Moab, Utah

Moab is one of those places I've often heard of but knew little about. It was a two-hour drive from Hanksville to Moab, and for a change the roads were straight and mainly flat. When we got to town, our first two stops were at the Village Market and the City Market, both on Main Street. Then we ate lunch and headed for the Goose Island BLM Campground, just 1.4 miles up the Colorado River on Hwy 128. It has no hookups, like most BLM campgrounds, but great views of the river and the red cliffs.

We pulled in and found a nice spot, but realized that we had forgotten to fill up our fresh water tank while we were in town. We registered and left some chairs on our site and went back to town. The camp host had assured us that Moab is a very water friendly city. We quickly found a Shell station with a convenient water hydrant and hooked up our hose. I walked inside to get some ice water and noticed that they had a Tuesday special on cold drinks--up to 44 oz. for 45 cents. The sun was beating down and the air was dry (hey, that's Utah), so I got a Diet Coke and Ken and I rehydrated while the tank filled.

Then it was back to the campground, where we set up camp and congratulated ourselves on a good site and an easy back in--and even a nice shady cottonwood tree. Soon we realized that the nice shade meant our solar panels would be shaded--not so good. We decided to wait until tomorrow to see if someone in a riverside site might vacate.

A bit later we were strolling along, checking out the dates on the site posts to see which might be vacated tomorrow. The camp host came by on his bike, and we stopped to talk with him. He told us that a riverside site had just become vacant--the campers had been called away on short notice. He said we could switch to it, but cautioned that it would be filled in 10 minutes. We rushed to the site, and Ken stood there while I went to get our site receipt to move it to the new site.

The Colorado River runs at the base of the cliff, just the other side of our chairs....

When we went on our walk this evening, we followed the bike trail that runs between the river and the highway. Everywhere we looked, we found more to amaze and delight.

We finally got around to doing some specific planning for our time here and discovered that the Devil's Garden Tour, the popular ranger-led tour through a maze of fins and arches, requires reservations far in advance.