Day 18 -- Kanab to Nephi, Utah -- 228 Miles

Today is our 18th day on our trip to wherever the heck we end up. Seriously, when we started out, we had absolutely no definite plans to be anywhere except wherever the route we chose took us that particular day. We began our journey heading for Pacifica, California for a special family event. But after that event, we wandered south along Highway 101 for a day, then decided to head east. We chose a route and set out, only to discover that our GPS had independently chosen a different route for us.

Ok, we thought, maybe she knows something we don't about the route we chose. But after that incident, we never completely trusted her guidance again. This, of course, complicated our navigation considerably, but since we didn't care where we ended up most of the time, if the GPS lied to us we just went with it

All things considered, and despite our ongoing war with the GPS, we have been to a great many exiting destinations in just under three weeks. Just to name three, we've been to the Grand Canyon for two nights, to Monument Valley for two nights, and to Durango for two nights so we could ride the Durango & Silverton train to Silverton and back.

So as our vacation comes to a close in the next few days, we have to pause and reflect on the many places we've been, the many people we've met, and to the many miles we've traveled in search of adventure. The GPS never quite learned to behave herself, but since we check every single mile against a map atlas, we don't care if she tries a bit of sneakyness once in a while.

Last night we stayed in a fabulous camp called Grand Plateau RV Resort just a few miles to the east of Kanab, Utah. The camp was very quiet, the layout was spacious, and the grounds were well kept by an itinerate camp handiman, Frank. Frank told me he loved his life in RV camps and had most recently come from a camp in Montana.

I got into a conversation with Frank because when I talked to him outside the camp office he sounded Austrailian. He grinned and responded that everyone thinks his accent is from down under, but in reality he's from the U.K. Well we hit it off great after that since I told him that vitually ALL my ancestors were from there as well. But that's the way of folks who either run camps or rent spaces in camps. Everybody is immediately your friend.

Our plan for today was to avoid Interstate 15 and continue our sojourn north on Utah Route 89, a route neither of us remembered having traveled before. On the map Route 89 appears to go all the way to Salt Lake City which is exactly the direction we wanted, regardless of what the GPS wanted. And our plan worked for most of the day, though for some unknown reason Route 89 dumped us onto Interstate 70 for twenty miles or so, but eventually we got back to our original route -- sort of.

If you remember we've been traveling on Route 89 all the way from the east entrance/exit to the Grand Canyon. We chose that route for a very good reason, we never travel the Interstates unless there is no other choice. We prefer rolling farm fields, winding roads through forests, and the mainstreets of many small towns still nurturing vestiages of the past.

Today for instance, we stopped and photographed a briskly-running stream on our route, a motel operation housed entirely in railroad cars, a wonderful Queen Anne victorian mansion, and a mouldering 19th century wagon that had all but fallen apart. We also photographed three abandoned filling stations from the 1930s and 40s, a sage-covered field of old rusted trucks, and -- best of all -- the boyhood home of one Robert Leroy Parker, alias Butch Cassidy.

The aforementioned photo subjects, plus a myriad of others over the years, are the reasons we avoid the Interstates and keep rolling down America's meandering lifelines once so important to yesterday's growing towns and villages.

One of the things that very much intrigued us about our route today is the large changes in roadside geology we experienced. Down near Kanab, Route 89 was bounded by large sandstone cliffs and boulders that exhibited a sort of rounded makeup full of criss-cross striations on their face. I very much regret that there was no real places to pull out to photograph these oddities as they were the first such examples of such rocks that we had seen on this trip.

Further up the canyon the striated sedimentary rocks waned, but were replaced by talus slopes of decomposing sedimentary rocks largely covered by pinion, juniper, and sage.

Even further up Route 89 the highway was suddenly bounded by nothing but volcanic lava flows, some that looked very, very new, and some that looked decided ancient. Since the lava flows were often hundreds of feet think and towered above us, I was constantly wondering if the Route 89 was only possible because the flows on either side of the road somehow stopped short of merging.

Sadly, I was not able to photograph ANY of the fascinating geology along our travel route today, but that just means we will have to return and give it another try.