What a day!

After a rather restless night of not finding a position that was comfortable to our aching bodies, we headed out of the Bryce Canyon area. I remember this area from the other times we came through here, so I navigated us through some more awesome ‘orange country’. What a wonder that was!

We took it slowly, winding through gentle countryside, beautiful yellow and orange shimmering trees and gently meandering rivers, all the time having the most awesome scenery presenting itself to us around every curve in the road.

The roads we traveled are not well used, which is exactly what we like. There are no tractor-trailors, very little traffic and one has to watch the gas gauge carefully as there are long distances between little towns. Generally we found the gas in these remote areas to be cheaper than in the bigger towns. There are many pull off places along the road and we visited many of them, not only to stretch our yelling muscles and aching butts, but to walk doglet, who was still absolutely determined to hate every bit of this ride.

All along the way are lookout places or viewpoints and the parks board or something puts these signs out to tell you about them. All very nice, but they never say how far away they are from the main road, nor do they say whether they are “rv-towing friendly”, so we are normally a tad leery about sticking the nose of this rig down one of those little roads. But this time we did. Within about 30 seconds the road got so bad that even I wanted to hide under the bed! The cutlery and crockery and everything else rattled so loudly, even at 5 miles an hour, that I thought of walking doglet the rest of the way. Only – we did not know how far the end was! This narrow band of rock and sand obviously offered no turnaround space and we just knew we would have to unhook the bakkie to get out of there, but had to go to the end to see if there was a place to do this. Finally, after much muttering from all three of us, we reached the end of the road where there was a big enough turn around that we did not need to unhook! The only problem was that there was a car parked there and the people were nowhere to be seen…. Big sigh. Frank took the right front wheel of the rv as high on the right side of this turnaround circle as he could, breathed just a breath away from the rear bumper of that car and turned us around with only an inch to spare!

There are only a few times that I close my eyes these days while driving around, and this was one of them. The hassle that would ensue if he missed one of these tight turnarounds just makes me tired, but he has not missed and may he keep that record firmly in place. It’s quite amazing how both my feet and hands become instantly clammy in these situations, and I try to wipe my hands inconspicuously on my jeans, but I did notice a small smile playing on Franks face……..

Near one little town there were sprinklers merrily sprinking away in the farmlands and we were puzzled as to why the farmer would allow what seemed to be flooding of the relatively small area that he was watering – it seemed such a strange way of doing things. Then just a little way down, we saw more sprinklers and noticed that as the water hit the fields, it froze! It was ice we were seeing – not over watering. And we were more than ever determined to head further south soon.

Again, I don’t think there is a way to describe the orange beauty of this part of the country. We drove for just over 8 hours and never ran out of views to ‘wow’ about. There were splotches of places that looked like The Painted Desert – all pink and white, and the orange hoodoos and cliffs towered way above us, sometimes leaning over the roads so that we involuntarily ducked a tad lower as we went along that section of the road. So many of the rocks and cliffs seemed to be hanging on only by a wish and it was almost surreal to purr under this amount of raw power and beauty. It’s strange to think that we can go along this road, take a gazillion photos, look on it in awe and yet, in just a minute there would be no trace of us at all of ever being there! Kinda like a python swallowing a big meal, sliding gently down, only to disappear.

At one point along the road, the orange totally disappeared, everything turned white. The cliffs, the rocks – way into the distance, all white with trees growing out of what appeared to be impossible places. And always, always those ever-present brilliant yellow and orange leaves lighting up the view. The orange did come back again, but that white was equally beautiful and fascinating.

I remember well baking a cake as a kid when we had to mix all the ingredients together from the start – those big floppy, flompy folds the mix would make as we beat it with a wooden spoon in that enormous mixing bowl. We were always allowed to lick out the bowl afterwards J This is what it looks like out here in many places, huge folds in the rock. You can see how that much of what is now solid rock, was once soft and flowing.

Remember that picture of the happy cow road sign? The one where it looks as if the cow is dancing? Well, we noticed that there are no happy cows this far away from the coast – even the signs are normal, plodding, pedantic cows. What a pity. And most of the signs have bullet holes in them too. No wonder – I would also not dance as much in this cool weather!

Anyway – after a day of awesome sights we stopped in the little town of Blanding, Utah. Its about 30 miles north of Mexican Hat…. You going to find it, mom? J We managed to do some shopping and had a good rest. They did have internet, but that only lasted about 10 minutes – long enough to get in my email, not to send.

Now……… on to the next episode…. boy was the next day different!

Love and light
Annie
Ps – my Comcast email is not sending right now so I have to use my gmail account to send. You can use either ibannie@comcast.net or ibannie@gmail.com to send to me. And, I posted more pictures tonight too. Too many – but hey, there is so much to see!Color Roads is the new album: http://s223.photobucket.com/albums/dd175/lens2life/?mediafilter=images