Summer 2009 - Day 9

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Long Travel Day - MT, ID, UT

The Drive
Today is the day we need to start heading towards denver - we have 2 days to get there, but I only want to have 1 really long day. We start out driving from bozeman around 8:30am and the mountains were incredible to see. The drive out of town was on a decent 2 lane highway as we headed toward Idaho Falls. Scenic drive through Montana, but as soon as you hit Idaho it got kind of boring. The ride into Idaho falls started to really drag. Once in Idaho Falls we got onto an interstate. We were going to have a picnic lunch in the Idaho Falls area but couldn’t find a picnic area, so we stopped at a McDonalds - Yuck! We piled back into the car and started to drive, I had given Amy some choices on where we could get to, she chose Moab - Arches National Park. While I was very excited, I knew everything would have to fall into place perfectly regarding driving times. That meant we couldn’t hit any traffic around Salt Lake and definitely couldn’t get held up by construction. Well, we made good time into Salt Lake, got slowed down a little by traffic but not too bad. We made our exit onto a 2 lane highway towards Moab, we drove a short distance and pulled into a gas station to get gas. The attendant told me it was about 3 hours to Moab. It was about 5pm now, so 3 hours would be fine, it would give us a short time to grab dinner on the road and still make Moab by 8:30pm and setup camp before it was too dark. About 30 minutes later we hit bad construction and lost about 45 minutes. Once we started traveling again, we needed to stop for dinner, we stopped in the town of ____, couldn’t find anywhere quick to eat so we went into a local chain called Wingers. The wait for the table wasn’t too bad, however, once we ordered our food it took forever to get it. Our chances to make Moab and to see the great sites of Arches National Park just went by the wayside! After dinner we got in the car and started driving, we decided that we couldn’t make Moab in the daylight so we would try to make Grand Junction, CO and get a cheap hotel. We got to Green River, UT - about an hour from Grand Junction and decided to stop driving. I promised the boys we would camp at least 1 more night, so I found a KOA campground and we setup camp. Besides being the worst campground I have ever stayed in, we had the lights of a Motel going right into the tent! We didn’t feel real safe, we went to sleep, got up early and got out of town!

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