Day 27 - Santa Fe, NM to Page, AZ

Another day, another early morning. Today, though, the idea was to drive 500 miles, so an early start was needed. Here was today's route:


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The first stop of the day was Durango, CO, where James and I ate lunch. Walking up and down the street in the historic downtown of the town, we happened across the Diamond Belle Saloon, which turned out to be an excellent choice. Irrespective of its authenticity, the place was full of old West charm.



Both James and I ordered the homemade chicken pot pie. One word: excellent.


Then the truck broke down. That's not 100% correct. The truck was making a funny noise, which I determined to be coming from the belt tensioner, so rather than have it fail in the middle of the desert miles from any civilization, we found a local shop in Durango. Charlie, the mechanic, and perhaps owner, of AA-American Auto & RV Repair, looked under the hood and confirmed my suspicions about the belt tensioner.

Here I am waiting in the shop office.


Three hours and a fair amount of money later, we were back on road, a touch behind schedule. In one way, having stopped to get the truck fixed was fortuitous because they advised us of the road conditions of the route I had planned to take. Besides being a good auto repair shop, AA-American appears to be a major towing outfit that does towing jobs all over the Four Corners area. They told us that our planned route, though paved, was rough and slow. So we remapped and headed towards Four Corners itself.

After Four Corners, we headed north into Utah.

The original plan, before the breakdown, was to make it all the way to Glen Canyon National Recreation Area just past Page, AZ to camp for the night. With our unplanned detention in Durango, however, we decided that instead we would head for Goosenecks State Park to camp. This would allow us to go through Monument Valley in the beautiful light shortly after dawn.

Goosenecks State Park sits at the edge of a remarkable canyon. The park is at place where the river makes several tight turns, so the canyon snakes through the desert here.


There was only one problem with Goosenecks State Park. It was completely misnamed. It should have been called Goosenecks Picnic Table and Overlook. We made the completely erroneous assumption that a state park would include camping (like every state park I've ever been to). Finding our plans once again confounded, we decided to push on to Kayenta, AZ, allowing us to go through Monument Valley at dusk instead of dawn, which was also gorgeous.





However, we also completely underestimated how much sunlight we had left. By the time we reached the most scenic part of the valley, the sun was already dipping below the horizon--pretty pics, nonetheless.

We arrived in Kayenta in the dark. We ate at the Blue Coffee Cafe, which we found to have a couple of traditional Navajo dishes on the menu (being in the middle of a huge Navajo Reservation, this was not entirely surprising). Both James and I indulged in the fried mutton wrapped in a tortilla. Delicious.

After eating, though, we were at a loss for where we would stay the night. We determined that camping options were extremely limited on the reservation and that there was virtually no place to stop between Kayenta and Page. We checked out a couple of hotels in the area and found them all ludicrously expensive. We pushed on to Page, where we ended up at a Motal 6, having arrived after 11pm.

The next day, we hoped, would be less...eventful, especially as we would be crossing Nevada near Area 51.