(Day 4: Road trip from Grand Canyon to Moab)

I’m always sad to leave the Canyon. Something about its scale and inaccessibility, the peace and wilderness, always calms me. Still, this time we were leaving to goto Moab, for more adventuring so it was a little bit easier to drag myself away.

We were up and at it reasonably early, suitcases packed and zipped before heading to breakfast. We tried to do some blogging and I eventually got the text up, but the connection proved insufficient for photo uploads and so, with time marching on, we gave up, packed the car and checked out.

Our reverse circle route took us east along the rim, so we stopped at a few overlooks, the first just a random location, and then at Grand View Point, before our final look at the Canyon from Navajo Point.

From there, Andrew drove to Kayenta, first going through the now-finished road works at Cameron (very nice job), passing weird rock formations near Tuba City which are just worn down sandstone layers, but look like abandoned slag heaps…and then past the more scenic ‘reefs’ of rock, before getting to Kayenta which is just south of the Arizona / Utah border.

At Kayenta we swapped over and I drove the three hours to Moab, past Monument Valley and volcanic cores, into red rock country. We arrived just before 6pm, taking into account the time zone change (we went forward one hour), and went straight in to say hi to Kim and David. Last year Kim had just had an operation, but this year she is back to being healthy and fit and it is great to see.

After unloading the car we went to Zax’s for dinner, being the nearest and quickest option. We were pretty tired, so it was an early night, with the thought of hikes to come.