Day 5 - Western Monuments

David's Journal

Our fifth day started with a fairly lengthy bus drive up to Monument Valley where we enjoyed lunch at Goulding's Lodge.  Then we went on a Navajo guided jeep tour of Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park.  It was interesting to see how similar, yet different, all of rock formations were in Monument Valley versus Red Rocks.  It was on this day that Amber's camera broke, the motor that operated the shutter and zoom functions apparently stripped a gear.  To make the poor little camera make it through the rest of the trip I did a "Mickey Mouse" repair to it using medical tape to hold the shutter open.  It allowed Amber to continue taking pictures for the rest of the trip, but it has since been replaced.  After our tour we took an even longer bus ride up to our final hotel, the Red Cliffs Lodge, which was quite honestly the nicest hotel I have ever stayed at anywhere.  Our room was fantastic, with a patio that overlooked the Colorado River with just a terrific view of the red rock cliffs behind the river.  The view from our patio was completely unobstructed by anything man made, except for a wooden post fence in front of the river.  Then we were reminded that many of the old cowboy movies were called "spaghetti westerns" when they served us an Italian buffet. :)

Amber's Journal

Day 5-- Monument Valley

Up bright and early again...ok, emphasis on early but I don't know how bright I am at 6-7 AM.  Off on the bus to Monument Valley.  Alas, today tragedy struck! In between bouts of picture taking, my camera suddenly developed shutter problems!  The motor opening and closing the shutter suddenly died! This motor controlled my zoom function too.  David managed to tape the shutter open so I could still take pictures, but I could no longer zoom in on things.

In Monument Valley we went to Goulding's Lodge which was an old Indian trading station.  We had lunch there--the fry bread was quite tasty, and took a quick peek around the museum which preserved life as it was for the Gouldings who ran the station around the '30's.

After lunch, we piled into a canopied truck with our Native American guide who was called Ashley.  He took us around and showed us some of the highlights of Monument Valley which looked somewhat like Red Rocks, but even more rugged and forbidding if possible!  The scenery was again spectacular in every direction that you looked--everything just cried out "Take my picture!" The only thing that could have made the afternoon better was a zoom focus, sigh! The color and drama of this landscape is hard to believe--even our best pictures couldn't capture the full magnificence and harsh beauty of what we saw.

Afterwards, we drove out to our last hotel, the Red Cliffs Lodge which was fabulous!  This was a plush, luxurious hotel nestled in between dramatic rusty-red cliffs.  It has a working ranch and an up and coming vineyard attached, and the scenery of just the grounds of the Lodge alone are great!  The room we got was huge with a kitchenette, dining table, and sitting area. It was more like a little apartment than a hotel room!
 This night we had an Italian (why Italian we don't know) buffet and kicked back to watch the sun set on our patio.  The river is a hop, skip and jump from our patio, and provides a lush note of greenery to the arid landscape which is overlooked by what we dubbed our "private mountain".  As the sun set, little birds and possibly bats darted out to gobble the bugs that finally drove us back inside.