Arrival Sunday, August 2 (late!)
121 Miles | 3 Hours
Trip Notes: Mari books us a site at The Portal campground which puts us close to the entrance of Arches National Park and other destinations on our list. She likes it because it shows great LTE, and has a big pool, which we decide we definitely need.
During our drive, we check out the petroglyphs at Newspaper Rock and various other sights, falling a little more in love with Utah at each stop. On our way into Moab the canyons get progressively steeper and redder, and the whole place looks like a giant piece of pottery that’s been left out to bake in the sun.
There are plenty of charming boutiques and restaurants and bike shops and we can tell we are going to like it here despite the fact that it is 6:00 and 106 degrees when we pull into our campsite and plug into shore power to get the air conditioner going in the airstream.
Datta day trip: Logan Utah for an Airstream parts run, 8am - midnight
Monday, August 3
314 Miles each way | 5.5 Hour each way
While Mari and Sibri enjoy a hot day alternatively working, playing and swimming the pool in Moab, Datta takes the Airstream off the bumper and makes the drive back up to Logan to visit the Airstream repair guy to check out his boneyard for his parts wishlist, but arrives at the scene to find their yard closed down a week before and all the trailers that they had been parting out have been hauled away and melted into scrap.
Datta tracks them down and visits them at their new location on an abandoned sugar beet processing facility outside of town where they are just 3 days into re-establishing their operation in a sprawling warehouse that could probably fit close to 50 RVs.
They apologize for the wasted trip and cut me a deal on a replacement heater at wholesale cost for the troubles, making arrangements for it to be shipped back home. They also promise to keep a lookout for our wishlist of replacement parts and think they can put it together over the next few months at which time we can come back for another trip to Utah, which we have plenty of other reasons to come back to visit. Datta arrives back in Moab just before midnight, and it feels good to snuggle in for a well-deserved rest after a long day of running halfway across Utah in search of parts that weren’t there.
Moab, continued:
On Tuesday it gets as high as 111 but it’s a dry heat and we make good use of the pool at the resort. We also go to Arches and see some spectacular monuments including the double arch and the delicate arch, which is featured on the Utah State license plate, and accessed by a 3 mile hike with a long procession of other visitors winding up the hill to its remote setting. Datta makes friends with Ethan and Dave, a pair of 22-year-old Engineering School graduates from University of Vermont who made the trek here to do some serious mountain biking and are up for taking along another rider. Awesome!
They drive out to a trail called Magnificent 7 the next day, with Datta loading all 3 bikes onto the Audi and taking them to the top of the trail after leaving Ethan’s truck at a remote drop-off point on a fire road towards the bottom of the mountain. For some reason Datta’s shifter has frozen on the lowest ring, but between the 2 mechanical engineers they manage to set the gears at a higher speed to be able to keep pace on the single track course which is mostly downhill.
Moab offers an amazing blend of features with mile after mile of technical trails over largely rocky terrain with lots of jumps and banks set to a backdrop of jaw-dropping beauty. We end up taking a hiking excursion halfway down the hill to check out a particularly spectacular archway and canyon before getting back on the track to finish the ride. Trouble is, we can’t find the pickup vehicle and everyone’s out of water, but Ethan has Apple CarPlay and is able to track the vehicle location as a blip on the map showing that we have overshot it by at least a mile.
We spend the next hour depleted and exhausted, feeling the initial pangs of nausea and dehydration as we push our bikes back uphill, and his little white truck is a welcome sight, with several bottles of water waiting inside. The ride back up to the Audi takes the better part of 20 more minutes, making us glad we had parked a pickup vehicle because there’s no way we would have made it back that far on foot alive. Ironically, we nearly get wiped out about halfway up the hill by the first vehicles we have seen all afternoon when a descending Razor and Raptor barrel around the corner right at us in a cloud of dust and rocks before swerving off at the last second.
It feels particularly sweet to cool off in the pool when we get back to the resort and the girls make it even sweeter with home-baked cookies, which my biking buddies take a few extras for their ride the next day, when they plan to hit The Whole Enchilada, a longer ride that will likely take them close to 5 hours to complete.
We plan to leave in the morning but there is definitely more to see in Moab and we plan to come back again.
Departure Thursday, August 6
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