By the time I woke up Dad had already got the car over to have the breaks checked out. Turns out it needed new pads so we had a few hours of just hanging out in the hotel room. Wasn't so bad, it was a nice place. It was more like a hunting lodge than anything else. There were stuffed bears as you walked into the lobby and various horns scattered about in strange places. This is how I will remember Craig, CO. Here is a shot that Dad got while waiting for the car. Apparently it wasn't just the hotel that had a thing for hunting:
Once we were sure that we could stop safely it was off to Dinosaur National Monument!
The monument is divided into two areas. The first is the canyon area. I was amazed at how beautiful it was. When I'd decided to stop by I was expecting it to be all about dinosaurs but the cliffs and canyons were a pleasant surprise.
I've never been to the Grand Canyon which is what Dad compare this to. I feel like I have to go now because this was magnificent. The variation in color and texture was surreal, the pictures don't do it justice. While we were touring this area Dad told me that he wasn't so excited about the idea of going to a place to look at dinosaur bones. That'd be "lame" in his opinion, so he was happy that it wasn't just a bunch of bones.
After leaving the canyon area we had to get back into Utah (a portion of the canyon is in Utah):
The Fossil area was the second section which was a little disappointing and a little unexpected. Turns out that the area that has all the dinosaur bones wasn't open. You read that correctly. Dinosaur NM had no dinosaur bones to be seen (with the exception of a few in a temporary visitors center). You can imagine the frustration. It seemed that everywhere we went something was closed for some reason. But it turned out to be fairly interesting in the end. Driving through there were even more crazy rock formations all around us. And to top it off there was a variety of petroglyphs etched into the rocks.
This is just a small sampling of the pictures I took. There was so many things to photograph I went a little crazy. But I figure it's better to have too many than to regret not taking more.
By the time we were finished at Dinosaur we decided to skip the caves in Utah. It was too late to do them and we were both starting to want to get home. So instead of staying in Salt Lake City we set our sights on Pocatello, ID.
Since we weren't staying in SLC there wasn't much reason to stop there, but I did snag this picture while we were cruising through:
We also stopped just north of the city in a place called Roy, UT to get some food at Burger Bar (a triple D site). The food was great, the only down side was that it was a drive in and we had to eat in the car. Usually not such a horrible thing, but after spending 10 hours a day in it for a week you can understand that I wasn't enthusiastic about it. The burger made up for it though.
Not much else to speak of. We drove north to Pocatello in the dark and got ourselves a room. Dad was beat and called it an early night while I ventured next door for a couple of beers. Didn't expect a couple things about that. First, Idaho apparently doesn't have indoor clean air laws so the place was smoky as all hell. Secondly, rural Idahoans are a strange bunch when it comes to karaoke. We'll leave it at that.
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