Re-route

After talking to some people at work who have done some traveling out west, the Jedi is considering rerouting some of our trek west. Instead of driving north from Denver CO to Laramie WY and then west through WY to Salt Lake City UT, we are considering driving straight west from Denver, through the mountains of Colorado into Utah, and then north to Salt Lake City. It is a slightly longer drive, but only slightly, and it supposed to be a far more scenic drive.

This would mean giving up Fort Bridger in Wyoming, which looked really cool, but it would mean driving through the Great Rocky Mountains, which would also be cool. So I've spent the past couple of days poking around on google to see what else we might encounter on a rerouted drive.

The new route would take us just north of Arches National Park in Utah. Let me tell you how excited I was by this discovery. I quickly did some more research, and discovered that the entrance to Arches National Park is on the south side of a very large park. And we're on the north side. Hmm.

Not to be deterred, I jumped on google maps to see if there were any roads that went into the north side of the park. Yes, yes there were! And, the back roads (Salt Valley Rd and Valley City Rd) connected to a state route {191} with an exit from the main interstate, I-70. Woo di hoo! So, Arches was looking like it might be on our itinerary after all.


Just to be sure, I did a google street view of the state route and looked at the turn off to these back roads into the park.

See that dirt path over the railroad tracks? That's a "road".

So, on a day that already has nine hours of travel slated, to see Arches, we need to drive an hour south, then drive north into the park and see the arches, then drive back south to leave the park, then drive an hour north to get back on the interstate. Add up the hours there. It's not looking like Arches is going to be on our travel docket.

Of course, that didn't stop me from dragging the little goggle street view person all over Utah and Colorado to plunk him down on the map and see what I could see. Or from surfing all sorts of blogs in search of other ideas.

I spent so much time on this over the past few days, that last night I kept waking up in a panic, convinced that I had forgotten to pack for our trip and that we needed to be on the road by seven. I'd eventually figure out that our trip was still several months away, and I'd fall back asleep, only to wake up again in a panic because I had forgotten to pack for our trip....