Petroglyphs!

Hello!

 

What a great day!  Up around 7 to a fabulous morning!  We were able to open the screens last night and ignore the air conditioning entirely!  Wonderful shower in our bathroom, and in no time at all we were assembled and out for breakfast!  Susan is an amazing hostess!  Her breakfasts begin with her homemade granola with fresh fruit and cream or yogurt. This is followed by an incredible cinnamon muffin, with bacon and our choice of eggs.  To go with the eggs, she provided an excellent salsa.  YUM!  Finally, we pulled ourselves away from the breakfast table and headed out.

 

Today’s journey was to look at Indian petroglyphs on Salt Island, which is just a couple of miles back up the road.  Susan knew all about them (she and her husband spent years in the area running rafting trips on the San Juan river), and I’m so glad she told us what was to see on both sides of the road, as there was one “official” panel on one side (to the west), and then panel after panel of glyphs on the other side of the road (to the east), once you followed a marked pathway.  The interesting thing, though, is that we had read about the first panel, but didn’t find anything on-line about the second, which went on and on, and we probably would have missed if it hadn’t been for Susan!  Thank you, Susan!

 

The hike was about a mile or so long, but we were rewarded with stunning petroglyphs all over the canyon’s walls.  Some were just a series of holes somehow chiseled into the rocks, and others were pictures of people on horses.  As R pointed out, some of these latter would obviously be from after the Spanish were through this area, as that was anybody’s first look at mounted horsemen!  There was an interesting sign available to explain the differences between the panels that were 3,000 years old vs.those that were 600-800 years old.  We enjoyed them all!

 

Got back to the car around 11:30 and decided to head to Blanding (about 25 miles back up the road), as Susan was telling us about an interesting museum there.  Well … we made it to Blanding, but instead of finding the museum she had told us about, we found their Dinosaur Museum!  It was great fun, and contained some amazing artifacts and fossilized remains!  We’ve been watching a Great Courses segment on Paleoanthropology, and it was so odd – some of the things that the instructor had been telling us, we were actually able to relate to the museum!  Amazing – and I thought he was only interested in microfossils! Who knew?!

 

By the time we finished with the dinosaurs, we were ready for lunch.  Our plan is to go to the local steak house (The Cottonwood) tonight here in Bluff, so we didn’t want to have a big lunch, but we were definitely ready for something.  R checked TripAdvisor for Blanding, and truly, there wasn’t much! Then I spotted the local A&W! It’s been quite a while since we’ve gone there – but this was even more fun!  It was a combination gas station/small market/A&W AND BOWLING ALLEY!  Wow!  What fun!  Hot dogs with onions for each, and glasses of A&W Root Beer to wash it down! Unfortunately, no one was bowling at the time, but I keep threatening Robert that we’ll get there to bowl at some point in the near future!  (As I haven’t bowled in years, it’s highly unlikely, though!). Oh well!  There’s always hope!

 

After our wonderful lunch, we decided to head back to our B&B.  I got a nice nap in, and R worked on the computer.  Now I’m up and hoping that I can successfully blog finally! Thanks to my friend Katy, I figured out how to add (I hope, I hope…) a “follow by email” gadget to the blog.  Still haven’t figured out how to change the color or font, but hopefully that will come at some point!  So … more later!

m

xxx