, it was still very cold at 28°F. There was a fine layer of mist over landscape.

The formation to the right reminded us of our visit to Cathedral Gorge.

The Blue Mesa reservoir extends for many miles, and we drove alongside it for awhile.

Eventually, we approached the road construction. 

There were three sections, but it was the third we were most concerned about. We managed to get through with nearly an hour to spare.

We stopped in Montrose for breakfast, and then continued on our way. It was a colorful landscape.

We had some business to take care of in Grand Junction. Mike needed to find a hardware store to pick up a replacement screw for one that had vibrated loose on his ATV. Also, we wanted to fill our propane tank, and what the heck? I wondered if there were any quilt shops in Grand Junction. Sure enough. We stopped at the one closest to our route. I'll tell you about that in a separate post.

The hardware store in Grand Junction turned out to be permanently closed. But, no problem. We found one just down the road in Fruita. Fruita happens to be at one end of the Rim Rock Drive in Colorado National Monument. We drove Rim Rock Drive on a previous visit to Colorado. The scenery was some of the more spectacular I've ever seen. You can read about our drive through the monument at this post right here. You can see some bighorn sheep there too. Yesterday's drive took us past the entrance, but it reminded us of what we might have seen had we turned off here.

Looking in the opposite direction, this is the Grand Valley, formed by the Colorado River.

Fruita had some fun life-size metal sculptures at its turning circles.

Driving on, it was raining ahead, and we saw more than a few bolts of lightning

Shortly after leaving Fruita, we left the state of Colorado...

and crossed the state line into Utah. Hello again, Utah!

From there, it wasn't long until we turned south onto Hwy 191 for the last leg of our journey into Moab. We always enjoy the drive when the first red rock monoliths come into view. In the image below, you can see a road at the bottom one-third of the cliff-side. We've ridden our ATV's there.

And then, it just gets more impressive as we go.

We have three nights here in Moab (two now). We'll spend one day riding ATV's on the Determination Towers trail. We've ridden it before, and you can see some pictures here. It's one of our favorite trails, and this will be our third time riding it. On our last ride, we missed the turn-off for Tusher Tunnel, and we're determined to see it again this time.

Also, we're going to spend a day visiting Dead Horse Point State Park, a Utah state park we've driven by many times, but never visited. It looks fabulous in pictures I've seen, and so I'm hoping for some good light during our visit. The forecast is for partly cloudy, with a small chance of rain, and so I'm not sure how we'll organize the next two days. We'll need to make a trip to the grocery store as well.

Okay, so that's all the news I have for you today. I'll head over and write a post about the quilt shop. Until next time, have a good day, everyone.