As if we didn’t spend enough time driving across Kansas last night, today it was here to torment us again.  We eventually got to the children’s museum in Topeka (another children’s museum!  The kids couldn’t believe their luck) which provided a good diversion for a couple of hours.  Then it was on to Kansas City, a destination the kids have been awaiting with great anticipation. 

 As a reward for making it across Kansas, we treated ourselves to a night at the Great Wolf Lodge – a hotel with a huge built-in water park.  (The expectation of this place is what allowed us to pull the kids out of the children’s museum.)  As soon as we walked in the door, bathing suits were donned and the race to the water park was on.

The water park was a lot of fun.  There were five big slides – some of them began and ended in the indoor water park, but went outside in between.  There was a four-story “tree house” filled with climbing structures and lots of water features.  (Every few minutes a huge bucket on the top tipped and dropped 1000 gallons of water to the floor below – that is a lot of water.  Unlike the kids, I wouldn’t stand under it.)  There was a “lazy river” tubing float ride, a few pools, some small kids’ slides, and various other water-based activities.

Lanie was thrilled because she was able to go on almost everything, despite her age.  She has no fear of anything water-related, which is both a blessing and a curse.  (Luckily, she has no objection to wearing a life vest all day, which helps our stress level.)

For dinner we walked across the street to “Famous Dave’s Barbeque”, where, hungry from climbing all those water slide stairs, we proceeded to order way too much food.  Barbecue leftovers for breakfast tomorrow!

From Bob:

One of the drawbacks to three or four Disney vacations is that every trip you take tends to have mouse ears stamped on it.  You’ve already heard us mention Disneyesque a few times in relation to places with natural wonders that seemed too perfect to be natural.

                This place, the Great Wolf Lodge, does not exactly fall into that category.  It is the least natural place imaginable; but it is a wonder, and very Disneyesque.   It falls on the calculated, orchestrated, fabricated side of the mouse ears, very well done, in its way, but not a bit subtle.

                They pack a theme park into this hotel (www.greatwolf.com/).  They have their own lineup of cartoon characters who show up in the grand lobby and are on signs all over the hotel.  There are restaurants, themed hallways, and, of course, the water slides.  It’s pretty decadent, but it also meshes nicely with the way our trip is going. We can’t live by peanut butter, national parks alone, and wholesome family resorts alone.  I’ll admit that I’ve even purchased a few loaves of white bread on this trip – and not the crusty French or Italian kind, either.  But there are no regrets.

                If this, and the Discovery Center, are the memories that the kids bring home of Kansas, don’t be surprised if one or three of them wind up settling in Kansas City.  Or Topeka.     

At last it’s time to say farewell to the YMCA.  As a parting gift, we were able to sign all three girls up for a 9-10 am activity so Bob and I could pack up the car in peace.  (We’re quite impressed that everything still manages to fit after so many stops, when we know from past experience that stuff somehow seems to enlarge every time you take it out of the car and put it back in.)

Today’s end point is somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Kansas, but we broke up the trip by spending a lovely afternoon in Denver.  My cousin Dan moved there last month after getting a job dancing for the Colorado Ballet, and was kind enough (even though he’s a young, hip single with probably many better offers) to hang out with us – even through a trip to the Children’s Museum!  That’s family loyalty for you.

We had lunch at a place called “City, O City”, with very cool and unusual vegetarian food.  A fascinating array of different kinds of waffles predominated at our table.  Bob got some kind of cheesy waffle with roasted vegetables on top, and it was delicious.  The girls somehow got away with ordering the “waffle of the week”, which totally belonged on the dessert menu.

It became clear during this lunch that our children are starved for conversation with someone who isn’t us.  Poor Dan practically got whiplash trying to keep up with three different voices shouting at him non-stop. (See photos at left.  I think this particular conversation involved a very detailed account of Nadia’s horseback ride.)  Hopefully social skills will return once we’re back at home.

The Denver Children’s Museum is a very fun place.  We had only a couple of hours to play there before it closed, but I think the kids would have stayed all day if they could.  (This may indicate that in addition to conversation, they are also starved for toys.)  The main disappointment was that Dan decided to fake some mysterious injury so that he didn’t have to perform for us on the museum’s very realistic dance floor.

At museum closing time we got back in the car again, for a 5.5-hour trip to a campground cabin close to the highway in WaKeeney, KS.  It was just the right distance to drive, I think — late enough so that the kids fell asleep for part of the way, but not so late that Bob and I fell asleep at the wheel.  We’ve crossed back into Central time, so we’ve lost an hour – I have to say that gaining an hour was much more fun.

***

Three cheers for Dan. This guy had fulfilled any family obligations he may have had to us when he was ring bearer at our wedding (We don’t have access to them now, but the next time you’re at our house, check out our wedding picture.  He’s there.).  Certainly he could have been done with us after showing us to the coolest waffle house imaginable in Denver or anywhere else.  He’s got a bum leg, for heaven’s sake.  He’s got to rest up and mend so he can return to his ballet troupe and its performance of “Sleeping Beauty”.

                But no, he soldiered on, listening the whole time to whichever of us wished to ramble on about something in Wyoming or something else  about Utah.  Five people who have had no one but each other to talk to for three and a half weeks can prattle if they get a sympathetic target within earshot.  Ask Dan.

                The Children’s Museum held little interest for him, for sure, but it was a really nice stop for us.  We are connoisseurs of such places, having been to Children’s Museums in Boston, Providence, North Conway, Myrtle Beach, and, of course, Dover.  Denver’s stands up well to all of them.  It was not too crowded, nor too messy.  It accepted our Association of Children’s Museums reciprocal membership that comes with our Children’s Museum of New Hampshire super-membership (thanks to Grammy and Grampy).  There’s not much more we could ask for.

                Add the museum pass to the list of things that are helpful to have on a trip like ours.  Other things on the list are an iPod that can play through your car, a decent (but not too complicated) camera, an EZ Pass, a package of baby wipes, and a friend/relative every couple of states.  All these things are nice to have.

                Another travel tip (if you can stand one more): Driving through Kansas at night is preferable to driving through Kansas during the day.  This place is not ugly at all, but its reputation for geographic monotony is well earned.  Colorado had flattened out pretty much once we got to Denver, so by the time we hit Kansas we were missing the mountains for scenery.  Once it got dark, though, I could imagine mountains around us, or great lakes on either side of the road, and the single lights that were really someone’s silo could be ships moored for the night.

                It worked for me, anyway.  

                

It is fun to stay at the Y-M-C-A.  We had originally planned on doing another day trip into Rocky Mountain National Park with the kids, but there’s so much that they want to do here that we quickly abandoned the plan.  This interval was intended for us all to get a little down time, and it’s been pretty relaxing. 

Nadia was happy because she finally got what she’s been waiting for the whole trip: a horseback ride.  We’ve been holding out for here, because unlike most places Lanie was allowed to ride with me so we could all go together.  Unfortunately this was only allowed on the shortest, most beginner-level ride, which was not really what Nadia had in mind – so she decided to spend all of her remaining trip money on an additional two-hour, more advanced ride for herself.

(After going on the one-hour ride with Lanie, I was very thankful we hadn’t been allowed on the two-hour.  Those saddles are not meant for two people, even two relatively small people.  Also, it was a big mistake to have had Lanie wear a helmet – I was expecting to find my chin was black and blue from the constant bumping.  Lanie wasn’t very comfortable either, and showed the most excitement when the stable came into sight on the return trip.)

Lanie was happy because there was a pool.  She’s been swimming every day, sometimes while the older girls have been at other activities that she’s too young for.  This pool is especially thrilling because she’s allowed to go down the water slide with her life jacket on, unlike most places where you have to pass a swim test.  Bob and I are somewhat waterlogged, eagerly awaiting the day when she can go into the pool by herself.

Zoe was happy with the vast array of activities that she could sign up for.  The possibilities are so exciting!  She told me early on that she might spend the rest of her trip money in the craft center, but she ran out of time after merely making a tie-dyed bandana and a mosaic.  She also did archery, and she and I participated in a rousing game of Capture the Flag.  (Three days later, we both still have sore legs from this endeavor.  I’m used to running, but not stop-and-go sprinting.  I’ve found it takes a lot out of you when you’re forty.  But I like to think that I helped our team to victory, even though I was about 25 years older than the average age of the participants.  When I got that thirteen-year-old with braces out of jail, I think I really earned some respect.)             

Bob and I were happy to have plenty of time to relax, in between dropping the kids off at various activities.  (You may have noticed that this resulted in a flurry of blog entries.)  We did plenty of things together too – family adventure games, mini golf, more bingo (our second night resulted in four prizes – and we all chose the gift certificate for a free brownie.  Score!)

***

From Bob:

We’re feeling laid back here at the Y, and it might be the mountain vibe or the family atmosphere.  More likely it’s the two all-you-can-eat meals back-to-back that have had let me towards food catatonia.  I looked at breakfast yesterday morning and saw a bowl of yogurt with granola, which closely resembled my typical trip breakfast.  This occupied a tiny corner of my tray, balancing a plate of two pancakes magically rolled around blueberries, two sausages, and a pile of potatoes.  Also there was some fruit and several small cartons of milk (really cold milk seems like a supreme luxury).   If anything, my dinner tray the night before was even more heavily loaded.

                So I’m a little stretched in the middle, which made me a liability in the life raft portion of the Family Adventure (no real life raft included, thankfully).  Babe the horse also suffered – although I showed excellent horsemanship – under my added weight.  Sorry, Babe.

                By night number three, we were back in the direction of our normal eating habits.  The notable exception is the addition of chicken to our Minute Rice dinner.  Our fridge let us extend our list of ingredients. 

                Good old Tonkawa Cabin is an oasis of comfort.  Once we moved over from the hotel – itself pretty plush with its bed clothes, towels, sink and shower – the girls were especially excited.  Nadia burst into the place and was in full discovery mode.  “There’s a utility closet!” she yelled.  Lanie checked out the full kitchen and exclaimed, “We have a BLENDER!”  She was only slightly less gleeful when she was told that what she spied on the counter was a coffee maker, not a blender.

                There hadn’t been such rejoicing in the family since I found my missing deodorant back in Yellowstone.  Happiest of all might have been the van, which one day only drove a mile to pick up Nadia at the livery after her two-mile ride. 

                Laid back with a little excitement is a nice way to spend your time.  Add to it the beautiful mountain scenery that surrounds this place, and it comes out to a pretty nice stop on the trail.  

Reunited after day camp

***

From Bob:

Jen and I are both in our 40s now, and it’s easy to think that we’ve passed the proverbial continental divide of our lives, ready to ride the gentle slope eastward and downward to our watery Atlantic graves.  I keep looking for signs of our aging, and they are there – or not there, as is the case with the hair on top of my head.  We might not be as bad off as I thought it was, though.

                Yes, we are tired a lot these days, with all the driving and seemingly-nonstop parenting, not to mention all the blogging.  Jen suggested that we bring the bikes along for this trip partly because she envisioned us getting up early and hopping out of our sleeping bags to zoom around the National Parks on two wheels.  In reality, we’ve found ourselves lingering in the sleeping bags most mornings.  Ok, it was cold in Yellowstone.  A grizzly attack might, MIGHT, have gotten us out of our sleeping bags before 7 (Mountain Standard Time). 

I think what’s really happening is the she and I are conserving our energy to help us deal with the constant threat of the unexpected happening on this trip.   The planning and preparation, as many people have noted in response to this blog, have been top notch, but the nature of such a trip means that something totally oddball can happen at just about any moment.  Kids just multiply the oddball chances.  Now, it is unlikely that Lanie would be kidnapped by bighorn sheep while we’re In the Rockies, but it’s a heck of a lot more likely to happen out here than it would be in New Hampshire.

So it is with much pride and not a little relief that I find that Jen and I were absolute go-getters today on a day when the unexpected was a little bit more at arm’s length.  With our kids in good hands and us on our way to the National Park to hike, Jen mused that what we should be doing is finding a bar in which we could drink and watch the Olympics. 

Why not, I ask, do both? 

I mean, we were in our 30s just a few short years ago.  Forget the fact that “Thirtysomething” was a tv show about old people.   We exercise regularly and eat wholesome foods.  We do not, usually, drink to excess. 

We tackled Cub Lake hike, more than five miles at altitude, in very good stride, eating our granola bar and apple lunches on the way.  Had option B not been available, we might well have gone on for another two miles to Fern Lake.  Heck, had Bear Lake Road been open or if the lady hadn’t warned us that the shuttle takes an hour and a half both ways (that can’t be possible, but we couldn’t risk it), we might have forgotten option B and gone for the Sky Pond trail. 

Option B worked fine for us, though.  A short drive into Estes Park, and after a brief distraction at a winery we got to the beer and Olympics that my good planning wife improvised on the way out the door.  We took corner seats and held up that bar for a good deal of ribbon twirling and hula hoop tossing.

And we still had enough energy after all that to be parents once 3 pm came around.  I don’t remember much about the afternoon and evening, but I’m pretty sure we did fine by our kids.

Today was one of our longest driving days – we were in the car for most of the day – and we survived it pretty well.  Fortunately, Lanie had to use the bathroom at an opportune time, since the exit we pulled off on had a nearby grocery store (for lunch provisions) and elementary school (with playground and picnic table).

After some driving that probably took years off the van’s life (see Bob’s account below), we arrived at Rocky Mountain National Park around 6pm.  The place we’re staying is in Estes Park, which is on the other side of RMNP, but we thought we’d drive through the park to see a bit of it on our way.  This involved taking the Trail Ridge Road, which is supposedly the highest continuously paved highway in the country.  If you’ve ever driven certain sections of the Pacific Coast Highway, you have an idea what this road is like – a harrowing series of switchbacks with sheer drops off the side and no guardrails.  It’s the kind of road where you feel that if you sneeze at the wrong time, you might easily plunge to your death.  It is also a beautiful road, with breathtaking mountain scenery and an interesting view of the tundra from above treeline.

After surviving this ordeal, we were happy to find a pizza restaurant in Estes Park (Cheesy Lee’s!) and then move on to our destination – the YMCA of the Rockies resort.  This is a very cool place, bordering on Rocky Mountain National Park, with tons of activities and amenities.  Tonight and tomorrow night we’re staying in a hotel room, and the two days after that we have a large 2-bedroom cabin, with a full kitchen.  (These cabins are very popular – despite calling on the morning of the first day that reservations opened several months ago, I wasn’t able to get the cabin for the full four days.)  Since 12 of the last 13 days have involved sleeping on the ground, we are all giddy with anticipation of what we’ll experience – beds with sheets!  Daily showers!  Clean towels!  Electricity and plumbing!  It’s all very exciting.

***

From Bob:

This was not my favorite day of the trip.  I am nervous enough about the car being overloaded and past its prime without us going over multiple switchback roadways to ever higher mountain passes.  (It was even worse from the passenger seat. – Ed.) (Thanks for mentioning that, Ed.  I can concur completely since I was in the passenger seat for more than half the trip – Bob.)  Route 70 itself offers some nice vertical action as it climbs from Grand Junction through Vail. This is just a warm-up, though; the fun really starts when you get on Rt. 40 near Empire and start climbing through the fearsome Berthoud Pass (elev. 11,315 ft.).  Then the road descends for a while through Winter Park.  In Granby It starts climbing again until you enter Rocky Mountain National Park and think you must be near the top. 

                Not long after the visitor’s center we stopped to see a moose (rule #1 for spotting wildlife on National Park roads: pull over where you see lots of people with cameras all looking in the same direction), and a man told us he had passed a herd of elk on the Trail Ridge Road.  What he didn’t mention was that some of the elks’ antlers were actually poking into the upper atmosphere, thus making them the only elks in the country that are under the jurisdiction of both the National Park Service and NASA.

                That Trail Ridge Road CLIMBS, baby. Up over 12,000 feet it goes, and for most of it, there’s nothing at the edge of the road to keep you from taking the very fast way down.  We saw those NASA elk and they were shaking their big antlered heads at us (almost certainly causing several satellites to change their orbits) thinking, probably: “What a bunch of idiots driving around the above-treeline tundra with their white knuckles and squeaking breaks.  This place is really not meant for them, poor two-legged round heads. When will they learn their limits?”

                I do not wish to talk about this part of the trip any more, except to say that at one point – at 6:30 pm according to our trip journal – we crossed over the Continental Divide for the last time (at Milner Pass, elev. 10,759) heading east.  This ensures us a gentle, gradual downhill glide all the way back to New England.

                Instead, I will mention a cool thing we did last night back on the flat desert.  Ever since we pitched camp in a mild drizzle, it never looked like raining again there in the Devil’s Garden.  So, we decided to take the rain fly cover off our tent for the last night.  It’s very nice star gazing there, and it was a thrill gazing at the heavens from inside our sleeping bags, inside our tent. 

                It also gave us a slight head start on packing up our belongings for the long, winding, ascending drive to Colorado, since we could fold up the fly and its pole the night before.  Perhaps because of this little edge, we were able to hit the road at 9:09 (according to the trip journal), a full six minutes before our slated departure time.  We had told the girls that getting out on time would be considered their Feat of Strength for the day, qualifying them for a present from the present box.  The later feat of strength – running around the RMNP Alpine Visitor’s Center parking lot to test the effects of high altitude/low oxygen – was strictly optional.

Today we repeated our strategy from yesterday – a morning hike before things got hot.  We took another trail that left from nearby our campground, to the famous Landscape Arch.  They don’t let you climb under this one anymore, since about 20 years ago a huge hunk of it fell off and crashed to the ground.  They’re not sure how much longer this one will last – it’s very long and narrow.

The kids (at least the aforementioned 2/3 of them) had pretty much had it with hiking by this point.  We made a quick stop to see the iconic Delicate Arch, which is what you often see in Arches pictures and is also the picture on the Utah license plate.  We only saw it from a distance, since we would have had a mutiny on our hands if we attempted the 3-mile uphill round-trip hike to the base.

     

In the evening, we’d decided to say enough with all this quiet hiking business and had booked a sunset jet boat tour through the canyonlands of the Colorado River.  Naturally, the girls wanted to sit in the raised, exposed back area of the boat – but it actually turned out to be the place to be.  The boat was fast, the scenery was beautiful, and the whipping wind kept us cool.  The driver would slalom back and forth across the river, twisting the wheel and sending up a wonderfully cool spray of water just before it appeared that we would crash into the canyon wall.  We also saw various wildlife, Native American pictures on the side of the canyon, and crazy people climbing its walls.  The tour also included an all-you-can-eat Dutch oven dinner with several kinds of roasted and barbequed meats that had been cooked in a Dutch oven for 22 hours – delicious.  We all retired full and happy.  Zoe and Nadia were so full and happy that we managed to convince them to go on one last little hike on the way home — down a trail called Park Avenue because of the skyscraper-like fins on either side.  (Lanie could not be convinced, and went in the car with Bob to pick us up at the other end.)

From Bob:

There are actually 2,000 arches in this place – although some of them might be as small as the ones Tom used to sit next to and wait for Jerry to come out.  I don’t know.  We haven’t seen them all, but even if some are tiny, that should not diminish the splendor of this place.  Any one of the arches we’ve seen in the past two days would be the crown jewel of any other state’s park system. 

                Still, slim and delicate as they are, these arches don’t offer much shade, so it was back into Moab for the afternoon.  This time we visited the County Library, which was air conditioned, offered wifi, and promised many books to keep the girls happy for a while.  As it turned out, the local parents also like some of these features, too, and they brought their kids in.  So the girls got a rare chance to play with some people they weren’t related to.

                It should be noted here that the most time-intensive part of producing this blog is not the sitting down and writing part, which what I expected would be the case.  In fact, the tedium and delay comes from uploading the pictures.  Public wifi – or even the wifi Jen had to pay for in Yellowstone – is pretty slow.  It takes a long time for the pictures to get from the computer to the blogging servers.  The County Library in Moab is a very pleasant place, and it has really cool water coming out of its water fountains, but its free Internet connection is not much quicker, if at all, than the other places we’ve managed to get online.

                So we wait (and read a few more Berenstain Bear books than we thought could possibly exist – did you know they went up into space?). The pictures are very important to the process, especially here, where the landscape so dramatically defies description.

Finally the stars aligned today and I was able to get up earlyish to go for a bike ride.  It was a beautiful morning, with the early sun making the rocks glow like fire.  It’s definitely worth the effort to be up and about before the heat of the day rises and the roads get congested with other tourists.

This morning we tried to get everyone moving early (for the above mentioned reasons) and went on a hike that left practically right from our campsite.  We walked through a lot of desert and red rock scenery to Broken Arch, then went on to the refreshing Sand Dune Arch, which is housed between two giant red rock fins and is therefore nice and shady.  There were lots and lots of rocks to climb, and you could get right up inside the arches.  (Fortunately we were able to tell the girls that it is against the rules to attempt to go on top of the arches.)

Our time at Arches is proving to be a lot more relaxed than at our other destinations.  There’s not as much too see, so there’s less pressure to stay on the move.  Also, you’re almost forced to take a break in the afternoon, when the heat becomes overwhelming.  So, we motivated the kids through the morning hike with promises lunch in Moab, at a nice air-conditioned restaurant (no peanut butter!)  As we were driving into town, Bob and I saw this billboard shining out like a glorious beacon: “Moab Microbrewery, 1 mile ahead.  Kids Welcome!”  There was much rejoicing.  The brewery turned out to be very popular with the whole family, in fact.  The food was quite good, the kids loved the homemade root beer, and there was an in-house gelato bar for dessert. 

From Bob:

Even at the time we knew that we would miss the cold we were experiencing on those Yellowstone mornings.  The kids even seemed to grasp this, as they clutched their tea cups and huddled by the fire.

                The afternoons here are the proof of that earlier hypothesis.  It’s around 100 degrees – only 9 degrees shy of the hottest temperatures they say one can expect here in August.  It is, of course, a dry heat, and there’s often a soft breeze that makes it bearable.  The sun does get oppressive, what with all the sand, the short trees and the fact that we’re still 5,000 feet above sea level.  It all conspired, once our three-mile morning stroll was done, to get us off the Arches National Park plateau  (you should see the road you have to drive up once you pass the visitors’ center) and into neighboring Moab by noontime.

                This city is almost mythical, such is its reputation as an mecca for extreme outdooriness. Most storefronts on the main strip are advertising river rafting, mountain biking, atv or Jeep excursions, mountain climbing, hang gliding, parachuting, or a bunch of other activities that people have thought up that fall in the range of having an acceptable chance of survival, yet a titillating enough possibility that you’ll wind up broken up in many pieces.  The main practice of law in this town must concern the exact wording of waiver forms.

                Even the brewery has boats hanging from the ceiling and bikes riding up the wall.  There were multiple advertisements for extreme sporting opportunities – several hours of beer drinking is probably a prerequisite for checking out a verticalwhitewaterJeepskydive adventure.   We just stuck to the beer.

                

Once we were back at our camp site and things started to cool down a bit, the girls were able to climb on the big rock behind the tent.  Simultaneously, many children were climbing on many rocks adjacent to tents and campers right along the campground road.  It’s that kind of place.

Strange day today.  Our plan had been to do a hike that our friends had told us about, to a natural hot spring waterfall that’s a popular bathing spot.  But when we found that it was a 2.5-mile hike each way, and the weather was going to be over 100 degrees, we didn’t think anyone would be much in the mood for a hot springs soak.

So, we figured when you’re in Salt Lake City, what do you do?  You go to the Great Salt Lake, of course!  Surely this must be a big tourist destination, with nice beaches, right? 

Turns out, not so much.

The first clue should have been when I looked at the map and remarked to Bob, “It’s really strange – there’s almost nothing near the lake at all.  Not even any roads.”  But undeterred, we located a “Great Salt Lake State Park” on our map, and figured that was just the ticket.  When we arrived, we found a deserted beach behind a chained off parking lot with an ancient sign saying “Beach parking, $5”.  There were some other people parked outside the gate and we asked them about swimming places – and even though they were locals, they were not able to think of any place to swim in the Great Salt Lake (clue #2).

At this point we noticed two people way off, actually wading in the water.  At the same time a van full of Asian tourists parked next to us, and they started heading toward the beach.  So we figured we’d give it a try.  Things only got weirder.  On the way across the large stretch of beach, we noticed that at some point well in the past there had been some sort of bird holocaust.  The remains of dead birds were scattered around the beach.  Then the smell hit us – sort of a low tide mixed with rotting animal smell.  Then the flies.  When we actually reached the water, the smell and flies receded, so we did wade in a bit.  At that point, we found the water to be teeming with tiny shrimp (and the surface largely covered with what I assume was floating dead shrimp). 

You’ll see from the photos that it actually appears to be a beautiful place.  But none of us really wanted to get too deeply into that water.  It was shallow for a long, long way out.  It’s apparently 70% salt, too salty for almost any fish or plants.  I talked to the other people who were actually swimming, who turned out to be a local guy and his daughter.  I felt a little relieved at this, figuring he still seemed healthy, but he then confessed that he had never swum in the salt lake previously.  Apparently this just isn’t done in Utah.  (Public service announcement: He also told me that all the black stuff we could see in patches on the ground was shrimp poop.  He said it gets harvested, then sold to hotels in Las Vegas who use it to make “black sand” beaches.  So you should probably avoid those if you’re ever in Las Vegas.)  The biggest mystery remains why the van-load of Asian tourists chose this spot to visit.  Maybe as an example of Western decay.  As I told the girls repeatedly, at least we can tell our grandchildren someday that we went into the Great Salt Lake.

So we said farewell to the not-so-great salt lake and went to a nearby different state park on a different lake.  This proved to be substantially more appealing (despite the weird layer of green algae floating near the shore), and the girls had fun swimming for a while before we moved on.

Then it was on to Arches National Park in Moab, Utah.  It’s a stunning place – words can’t do it justice.  There are huge red rock formations everywhere (some of which are arches, hence the name), rising from a carpet of soft red desert sand.  Driving to our campground at the far end of the park (Devil’s Garden), we couldn’t stop gasping in amazement at everything we were seeing.  Unlike Yellowstone, this park is a nice manageable size – it has one main 18-mile road running through it, and most of the hikes and famous formations are accessible from it.

Our campground is also stunning – we all immediately agreed, the most scenic we’ve ever been in by far.  We’re nestled among the rock formations, looking out across the desert with our tent on soft, fine, red sand.  The kids immediately threw off their shoes to run in the soft sand and scale the rocks.  (The only downside to this campground is the lack of showers.  This is a substantial disadvantage given that you end up sandy and very sweaty with the 100+ degree desert temperatures, and if you were foolish enough to visit the Great Salt Lake you may also have a crust of salt on your calves.)  We got there in time to prepare a dinner feast (including a watermelon, sweet corn, and tomatoes that we’d gotten at a roadside stand) and attend the campfire program on local animals.  Chances are that everything we own will end up coated in sand (despite our strict foot-brushing requirement prior to entering the tent) but we still think it’s worth it.

***

From Bob:

Hey, the tent’s back.  And it’s sitting on a nice bed of soft bed of fine red sand.  This is the grooviest camp ground in the world.  Everything is red.  Red sand everywhere.  Big red rocks for our tent to hide behind.  Sunburned Europeans. It’s the Devil’s Garden.  Sounds like another Grateful Dead song.

                AND, when it’s sunset, which it was not long after we got the tent set up, everything gets even REDDER (except the Europeans, who turn orangish in the fluorescent lighting of their rented RVs).  There is no campfire ban here, thanks probably to the large amount of fireproof sand in all directions.  The Nation Park Service is not very generous with their firewood prices: we bought two packages for $5 apiece, and each has about eight pieces of wood in it.  No doubt the wood has to be shipped here from somewhere.  While the trees around here do look pretty flammable, they are sparsely spread around and they’re not very big.

                In fact, we should all be proud of the way the Park Service is trying to fulfill its mission without wasting a lot of money – aside from gouging people for firewood. When you enter a park, you get a map and a newspaper if you want one.  If you lose your map, you could as for another one, I guess, but they’re not out in racks everywhere where people can just pick them up and toss them around.  Certain sections of the parks have their own maps at little stands that request a 50-cent donation per map, or that you return the map to the rack.  You don’t see a lot of maps lying around and I think the way they’re distributed has something to do with that.  We can also rest assured that these parks – the big western ones, at least – are lightening the wallets of people from all around the world.  Most of the towns we’ve visited seem to survive mainly on tourism, and they treat foreign tourists well.

                In many cases, we’re in rather the same boat as the foreign tourists, as was clear in our trip to the Great Salt Lake.  It’s a beautiful place, but it smells awful (every time I pass the dumpster on my way to the bathroom here I have a Salt Lake flashback).  Pretty much everyone seems to know this except us and those two vanloads of Asian tourists.  We all hiked across maybe 200 yards of salt crusted sand, amid dozens of dead birds in various states of decay.   They didn’t know any better than we did.  We did find that it didn’t smell so bad once you waded in a few hundred feet.  Unfortunately for our fellow tourists, they did not venture off shore.  If we run into them again, I’ll let them know.

                As for now, we’ll rest comfortably knowing that we don’t have to go anywhere for a while and maybe we’ll spill some food wantonly because we can.  We are now officially out of bear country, and the kangaroo rat and grasshopper mouse do not inspire the same fear as does the grizzly. 

                

If you ever happen to drive from Yellowstone to the Salt Lake City area, you’ll notice a few strange things about your route.  You’ll be puttering along nicely, believing you’re making excellent southward progress, when suddenly you find yourself in Idaho, on a road with a different number.  As you’re scratching your head and consulting your map, never fear – about 45 seconds later you’re back in Wyoming again, on the same old road, as though Idaho were just a momentary hallucination.  Then, a while later, you rejoice – you’ve arrived in Utah!  No, wait, here comes Wyoming again.  It is a very hard state to escape.

The other thing that’s odd, at least to someone from the east coast, is how little is out here.  We’d planned to stop for dinner and made the foolish assumption that a town that actually appeared on the map, in a substantial size font, would have some sort of restaurant.  Then we’d arrive there and find the customary “Pop. 37” sign, four houses or so, and maybe a couple of trucks.  We had to find a town with a large, bold font on the map (probably equivalent to say, Hartford on a map of New England) to find anything that would remotely qualify as a “town” to us New Englanders.  And in between the marked towns on the map, forget it – nothing but endless fields, trees, and maybe a few cows.

Prior to all this driving excitement, however, we made another stop.  The south entrance to Yellowstone leads directly into Grand Teton National Park, and we’d planned to spend a couple of hours there.  It was a beautiful place – we did a 2.5 mile hike, had a picnic lunch (surprise, peanut butter!) along a breathtaking lake, and wished we’d had time to ride on the lovely bike path that seemed to run along much of the length of the park.  We saw the iconic mountains towering in the distance, with glaciers still clinging to their tops.  Bob and I both agreed this was a place we’d like to come back to.

As we got into Utah, the scenery changed dramatically.  Instead of lush forests and snowcapped peaks, we saw dramatic red rocks, sometimes streaked with pinks and greens.  Our destination was a cabin at an RV resort outside Salt Lake City – chosen purely for convenience and with a less than charming setting right off the highway bordering on a gas station parking lot.  But it was nice to sleep in a bed for a change, and very pleasant to be warm.

***

From Bob:

Tonight in a cabin in Utah, perhaps the very same on where Jerry Garcia hung out in that song, we are enjoying the beds.  It was a bit of a struggle to figure out who would get which bed, and Lanie is sleeping on the floor on one of our thermarest pads. Well, anyway, I plan to be enjoying a bed in a few minutes.

In much the same way that our family had trouble deciding who got the top bunk and who had to share their space, I’ve been spending the last few minutes filling up the four electrical outlets in our cabin.  These are a precious resource.

                At this point, after some rather primitive surroundings at Yellowstone (remember those signs in the bathroom about personal care items only), we have a good number of electrical items that need charging.  Right now the battery charger is plugged in and charging AAs for the camera.  Also in that outlet, Jen’s Kindle is plugged in.  This device is important because it gives us Internet access, even without a hot spot. 

                The iPod is in another socket, paired with this laptop.  The laptop we will continue to charge, as we don’t expect to see another outlet until Colorado, four days from now.  Once something gets fully charged, we have two cell phones to plug in.

                We do have the car outlets, and Charles gave us a nifty gadget that lets us plug anything into those, but things charged in the car seem to get depleted very quickly.  Maybe it was the altitude, or the cold, but I think it has something to do with the physics of the car electricity.  Also, our car is working so hard, and doing so well, we like to give it a break any time we can.

                So we plug in when we can.  This is what I like to think of as resource management.  It’s much the same as all those pepper and salt packets I took from Taco Mike’s in Wyoming during one of our few fast-food stops (the first since Canadian Wendy’s, I think).   We also grab ice and water from soda fountains when we can and napkins and plastic cutlery when they’re within reach.  Not too much, just what we need.

                Good news, we heard a ranger talking the other day about what background people need to become rangers.  He said resource management was one of the things people study.  Jen and I want to be park rangers someday, and we’ve already got a head start.

The coldest morning yet, and we had difficulty getting going – we all kept having to stop and warm our cold, stiff hands by the campfire.  But eventually we were back in the car, ready to take on Yellowstone’s upper loop.  The advantage of our campground is that it’s in the center of the figure eight, and is therefore on both loops.  (The disadvantage is the high elevation – we discovered that the Mammoth Hot Springs campground was predicted to have balmy mid-forties temperatures tonight!)

We had three main stops today.  The first was the Norris Geyser Basin, where we happened to arrive in time to go on a ranger-led hike.  This was quite a workout for Bob, since Lanie really hit the wall this morning.  She’s been a real trooper, going on two and three mile hikes without too many complaints, but today her cold was really getting to her, and she just wanted to be carried the whole way.  (Luckily she perked up as lunchtime approached – though I’m frankly surprised anyone is able to summon any enthusiasm for lunch these days, since we’ve had peanut butter sandwiches pretty much every day since the start of the trip.  It’s hard to find anything as convenient, non-perishable, and nutritious as a good old peanut butter sandwich.)

The second stop was the Mammoth Hot Springs, a little town on the upper loop that has beautiful rock terraces that have been created by the mineral-rich hot springs.  Today is Saturday, and everything was extremely crowded.  We had trouble even finding a place to park.  However, the terraces were beautiful — like a frozen winter wonderland, even though they were really just icy-white rocks — and we had an up-close-and-personal encounter with a herd of elk that apparently like to cool off in the shade of the buildings in town.

Next came the stop that the kids were most excited about – the Boiling River.  This was the other swimming spot that the ranger had told us about, and I have to say it an amazing place to take a dip.  We had to take a road north just over the border of Montana, and look out for the unmarked parking area off the road.  There seemed to be nothing else for miles around, and we had a long walk from the parking lot to the swimming hole.  The swimming hole was in the Gardner River, with beautiful mountains rising on either side and no roads, cars, or buildings visible.  At this location, the Boiling River, a hot spring, feeds into the icy waters of the Gardner River, in a series of waterfalls stretching down the bank.  Rock walls had been built near each waterfall, creating pools where the hot, sulphurous water could mix with the cold river water.  You could stand just in front of a waterfall, with your back scalding and your front freezing.  Or you could find a little nook off to the side, and soak there in comfortably warm water.  Or, since the current was quite strong even within the pools, you could struggle upstream and let the current carry you back.  It was a unique experience, and the kids would have stayed there all day if we’d let them.  Unfortunately we left the camera in the car, so you’ll have to take our word for it.

                                                                                    

***

From Bob:

Try as we might, it’s difficult for us to get out and about before 8:30.  I had hoped to be driving the roads of the upper loop early so that we might be able to see some interesting wildlife.  Not that bison aren’t interesting.  We just saw a cool ranger program yesterday on wolves, and I thought it would be cool to see some of those guys.

                Also, as today is Saturday, there was a little pressure to get out to Mammoth-Hot Springs before large crowds assembled there.  We didn’t, of course.  Mornings are slow when temperatures are low.  It is now important to cook a hot breakfast (today was a hash made from the other night’s potatoes, leftover meat and corn from last night’s burritos, cheese and some eggs cooked over the fire in our cast iron frying pan, in case you’re interested).  We also make tea on the cook stove.  This cold really does make me feel like we’re camping, and it does help to warm us all up.

                We did have a nice drive anyway – even though by 8:45 all the wolves had clearly receded into deepest Lamar Valley and other parts unknown.  Only a large and gregarious herd of elk made itself available today, starting off on someone’s lawn in Mammoth Hot Springs and working its way leisurely up to the edge of massive thermal terrace display.  It looked like the elk were walking on ice.

                I also saw two very cool birds on the Gardner River: one looked like a large goldfinch with a red-splotched head.  The other had a shiny teal body and greyish wings and flew over the river.  There were no fish to be seen on the Gardner, although it is a very nice-looking trout stream.  Of course the gallons and gallons of hot sulphurous water pouring in might have discouraged the trout.   To be fair, the river was also very swift moving at that point, so spotting trout would have been tough.

                We did see a few good-sized  trout in Fire Hole Canyon the other day.  Zoe pointed them out to me.  She’s becoming a very good animal spotter.   There must be fish in the Yellowstone River because we’ve seen dozens of people fishing in it.  I’m not sure what to make of this, because August is usually a slow month for river fishing back home.  Here there are people on the river right in the middle of the day, and it’s 85 degrees out.  To be sure, I haven’t seen anyone catch anything yet.  They may be yahoos from back East or from California. (Californians seem to be the butt of a lot of jokes on this side of the Rockies.)  It does get cold at night, as I might have mentioned, and there are still snow patches high in the mountains so the rivers are  still being fed by runoff.  Who knows, maybe there is lots of trout action here at this time of the year.  I was told that everything is catch-and-release here, except if you catch a lake trout in the big lake.  Those are considered an invasive species that interferes with the native cutthroat population’s breeding.

                Anyway, I don’t think there were many fish at the junction of the Gardner and the Boiling River, catch-and-release or not.

***

From Zoe:

At the Boiling River there are a bunch of little waterfalls coming from hot springs and  they run into pools with rock walls to keep the water in and to make there not be very much colder.  The first one is colder but the second is warmer and if you get too close to the waterfalls it gets too hot. 

Also the second pool has a current and Nadia and I had fun riding the current down, then trying to work our way back up.  We met another girl and she was doing it with us. We were in the warmer water, which is a bigger pool.  Lanie had a little place that was sort of closed off by rock and it didn’t have a lot of current.  It didn’t have a waterfall in it but it was still warm.  She found a friend, too, and they were playing in there.

At the way end there was a big pool without any current. Nadia and I would ride all the way down to there and then try to force our way back up the current.  We went down past the bottom pool a little bit, into the river.  The current was stronger. 

I feel like we only spent a short time there.  I wish we could’ve stayed longer.