Day 24-29

July 8- 14

We've been on the road for over a month now! The time has flown by, we can't even believe it.  

After the Great Sand Dunes we headed to Messa Verde national park. It is the only man made national park. We took two days to explore the park and did 3 different tours of the cliff dwellings of the ancient Puebloans. They were amazing, and their houses were literally built into the side of cliffs. We took one tour called Balcony House, and this cliff dwelling was set high in the cliffs, and the whole house was a balcony overlooking the canyon below.  We made a friend while we were at a campground in Messa Verde, Jim ( Hi, Jim!).  We talked to Jim for awhile,  he was also originally from the east coast. He is traveling cross country on his motorcycle! He told us all about his cross country journeys, which have been plentiful! 

Next we headed to Arches National Park in Utah. Arches was awesome! We hiked a bunch different trails, and climbed some of the rocks. Neil even climbed on top of one of the arches. The arches are all natural, not man made, and it is amazing how huge some are! 

Next stop was Canyonlands National Park, The canyons were crazy! We could not believe how huge they were, Neil even said they reminded him of the Grand Canyon. Again, we did some hikes and got some awesome pictures!  Utah is really hot we have found,  even being outside for a few minutes makes you sweat. 

Next destination  was Bryce, but we drove through and stayed at Capitol Reef National Park on the way. We did some research and Capital Reef didn't really interest us, so we weren't going to do too much exploring. When we got to Capital Reef campground it was pretty late, we were tired, and the gas light had turned on in the car. When we got out of the car we heard the tire hissing and discovered that a rock went right through the tire. We decided to change the tire, and put on the spare, but that was flat as well, just our luck. We decided we'd deal with it in the morning. The park rangers took us to their maintenance shed and pumped up the spare, and we drove into down and got the tire patched, we were ready for action again. 

Bryce National Park was next, and it was amazing. The rock formations which they call the hoodoos were beautiful, they are all different shapes, and such a vibrant orange! We hiked down into the Bryce amphitheater which was awesome. It had just rained so the clay path was very sticky, and we had a build up of a ton of clay on our shoes. The wet clay was also slippery, it was an adventure hiking town. The hoodoos looked awesome, and it was very neat to see them from different angles. Then we headed to the starting location of our overnight backpacking trip. It took us awhile to get all of our supplies packed in our bags, but we eventually got everything packed and headed on or way. The hike to our site was very pretty, very forested but we did see sone hoodoos. The designated sight was very nice with a stream running right behind it. We made some dinner but far away from our site because of bears. We had to tie all of our cooking supplies and food up in a tree after we were done. We had a lot of fun just relaxing and having peace and quiet.