Day 11: Moab, UT to Cedar City, UT

Driving Dist/ Time: 5.5mi/ 9min. (to Arches NP); 30.1mi/ 43min. (to Canyonlands NP); 284mi./ 4h 5min. (to Cedar City)

Sights seen: Arches NP, Canyonlands NP

I dislike the idea of starting a post with a negative thought, especially when it has nothing to do with the wonderful things we saw today, and they were wonderful, but we as a family need to vent on one subject- the newfound hatred we have for the Best Western chain. Now, I am hater; I am lover- a lover of fine cuisine, a lover of nature’s finest displays of beauty, but right now, I am a lover of a large number of four-letter words and they all directed at Best Western. This hatred is not unfounded; nay, it is predicated on the notion of complete ineptitude and lack of customer service. For this trip, our family booked four separate Best Western hotels over the internet, along with all of the other hotels for this trip; Best Western was the only one to get the dates of our stay wrong. And no, these temporal errors were not mistakes of a day or two, but rather of two months. Now we caught their mistake in three of the four hotels; that is until tonight when we attempted to check into our hotel outside of Bryce Canyon National Park, when we found out that we were two months late for our stay. This was news to us. Given no assistance and told that they were completely booked, which judging from other hotels we passed, so was the entire region, we were kicked to the curb with nowhere to go for the evening. Thank to teamwork and a AAA tourbook, we were able to locate lodging just under two hours away. This unplanned detour in our trip has now axed Bryce Canyon from our itinerary and simply has put comfort levels at an all-time low as we will stroll into our lodging around 10:30pm Mountain Time, 12:30am Eastern. So that said, we officially discourage the use of the Best Western hotel chain in your roadtrippin’ plans.

Oh yeah, today… right… I guess it wasn’t all bad. What did we do again, Liam? Oh yeah, we saw some rocks, pretty rocks, ‘hole’y rocks you might say. First stop for the day was Arches National Park, and I know I’ve called a lot of things ‘unique’ on this trip, but this stuff takes the cake. Arches NP contains a wide display of natural stone formations including buttes, but most notably natural stone arches- over 2,000 as a matter of fact. There’s no possible way to describe with words the majesty of these formations; so I implore you to go to the photo album for today and see the pictures for yourself. You’ll be grateful you did. Following our expedition in Arches NP, we journeyed 30 miles up the road to Canyonlands National Park, which encompasses the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers. To put the sheer natural importance of this fact into perspective, there are three main river systems which drain all of the water from west of the Rockies- the San Jacinto drains California, the Columbia River drains Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana, the Colorado and Green River system drains everything else and provides water and electricity for pretty much every southwestern and central western state. The confluence of the two rivers in Canyonlands NP plays an enormous role in the natural ecology of the West. Canyonlands itself, as the name implies, is filled with the natural canyons formed by both of the rivers as well as water run-off which the arid desert soil cannot absorb. The rivers have eaten away at the sandstone layers over the hundreds of millions of years of geologic formation (also known as the average time span of a single failed military spending program) to reveal the various colors and thicknesses of each line of strata. Information from these superficial observations goes far in determining the geological history of a given area and has done so for the Colorado Plateau, which averages a height above sea level of 5,000 ft. Seeing these canyons gave us a fantastic preamble of what to expect in a few days when we go to the granddaddy of all canyons, the Grand Canyon (and yes, we hope to be able to tell you afterwards what is so ‘grand’ about it anyways).

So with a long sigh and still feint hope for tomorrow, we bid all our reader(s) a good night; after all, at least one of us should be able to get some sleep.