Thursday, July 31, 2008

Dusty had me up at 6:30, so I obliged. I walked her down the highway from our RV Park and even said “Hi!” to a hitchhiker and pointed him towards Moab. After breakfast, Michael began noticing that our air-conditioning didn’t seem to be cooling quite as well as it used too, so we packed up and ran into Moab to see if someone might look at it for us. We were sent on to 3 different places. Each place kept giving us the next places name, no one wanted to even look at our unit. What to do? Michael, bravely climbed on top of the coach, unscrewed the top of the AC unit and said it looked inside and said it appeared to be blocked p by a huge chunk of ice. So he backed our rig into full sun, to let it melt and see if that didn’t resolve any issues. The boys and I set off for downtown Moab on foot. They whined that it was a little hot, I was thoroughly enjoying the heat and it’s true; dry heat is different than moist heat. It was all ready in the upper 90’s and you don’t even break a sweat. We bought some trinkets and then dad called on the cell saying problem resolved and came to pick us up. On to Arches National Park! First stop, Entrance booth to check to see if we could get a site for the night. Nope. Full. Darn. Sigh. Next stop sight-seeing: Balancing Rock was first, then North and South Windows, Turret Window, and finally Double Window. The boys had a great time scrambling around on the rock. Devin was pretty sure-footed and Trenton was getting better after a few pointers from dad. We got lots of great pictures of all of these places. Lunch was along side one of these red rock views.
After we were hiked out, Michael wanted to still go check out the campsite and maybe just see if there were any empty spaces, sho’ nuff, there were 3 that had been no shows. Viola! Camping at Arches National Park.

We ate “Hamburger Helper” in the RV and it was good. Everybody ate up. After cleaning up, we took a sunset drive back through the park to see how different the dusk shadows make all the rock formations look. When we returned to camp, it was time for the Ranger encounter at the amphitheater. It was supposed to be good one about the night skies, but it turned out to be a dud. We decided not to stay for the end and head back to our site and ponder the stars on our own. We had a clear view of the Milky Way and plenty of shooting stars. We did a campfire and s’mores and then washed everyone up for bed. It was still really hot and I thought clean cool bodies would sleep better than hot, dusty ones.

*At about 2:00am that morning Michael decided he’d had enough of the “No generator” rule and we left for a spot off the mountain and out of the park. We all did sleep much better.