7-31-2018 Monument Valley, UT

Sign in the bathroom, “Please do not overfill the toilet.”  Huh?

12-hour slow cooked mutton stew.  YUM!

In Bloomfield, NM, at the Farmer’s Market Grocery I found mutton!  We’ve never had mutton!  Well!  I bought some chops and we did them up same as we do lamb shoulder chops.  They were quite tough.  But I wasn’t about to give up.  The following day, we went back and bought a mutton roast with the intention of throwing it in the crockpot for several hours.  Well, after 6 hours it was still quite tough and required an overnight in the fridge to pull off a lot of fat.  Six more hours the next day and finally the meat was brought around to tender.  The veggies were added, the broth was thickened to gravy and bazinga, mutton stew, enough for 3 nights!  And if I may pat us on the back a moment, it’s delicious!  (Btw, blindfolded, you’d think you were eating beef.)

Monument Valley KOA

This campground, Monument Valley KOA, is such a stripper, bare-bones place that we immediately regretted our scheduled, bought and paid for, 2-night stay.  That was premature.  Just a few miles south across the border into Arizona, we found Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park.  A brief explanation of the geological history of the land formations claims that this area, submerged beneath the oceans (specifically the Gulf of Mexico) 570 million years ago, emerged when the two continental plates collided.  The seas subsided through the cracks and slowly the sandstone that made up the ocean floor was swept away by erosion over thousands of centuries.  What is seen today are the hard, core, “organ rocks” that remain.  It takes several hours to drive through the park because at every turn, a more magnificent monument than the last appears, each with its own name.  Why I have lived 70 years without seeing a rock formation that looks like a camel and suddenly in the last few weeks I have encountered two remains a mystery.  It was a day of adventure well spent.

Rob at The View Restaurant in Monument Valley

Camel Butte.  (You gotta admit, it does look like a camel.)

Lindy and some BIG rocks! 
(Look carefully.  It's the chick
in the orange shirt.)

Lindy and Rob at Thumb Butte

West Mitten and East Mitten Buttes (I call
them Left Mitten and Right Mitten.)

With nothing to do, no phone and no internet, we broke camp early this morning and by 10 AM we were on our way to Hurricane, UT.  I’ll admit that I am a little leery of a place named, “Hurricane.”  It was a very upsy-downsy, windy leg of the trip.  My palms were sweaty when we finally arrived.  But it is a beautiful, shady, grassy park and we are settled in with a toonie.  This is our last 2-day stayover before we hit the dusty trail for home.  Our homing beacons are screaming.  But you never know, there could be another story or two in my fingers.