Retirement

We left Northwestern Colorado this morning and are in Laramie, Wyoming tonight. We saw a lot of interesting things along the route including many pronghorn antelope just a few yards from the roads we were on. Damsel took this photo of a pair of antelope near Baggs, WY, along Hwy 789 just north of the Wyoming State Line.

Keeping a long day to a short summary, here is our campsite for tonight. We will be relaxing here for a couple of nights before heading back down to Colorado east of the Rockies on Wednesday.

There was so much beautiful scenery along our route today, that it is difficult to pick one out of over 500 images that Damsel took from the motorhome today. Finally, we selected this unusual rock formation taken along CO Hwy 13 near Hamilton, CO.

Colorado River scenery and rock formations aren’t the only interesting things out here. In addition to livestock (cattle, sheep, horses and goats), there is wildlife: we saw a herd of Antelope lounging in a field next to the highway.

Tonight, almost two years to the day since we traveled to the Great American Solar Eclipse of 08/21/2017, we are again camped at the Craig Colorado KOA. This time, we will be headed to the other side of the Rockies for some more visits to ancestors. More on that as we get there. This is our campsite this time:

We spent the day enjoying Utah! We drove from Monument Valley to Moab, which is just south of Arches Nat’l Park. Wilson Arch in the photo above (courtesy Damsel) is several miles south of Moab and not a part of the park. It is right along US 191 which we took to get here.

Since we have been to Arches NP several times in the past, we won’t be visiting there this time. We plan to join the Colorado River in North Moab and head upstream through the scenic river canyon as we head to Grand Junction, CO and thence to Montrose where we will be staying for a couple days.

Our campsite here in South Moab is nice – spacious with good views of mountains to the south and the red palisade immediately to the west. We’re comfy here and have good satellite TV reception and good 4G internet access. Our rig in its spot is pictured below. Click on either image to enlarge.

We spent the morning doing our usual camping routine – walk the dogs, eat breakfast, feed the dogs, etc.

Later, Damsel and I went shopping for curios, postcards and such at the gift shop here. We picked up a few things, but there is a better selection a mile down the hill from where we are, so we will be stopping there in the morning after we break camp.

We also took several walks around the area, some with the dogs and some with our cameras. This is a very beautiful campground in itself, but the views into the valley are very spectacular. We both took photos, but our net connection is quite slow, so most will have to wait to be uploaded until we get a better connection.

I took the view above with my Canon EOS SL1 at a focal length of 139mm. I cropped the image and applied color corrections to compensate for the haze. This is one of the more prominent monuments we can see from the campground. Click on the image to enlarge.

For the next couple of nights we’re camped at Goulding’s Campground at the foot of Monument Valley. The view from the campground is shown above (we actually have to walk a couple of hundred feet from our campsite to see this). But the campground is beautiful itself surrounded by cliffs and red rock formations.

Our campsite is a little more reasonable than that of last night. We’re in a spacious pull thru with trees, a picnic table and all the shore power, water and sewer hookups.

Even though it is early in our proposed journey, we are suffering from a couple of minor drawbacks. Foremost is that the automatic leveling jack system which was working perfectly at home has now decided to stop functioning. We can live with that since most campsites are fairly level and we can live with a little tilt. Other problems include the DVD player, which failed to function last night when we wanted to put on a video. We wound up watching the DVD on one of the computers.

Problems aside, we are here to relax and enjoy the scenery. Damsel wants to go to the main hotel complex down below to do some gift shopping and such. She will be enjoying that for sure. I’m enjoying the peace and quiet (not that at home is otherwise) but away from the retirement routine.