ARCHES NATIONAL PARK

How do you know that the sabbatical you are on is really working?  When two first born, type A, super planners show up to their next destination a whole day early!  Yes, it happened to us.  We’ve had this trip planned forever, reservations made at all the campgrounds since January, and most of the details taken care of.  So, we show up to Arches and pull into the campsite that we think is ours.  We unpack, take the bikes off the back of the RV, move the BBQ off our bed, and start to explore the campground.  After we were there for an hour I got our paperwork that we had printed out at home so that I could check in with the camp host.  I happened to look at the paperwork and noticed it said, “check-in: Friday”.  I wasn’t even sure what day it was but Friday didn’t sound quite right.  I asked Erik and he confirmed that it was Thursday.  We had arrived a whole day early!  And, the signs heading into the campground said, “FULL”!  I quickly went to the camp host (who laughed at me when I explained our little oversight) and he said that they have two sites that they hold back and don’t let people reserve but, those two sites were already given away!  Thankfully, the solution to our problem was that we could park in the group camping parking lot for the night.  The next morning we headed out on a hike and by the time we got back we got to move into our normal campsite.  Yay!

Arches National Park was amazing!  The campground was nestled in among all these huge sandstone rocks that were just waiting to be climbed all over.  It was an enormous playground for big kids!  The Arches were beautiful.  The hiking was so much better than at the Grand Canyon or Bryce (there were no major elevation changes like the previous parks!). 

The major down-side to Arches was the heat. Oh my goodness, it was HOT!  And, there were no showers.  We hiked early in the morning or waited till evening.  We found shady spots to spend the rest of the day in.  And, we were creative in our showering. 

The first day we hiked up to the Delicate Arch.  It was a really neat hike that started out on gravel but soon progressed to hiking over sandstone. 

At night we sat outside and watched thunderstorms in the distance.  Sometimes there were five or six storms all around us (they were all really far away though).  It was beautiful and reminded me of the thunderstorms when we lived in Missouri.

On Sunday we went into Moab and visited an Episcopalian church which was quite an experience.  After church we went to McDonald’s for about three hours to charge up our electronics and get some internet access.

One morning Erik and I got up at 5:45 to go on a 7 mile hike to Devil’s Garden.  We got to see 8 Arches on the hike.  The hike was by far my favorite hike out of all the places we’ve hiked so far.  The hike was on gravel, sand, over sandstone rocks, and along the top of rock fins.  We loved the hike so much that we did it again the next morning. 

Some of the Arches we saw on that hike:

Somewhere along the way we picked up an extra traveler or two.  I don’t really remember when but at the Grand Canyon or Bryce Canyon I noticed that a packet of oatmeal had been torn open.  I just thought that a BBQ skewer had created the hole.  But, this week I found two granola bars that had been chewed open and bits of it were eaten.  If you have read my blog previously, you know I don’t do rodents very well.  My really brave husband cleaned all the food out of the drawer and headed 20 miles into Moab on the scooter to get mouse traps (that’s 40 miles round trip!).  He set the trap and we waited.  Sure enough, as soon as we were all in bed and Erik had just fallen asleep the kids and I heard the mouse stuck on the glue trap.  I woke Erik up and he disposed of the mouse.  Yay!  Just in case he set up another trap and sure enough, the next night when we were all in bed he caught another one.  It’s been a couple days with no more visitors so I’m really hoping that they have been taken care of.

We ended up leaving Arches a day early so that we could stop for the night in Colorado to see my brother, Dann.  I hadn’t seen him since January so I was really glad that it worked out. 

Next stop is Wyoming for four days to see a friend of ours that Erik met at college in Juno, AK.