Eastern Europe Trip

We woke early after another sound night’s sleep – the walk yesterday must have tired us out a fair bit. After we’d packed and put the bags in the car, we sat down again to another of John & Wendy’s special breakfasts – warm pastry followed by cranberry’s with French toast. As neither Tracy nor I can eat cooked fruit, we had to make our excuses, but the other guests seemed to really enjoy them! Once paid up we wrote in their guest book and set off again, with some of John’s advice on where to stop etched in our minds.

First of our recommended stops was a coffee house called “Kiva Coffee House” where we stopped after less than an hour on the road.






The coffee was excellent, as was the view, and we listened whilst the only other customer, a cyclist, recounted his story to the coffee shop owner. He was busy cycling from LA to Chicago to raise money for pancreatic cancer, a condition his “mom” had been suffering from until she passed away recently. A professional artist, he was doing portraits of other pancreatic cancer sufferers on his way, and then holding an exhibition and auction when he arrived in Chicago. He was even booked on the Oprah Winfrey show… check out his website at http://scottglazier.com/crossingforcancer.html

Full of caffeine and inspiration, we got back in the Mustang and rejoined the highway.






The scenery was stunning as usual, with a few “lookouts” at the side of the road where we could pull over to catch out breath and take a snap or two…Here’s Sheep Creek Overlook (though we couldn’t see any sheep…)






We then joined Highway 24 at Torrey and made our way into Capitol Reef National Park. As this was going to be our longest day driving, we didn’t want to just be on the highway trying to get to Cortez (our stop for the night) without seeing anything, so we took the turnoff into the Visitor’s Centre at Fruita. Here we bought a guide to the scenic drive that winds its way for 17 miles into the national park, and then headed off exploring, with Tracy reading from the booklet as I drove and admired the scenery…






The first stop on our ‘guided’ tour was to examine the interesting rock formations which can be clearly seen in the layers of the cliffs – here we can see Wingate sandstone (at the top, formed by wind-blown sand dunes some 208 million years ago) then Chinle formation (formed from sediment at the bottom of lakes and rivers some 245 million years ago) and finally Moenkopi formation (formed from sediment deposited from coastal plains and tidal flats even before that)…






The dirt road then wound its way deep into the rock formations, past an early uranium mine (no longer in use for ‘Health and Safety’ reasons), passed a formation known as “Cassidy Arch” where it is said that the outlaw Butch Cassidy hid out when being chased by the law (you can just make it out at the top of the rock cliff on the right of the picture below). Towards the end of the road we were joined by some Desert Bighorn Sheep, although they didn’t pay much attention to us, preferring the desert bushes…










After a really interesting hour or so we made our way reluctantly back to the highway and continued our journey East. John had warned us that once past Capitol Reef National Park there was pretty much nothing to see – in his words “it would be a great place to dump our nuclear waste”. I have to disagree, though, as whilst the landscape was pretty barren, it did bear a passing resemblance to the surface of the moon, and kept Tracy and I enthralled for hour after hour as we drove through this weird landscape between Henry Mountains and the San Rafael Desert…






By now we were starting to get hungry, so we pulled over at a small roadside café in Hanksville and ordered a burger and fries. And it was good… very good! Suitably refreshed we joined highway 95 south through yet more moonscape before we rounded a corner and nearly crashed the car such was the spectacular sight in front of us – the start of Glen Canyon at Hite…










For the next hour or so we followed a really scenic road all the way to Blanding and then on to Monticello before heading further east on highway 491 to Cortez. By now we were getting tired from the drive, so were stopping much less frequently (hence the lack of photos!), and eventually we found our way round the streets of Cortez to our motel. Up until now you will have noticed that I’ve posted photographs of our hotel rooms. That’s not because I’m some kind of hotel-room-pervert, it’s because they’ve been simply fantastic. Well, the Days Inn at Cortez was just a roadside motel, and a chain one at that, so I didn’t even bother to take a picture of the room…

But it was late, we were tired, and it had a bed and a bathroom with a hot shower, so we weren’t complaining. It also had a fridge and an ice machine, so in short order I’d put the remaining beer bottles “on ice” and we’d showered and changed ready to head out for tea. Oh, and Tracy had done her mother-hen trick and managed to suss out the washing machine and dryers on site and washed the rather large and smelly bag of smalls we’d been accumulating…

Suitably refreshed we went out in search of some food – nothing fancy, just something tasty. We settled on Chinese and found a place not far from the motel. The food was ok, and the Tsing Tao beer excellent…






After eating our fill we made our way back to the motel room, where “Batman Begins” was just starting on the TV and the beer was cold. Suffice to say we relaxed completely after the long drive…