USA II.
Colorado a Utah
We are flying home in less than a week. Sometimes I look forward to it, especially when I do not sleep well at night… From Glenwood Springs, Colorado, where we were enjoying the hot springs a lot, we set off for Monticello in Utah. The drive was beautiful because we went through the mountains. It was long though, and towards the end dad was quite nervous because we were running out of gas and water. We did not meet many cars at the end of the day, that is true. We stopped in a little town, Panoia, for lunch. The waitress was very nice to us. When we got back on the road, a Pacific Union train passed by. It’s the same railroad company that Willy Fog (the British gentleman traveling around the world in 80 days) used to travel!!! It had 110 cars full of coal and three locomotives. I could not count that, but my aunt was patient. The train crossed our path several times, and we enjoyed looking at it very much. Then we crossed the mountains to the desert. The last few miles were quite tough because we were on the road the whole day, and Borivoj started to complain loudly. In the end they took him out of the car seat but not me! We stayed in a motel with a pool, which was wonderful. It was over 36°C, meaning around 97°F (my parents are starting to get the hang of converting Fahrenheit to Celsius)!
Every morning we have problems setting out before eleven o’clock. It is a bit of a problem because the check-out time is 11am most of the time. Mom and dad insist on the exercises and coughing and eating each morning, it is awful. Then around 11.30am we are sitting in the car (mom and dad were looking for accommodation for tomorrow in the lobby for half an hour) and we are off to Canyonlands National park. We get there at noon. We are almost the only ones there because everyone else was here at 6am. The air-conditioning is blasting at its maximum but it’s still not cool enough, so we do not turn off the engine. It says 42°C (107°F). There is a sign that says during dangerous heat wave, we must drink at least a gallon a day. So I drink that… Dad stares out of the window all the time and is amazed by some rocks. I am looking for Native Americans, but they are nowhere to be seen. We are stopping and going to check out some rock again. We leave the car running in the parking lot because there is no one around anyway. Dad found a rock entirely covered with writings by Native Americans, it is just great. Mom says they have not deciphered it yet. But I know, it is just life!
Our trip that day ended in a nice motel with an outdoor pool. The next day we drove around more rocks. It was mostly dad who was enjoying it the most, and he took me out of the car so that I can take a closer look from time to time. We decided to stay in the same motel for one more night because of the pool and the outside temperature. In the evening dad found a black spider in the corner of the swimming pool and told Borik not to go there, but dad himself poked the spider and said, “wow, it is a black widow!”
We barely managed to check out at 11am and we are heading to Arches National Park. Then we are driving through the desert to another motel. I wake up at a parking lot, Tonca sleeps next to me and Borik behind. Mom and dad are gone. Tonca wakes up, too, and tells me they went to go see some arch. I see them sprinting back, and people in the parking lot are looking at them strangely because it is again around 40°C and everyone is moving rather slow.
We were driving fast on the highway and got nowhere. The little town, Price, is a real desert town. We did not get a chance to go to the museum of dinosaurs. We spent a night in the worst motel of our trip. The air-conditioning smelled bad, so we had to turn it off. It was very hot at night, so we were trying to turn it on again for a bit. We were itchy from a dirty pool, so we did not get much sleep. In the morning we moved faster, and we were in the car before 11am. The day before, we bought a potty with a great backrest. We are trying out the new potty at a gas station near Salt Lake City. It is super, it works! I can sit on it, and I think I’d like to use it as a chair too.
You can check the pictures here. For a while, we were thinking of returning home because of the heat, but we are glad that we stayed. Now it is hot back home. We are further up again and it is much more comfortable.