Helen wasn’t feeling so good, so we left her and Jon at camp while Rose and I explored the cliff dwellings of the park – Long House in the morning, Balcony House in the pouring rain, then in the evening, as we were the only two people, with our very own guide we explored Cliff Palace. Wandering around these ruins was much like the experience in the Mexican ruins a few years back. Clearly there has been a lot of “restoration”, since early photos show many of the sites as piles of rubble – which makes it feel a bit like you’re walking around a prepared, packaged exhibition rather than an original, ancient site. But without restoration, you wouldn’t get the same idea of what the villages used to be like, and tourism probably wouldn’t even be possible. Impressive, nonetheless. Yet another unique experience!
We picked up Jon & Helen and trucked on towards Utah. We’d not had an American diner meal together, so we stopped off for dinner at Denny’s in Cortez where we met a friendly local called Steve, who lives on a small ranch nearby with his wife – having moved from Boston seeking the simple life. Another late night drive – we’ve hardly done any driving after dark in months – took us over the border into Utah. It’s very, very dark at night out here. No street lights, and pretty poor van lights means that we only get to see a small patch of yellow tarmac for a few hours – with a huge flash of lightning every now and then in the distance. We’ve been able to see thunderstorms somewhere on the horizon pretty much every day. So we turned up at a campsite a 6 miles down a small side road, in the dark. With my powerful bike light we could just make out the huge, red rocks looming over us. What’s it going to look like in the morning?
Road and Ocean 