Tuesday, September 13, 2016 Cedar Breaks National Monument

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

That wretched cat is back and he is meowing for MY humans!  He is on MY doorstep!  These are MY humans!  Mrrrooooowwwww!

It is windy today.  I took my walk up a back street around a golf course.  Looks pretty nice but not on our agenda.  When I woke up, I figured this might be the last easy time to do laundry so we got that going.  Spouse found the missing part for my golf cart and fixed that.  We got ourselves squared away to spend the next three days off the grid.  We don't plan on going far, just up the mountains a bit.

We headed up hwy. 14.  It is incredibly scenic with steep, rocky mountains coming right down to the road on one side, and down to a river on the other side.  The river is hugging the road so it is a very narrow corridor on which we are travelling.  The trees are stunning in those that are turning for the fall, but most of the trees are some types of pines.  We climb, we turn, we ooh, we ahh!  We have been this way before but I don't think you could ever get sick of it!

We decided to head up hwy 143 to the Cedar Breaks National Monument.  There is a campground there.  Most of the sites have reservation tags on them, but we did manage to find one for us and it is a nice one.  We set up Hannah, then left Rudy to watch over things.  And I got out of my shorts and into my jeans and closed shoes. My jacket is in Jack... good thing.

The Cedar Breaks National Monument visitor center is the second highest in the country (Rocky Mountain is higher).  We are over 10,000 feet.  It is windy and cold, about 49 degrees.  There are stunning views over the red rocky canyon a la Bryce, complete with hoodoos.  And I was able to get me a new coffee cup (thank you Rudy for breaking my favorite one...).

After our photo ops, we headed back down to 14 then east over to Navajo Lake.  There is construction there, they are making the dirt road a paved road.  Most of the campgrounds there are already closed for the season.  It is windy, it is cold, it is cloudy.  We head to Duck Creek Village.  Samantha dumped us about a block past the village at a dirt road.  We didn't fall for that this time.  We turned left, HAH!  It is only about a 2 block town, but we found a little cafe as it started to sprinkle.  Good down home cookin'.

When we got back to Hannah, Rudy was whining to go out, so Spouse obliged him.  Imagine, at the first sound of thunder and the first few drops of rain - wait, that is sleet - Rudy ran for Hannah!  What a wimp!  It sleeted for about 10 minutes, then subsided.  After that, there were intermittent thunderstorms with rain.  I love listening to the rain fall on Hannah.  When it wasn't raining, Spouse took Rudy outside.  Rudy would be happy under Hannah with his human out in the rain, but his humans don't play like that...  He had to settle with curling up on a soft blanket on one of his humans' laps.  Tough on all of us!

Too cold for a vodka tonic.  Too wet for a campfire...   turning on the heat for a bit... and hot tea...