Road 163 to Monument Valley, if you come from the south, goes into Utah for all of a mile or so before the turn off into Monument Valley heads back into Arizona. That’s it for Utah, way too cold up there.
It was a frigid start and I was tired from the day before. But it was cheery to see horses wandering around downtown Chinle. I was enjoying coffee and egg and sausage McMuffin with a hash brown biscuit at McDonalds (super-fast internet connection at every one)
Then on about 80 miles to Monument Valley. My expectations had changed from very high to medium after Canyon de Chelley. There was plenty of advance warning as we moved west.
There was plenty of this
Then, as you would expect, this
It clouded over and a strong wind came up. The clouds weren’t helping with the photography but of course it’s spectacular.
There’s a 17 mile loop around the park. At the gate it says no motorcycles but after a chat with a warden he’s fine with Lucinda.
It’s always good seeing horses
This is as close as you can get to the Totem. Now very cold and the sun is at the wrong angle for a good shot, but no tour of Monument Valley is complete without stopping to admire it.
Then,as suddenly as the clouds came, they went.
This scene is the first thing you see when you come in and the last thing as you leave. And out of focus, but whatever!
Managing expectations is always hard, specially when your confronted with epic places such as this. The long and the short of it is sometimes they’re hard to meet when you’re a bit tired and quite cold. So no positive epic here, though the loop was a decent ride, specially now that Lucinda is riding like a champ, but I know how to recover from it and so I’m planning something unexpected.
But the drive around the park was fun. The videos so far have been pretty poor but they’ll improve. The biggest problem is knowing when to turn the GoPro on and when to leave it off, when you can’t see ahead, which I could this time, but iMovie takes way too long to process anything over a few minutes. So you stop it when you shouldn’t sometimes. I don’t know, should talk to Brian.
Then on to Page, AZ to warm up.