Tuesday, August 31, 2010

We’ve had better drives.....8.5.10

No, it wasn’t a long ride, as I said before, but I think the kids swallowed some ‘I’m gonna go nuts now’ pills this morning cause it wasn’t pretty!  Good thing it was short at least......We’re at the south east side of DNM and the kids popped in to get their Jr. Ranger booklets to complete in order to earn their badges (FYI all national parks and monuments offer this).  The cool thing here is they offer a Jr. Paleontologist badge as well, they’re super excited about that one!


We’ve certainly changed our scenery during this relatively short drive.  Gone from lush green mountains to high mostly flat desert.  Most of the green around us is short, dry and stubby.  Beautiful nonetheless.

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S’s driving confidence and skill is growing by leaps and bounds, he’s managed to maneuver us in and out (getting out is important!) of shopping plazas and now the visitor’s center here.  Quite impressive if I do say so myself.

We all enjoyed the black water dump this morning, and now you can too :-)

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It’s really not so bad, coming from the one who stood by and took pictures.  But ask S and he’ll say the same............
...........Well, many hours later and our relatively short driving day has turned into yet another late night of travel.  But before those details, an important milestone was reached briefly after leaving our first encounter with the park, WE LEFT COLORADO!

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Ambivalent feelings were had by all, but we were comforted by the notion that we would indeed be back to our home state.  So now we’re in Utah, officially our second state on the trip (counting CO as first of course).  DNM BTW stretches across both CO and UT.
So, going back to how our nice short yet crazy kid day turned even nastier....we somehow missed the western entrance to the park and ended up 40 minutes past it in a town called Vernal.  We had originally thought about spending the night there since we had read somewhere that the park itself cannot accommodate our monstrosity, yet we later found out it can (sans any hookups though).  Soooooo, we happened across a Honda/Harley/toy shop where S managed to pick up a generator for a fairly good price, headed to eat (since by that time it was getting pretty late and the natives were even more restless) and finally started BACK towards the park.  We settled into our site by 9ish at which point Whirlwind was completely falling to pieces.

Despite my original plan of everyone heading straight to bed, we found out there was a stargazing program starting at 9:30, so off S went with the older two while Whirlwind was thrown in bed.  Analyzer and Inventor now have the opportunity to earn their stargazing patch if they complete their activity book.  Boy, one park and three badges/patches!

....It’s now 11PM and they just came back......guess it’ll be a low key day tomorrow, which sounds just about right.

1 comment:

  1. so that's how they learned about the stars and taught the group at the Tetons campfire? clever kids.

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