Wild West Vacation 2020 - Mesa Verde

 After the week in which everything blew up (Things that Broke: plumbing leak, water heater, car, microwave, oven; seriously a very very bad week), we booked a vacation. It was maybe a little bit crazy, in the middle of a pandemic, but we were both more than a little fed up and wanted out of the house. We ended up in Moab, Utah, because Nicholas is in 4th grade this year and gets in free to national parks, and Moab has three close by. As we were driving in to Moab the scenery was getting more and more spectacular, but it's an 11 hour drive away from us, and we eventually drove in in the dark, so we really had no idea what Moab was like until we woke up the next morning and saw the view from the window. It was just spectacular. A huge red cliff just over the road from the house, that seemed to go for miles.
Our first day was our only free day with no commitments, so we got in the car early and drove to Mesa Verde in Colorado, a couple of hours away. I am so glad we went! Even though some of the cave dwellings were closed, most of the park was open and I think we saw everything we would have seen had we come in non-Covid days.

We decided we wanted to hike to Petroglyph Point. We know that I am not good hiking at altitude - but unfortunately we never remember this until we are already a good ways out on a trail somewhere. So even though I was suffering a little there was not much point turning back, so we pushed on, on one of the craziest trails I've been on. Yes, the trail went through these rocks.

The petroglyphs were pretty cool! And we stopped and rested for a while before tackling the rest of the loop back to the car. 

It was extremely rugged countryside. We found out later that we were supposed to have registered at the museum before heading out on this particular trail - whoops. It was extreme. Cliff edges were never very far away! 

After our marathon hike we jumped in the car and drove around the rest of the park, stopping to look at whatever there was. It was honestly astonishing - the pictures do not do it justice. You really can't get a sense of how far up the cliff and how inaccessible these dwellings really are. 

After we were all done in Mesa Verde it was time to drive back to Moab - except we somehow decided that we were going to go another way home and visit Telluride on the way. So off we went, following our trusty paper map that lives in the dash of our car. All of our phones did not agree with our paper map, but we wanted to go the scenic route that we could very clearly see marked on the map. So off we went. Whoops. The road did not go to Telluride at all. The road went into the mountains, where it skirted where Telluride should have been, but didn't cut through. Our phones all knew what they were talking about. So we ended up on a mad mountain road (and we know how I feel about those). It was a nightmare. We got up to about 11,000 feet, and then of course we had to come down. And it took hours. We finally reached a town named Ouray where we should have stopped for dinner, and where we probably would have stopped had I not been a gibbering basket case at this point, I had been white knuckling it for about the last 60 miles and I insisted that we get DOWN out of the mountains before it got dark. So we didn't stop. And that turned out to the be the last food before Utah, literally. We went through several tiny towns, all so far out in the boonies that they didn't even have a stop light and certainly didn't have any restaurants. We finally crawled home at 11:30 pm and fed the kids petrol station cereal and pot noodles and called it a day!
Mesa Verde was great, I loved it. The parts of Colorado that we drove through were stunning. It will be a long time before I can be persuaded to go back though!