Moab, UT and Ouray, CO

May 2006

Day 01 - Day 02 - Day 03 - Day 04 - Day 05

Friday Next morning we wake up around 6:00AM and left the campsite 7:00AM. Crossing Zion National Park was easy at that time in the morning. Few cars and no animals on the road.
Riding East at Ut-9 we exit the park and stop for gas at Mount Carmel Junction (US-89/UT-9) around 7:30 (26 miles from the campsite). From there we went North on US-89 up to Bryce Zion Midway Resort, few miles north of Hatch, when we stop for breakfast. Nice people and honest food. Few more miles North and we are at the US-89/UT-12 junction. The Utah 12 is one of the great/best roads in Utah. You must ride it.
	The stretch from Escalante to Bolder and from there to Torrey is amazing. At Torrey we make a right turn onto UT-24 towards Capitol Reef N.P. and Hanksville. We stopped at the Capitol Reef Visitor Center and got some gifts for friends. Nice mouse pads.
Around 1:30PM (240 miles from Springdale) we were at Hanksville and stop for lunch at XXXXX. Nice people there too and very Motorcycle friend. We charged our camera batteries there and also re-charged our neck coolers. The temperature was 95F and we decided to take the short way to Moab witch was continuing on UT-24 north, towards I-70 and then South on US-191. So, after another one hour and half and lot of wind and heat (wind was 35mph) we got to Moab at 4:30PM and check in on our camp site Moab Valley RV Resort. One of the worst camp experiences we had so far. More on that later.

Around 7:00PM our other friends, one couple from South Dakota, the other from New Mexico arrived at the campsite for us to have a dinner at a local Mexican restaurant. They were staying at Monticello, 57 miles South of Moab, in a Motel. Smart people…
We had our dinner and went back to our tents/rooms.
Another bad night. I believe because the holidays, we had people arriving as late (or should say early?) 1:30AM, and again we had hard time sleeping. On top of that, the campground looks like doesn’t have enforcement on the 10:00PM silence police, so many happy campers were talking loud and playing all night long.

Today we rode UT-9, US-89, UT-12, I-70 and US-191 in a total of 350 miles in 7:00 driving hours/9:30 total. Got temperatures from 65F to 95F and high winds from Hanksville to Moab (35+mph).