Day 6 Summary – Durango to Moab, UT
// June 16th, 2010 // No Comments » // Life
We had an amazing day. We tried to sleep in but the sun shows up before 6am at our condo and by 7am it feels like midday. So we got up and packed and left Durango going north on highway 550 toward Ouray. We of course picked the day there was a bicycle race along the route with about 1000 cyclists young, old, skinny, and fat making their way up or down the mountain. But we weren’t in a hurry and most of them were traveling south so we only had to watch for cars trying to get around them and leave them room to pass without hurling ourselves off the cliff. But we made it and along the way saw some of the best scenery western Colorado has to offer.
We drove through Ouray and on up to Montrose where we stopped at McDonald’s to get Ethan lunch (hilarity ensues…). We went in for a bio break and Debbie ordered Ethan’s lunch while I caught up on some emails during a brief linkup with the “Internets”. I handed Debbie all the cash I had (around $200) to pay for lunch. After getting her change she gave Ethan the cash to give to me, which he tried to do but I told him to wait a minute as I was finishing a thought in an email. I didn’t pay attention to what happened next but I assumed he went back and gave it to Mom. We leave and go to Sonic to get lunch for the rest of us (yes, we’re “too good” for McDonald’s). We’re getting ready to pay and I ask Ethan what he did with the cash. He said “What, I tried to give it to you?” I said “Did you give it back to Mom?” He said, “No, I sat it down like right next to you.” All the cash we had was sitting on a ledge in front of the McDonald’s counter. Heart stops. I jump in the car and race back to McDonald’s (across the street) and walk in to find my cash sitting exactly where he left it. Only in a small town. Thank goodness! Heart restarts.
After lunch we drove around Montrose a bit then headed west on highway 90 across the Uncompahgre Plateau. It was an exciting drive. Mostly unpaved, often one-lane, marginally marked, sometimes public land, sometimes private (“NO TRESPASSING!!”). We traveled about 20 miles onto the plateau and found a good place to get out and walk towards the mountain ledge and get some good pictures of the beautiful valley below. It was a great feeling being together out there on that mountain – the sun shining in a bright blue sky, the white-barked Aspens shimmering in the wind, the smell of the cottonwoods and a thousand other amazing smells you don’t get in the city, knowing there were only one or two other people for miles. Really, really amazing.
We made our way off the plateau eventually and (mercifully) back to paved roads. From there it was another 2 hours through long sweeping valleys and up and down smaller mountains and hills to Moab.
In Moab the kids hit the pool almost instantly, but the water was FRIGID, which contrasted sharply from the desert that surrounded us. Ethan didn’t hesitate and cannonballed into the pool. Anna took her time but eventually made it almost all the way in. Dad was confident in his manhood and felt he had nothing to prove by subjecting himself to that torture, so I abstained, as did Deb, who had an alleged wardrobe malfunction with her bathing suit.
After swimming we headed into town for dinner at Zax Pizza and Pasta, then to the store for some groceries, then to the hotel.
Tomorrow morning we’ll head to Arches National Park for a few hours, then on to Salt Lake City for a few days to visit some of my family there.
