Monticello, Utah

Good morning, my friends. And hooray for good internet! We had some time to kill yesterday morning since our drive to Monticello was only about an hour. It gave me some time to spend on my slow-stitching. I finished the head of the cat.

I could have stitched more, but it seemed as good a time as any to move my hoop lower where I could stitch the cat's body.

When I finished with that, it was time to move along. We hitched up and left the park, driving north just a little way. We had lunch at the Moab Brewery, and then headed south to Monticello. We stopped off at a quilt shop along our route. I'll say more about the quilt shop in a separate post.

Our drive started with red rocks and cliffs on both sides of the road. I was plagued by reflections on the windshield, and so I'm sorry the pictures aren't better.

We drove on by this tourist trap. We were especially put off by their painting directly on the surface of the red rock. Sheesh. It's just organized graffiti. Cretins.

Moving on, I took this picture so you could see the tiny hoodoos at the top of the cliff. It's the same sort of thing you'd see in Bryce Canyon National Park, just a smaller scale.

Farther down the road, we saw this big arch. I'd estimate it's horizontal span at about 30 feet.

As we approached Monticello, we saw evidence of early settlers.

Also, some ramshackle barns with wind turbines in the background...a juxtaposition of vintage and modern.

Someone lived here once, but no more. It looks like it was a nice house at one time.

There was a lot of color in the landscape, but it's quite different from Moab.

This town has a population of about 2,000 and it is the county seat of San Juan County. There is a Mormon Temple here as well, although we haven't seen it. I found this image in the public domain.

(Image credit: Staplegunther, CC BY-SA 3.0 

<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons)

Wikipedia makes it sound like a fairly large place, but we can only see a small portion of it from where we are located. 

When we arrived, I did some laundry, and it was nearly dinner time when that was finished. I've cooked dinner every night while we've been traveling, and I just didn't feel like it last night. So, we inquired of our friend The Google, and found Doug's BBQ, just a five-minute walk away. 

And lucky us...they're only open Thursday through Sunday, so we happened to get in on their first open day of the week. Inside, we found this pig, which I immediately texted to my pig-loving friend, Sue.

It was good BBQ. I had a pulled pork sandwich. Mike had a brisket platter. While we ate, I noticed this sign with some good advice for anyone.

So, as I've done some reading about this portion of our journey, I've realized that we will be riding within the boundary of Canyonlands National Park. We've visited the "Island in the Sky" visitor center several times, but I've learned that the "Needles District" has its own visitor center. The two visitor centers are 110 miles apart, giving you some idea the size of the park. Since we're unfamiliar with the area and neglected to bring the correct ATV trail book, we're going to do the sight-seeing part of our stop today. We'll visit the national park and check in with the rangers for information about riding our ATV's, and we'll try to get in visits to Bears Ears National Monument and Newspaper Rock. This is going to mean studying the map some to find the most efficient way to spend our time and our diesel fuel.

This is the view from my window this morning.

If you've appreciated the grammar, punctuation, and spelling in this post, you can thank Sadie for her helpful editing. She's a stickler about all of that.

That's all I have for you this morning. I'm happy to be able to post from here. It's time for breakfast, and I'll write another post about the quilt shop soon.