Today we were on the road by 8:00am, with a goal of making it to Salt Lake City by noon, where we had plans to meet Abby's third grade teacher for lunch. We zoomed through the rest of Idaho and arrived in time to study the map for the next leg of our journey before her teacher arrived.
Lunch was very nice, and we got to see the new baby, who's now almost two.
After lunch, we started towards Vernal, Utah, which is just a few miles away from the Dinosaur National Monument, which is tomorrow's big event. I tried to get on the freeway we'd gotten off of for lunch, going south, but the entrance was closed. Not so easily thwarted, I made my way down to the next entrance to the freeway, but that too was closed.
Still, not listening to fate, I found yet another entrance and finally got on the southbound freeway. I really should have gone north.
My biggest map of Utah is one that the tourism department sent me, and it's a bit lacking in details in some places. Like how it doesn't always list the names of the highways. The important highways. The highways that I really need to know about.
So we wind our way down the highway that I think is taking me where we want to go, and we seem to be going towards the mountains that I know we need to get across. I know there's only one road across the mountains, because I've looked at my map. My really good map.
Eventually, after passing a couple of creepily identical churches, we get to a ranger station where they're collecting fees. I point at my map and girl ranger rattles off a couple of directions which I completely ignore, because, you know, I have my map. She says that if I'm not stopping, I don't have to pay, so I cheer silently and hit the road.
The scenery is gorgeous, and I assign Abby the task of opening her window and taking pictures while I drive. After a while, the road forks and narrows, and the signs are sparse and none of the things they're pointing to are on my map. I try to remember girl ranger's directions, but can't, really. So I shrug and we had onward and upward. And upward, and upward. There's lots of markers for trails and things of that nature, and we keep climbing and climbing, and by the time we've passed our umteenth trail marker turnout, I decide that I picked the wrong fork. So we get out of the car and take some more pictures of the gorgeous scenery, and then we're off back down the mountain to try the other fork in the road.
That was not an improvement.
We apparently stumbled onto what must be heaven for ATV enthusiasts, as we see dozens and dozens of trailers carrying dozens and dozens of ATVs. I get past them the best I can on the endlessly narrowing road, and eventually, I get to a little booth that marks the entrance to a campsite, where the road then turns to gravel. This was definitely the wrong way.
At that point, I'm feeling quite lost, exceedingly annoyed at the general lack of maps and signs and directions, and tired of the woods. So I check my map and find that a little bit north of where we stopped for lunch, there's a big highway that also takes me across the mountains, so I get out of the forest and back to the highway and then, with no more misturns, we make our way to Vernal, Utah, where there are approximately one hundred and fifty nine dinosaur statues. I'm guessing.
Tonight's campground is the 'Dinosaurland' KOA, and it has a pool, so once I've set up camp the kids decide to wake up and go for a swim. Then, we drove into town to find dinner, and got pizza. The pizza was pretty cool, because we ordered one of the premade ones and the guy just grabbed it off the rack and handed it to us, and we had our pizza and were on our way. I don't think I've ever even gotten a hamburger as fast as that was!
The girls played on the teeter-totter after dinner, and would have continued that for much longer if I hadn't pulled them off because I was sure one of them was going to lose some vital limb if I let them at it much longer. Katrina managed to fall off twice in about five minutes, because tetter-tottering isn't any fun if you don't bash down as hard as you can, or kick sand at your sister to attempt to blind her, or better yet, both.
Tomorrow we're off to Colorado Springs to see Debbie after we check out the dinosaur site. She hasn't seen the girls since they were one and two, so I'm really looking forward to it!
Posted by Rachel at June 26, 2004 10:14 PM