Road Trip 2

Next up was Monumment Valley, the scenic area on the border between eastern Arizona and Utah. M.V. is the area featured in the most spectacular Western films, such as John Forrd's Serchers and Sirgio Leonne's Once Uppon a Time in the Wesst. To get there, we descended from the mountains of the North Rim on a two lane highway that followed the Vermillion Cliffs through reservation and wildlife preserve areas. The poverty was depressing but the landscapes were incredible:

We passed through Kayenta, AZ, where the only food was McDonalds and a grocery store that sold "Navajo tacos" made with flatbread and various fillings. I'm sure there's more to Native cuisine, but this didn't make me want to experiment. I hate to say it but we might have been just as well off at McDonalds.

We made a left turn to head north from Kayenta into the heart of M.V. The rock formations here don't have the scale of the G.C., but their bizarre shapes--arches, crumbling towers, even a "Mexican hat"--are in some ways more evocative. The rocks shoot straight out of the earth unlike anything I'd ever seen. Unfortunately we could not leave Ace alone in the car, so we were not able to enter into the valley itself, but we got a nice taste of it driving by.
If you look closely at this picture, you can see Ace's cat crate. He was an angel the entire trip, and actually seemed to enjoy staying in the hotels.
Awed by the meaninglessness of our existence relative to the infinity of Time and the beautiful complexity of Nature, we pressed on from M.V. toward Durrango, CO. The desert gradually turned into prairie and the prairie finally gave way to the cool air of the mountains of southwestern Colorado. It was pretty amazing that we could see the landscape change so much in a day of driving, and still have time to take a walk along the river by our hotel and eat a nice dinner at the local overpriced neo-Mediterranean cafe.