The Great Wander

Traveling is hard.  Even when you know where your next destination is going to be, it’s a bit different, when every few nights you are sleeping in a new location, even if you are sleeping on your own pillow and your ‘bed’ is a Thermarest!  As we planned this trip, we knew that after only a few nights at a first few campgrounds, we picked a spot that we would be at for a bit longer.

Just out of Blanding, UT is a great Forest Service campground with several spots that were spread out, lots of room for both tents and our grill.  From there, we were able to hit the Four Corners, Monument Valley, Valley of the Gods, Canyonlands National Park, and Bears Ears National Monument.  We even took one day to do the mundane pieces of life, like paying bills, that needed to be done. 

Canyonlands was the first national park that we took the dogs into.  As I mentioned in the post about traveling with dogs, many parks aren’t very dog friendly.  I understand why, it just meant that we had to do some adjustments to our travels.  The Needles District of Canyonlands is really just one paved road with lots of hiking trails.  Here is one place we needed to make adjustments to our travels.  What we did was set limits on how long two of us would be out hiking, while one of us stayed in the car with the dogs.

Dogs are allowed to be anywhere cars can be.  So, in basically in parking lots and along side the road.  While two of us hiked and enjoyed the scenery and took pictures, one of us stayed at the car and would alternate between running the car for the air conditioning and taking the dogs on short walks around the parking lot.  Just before we went into the park, we did find some BLM land that we were able to let the dogs run around on and get some exercise. 

Canyonlands is an amazing park, but because of our limits with the dogs, we couldn’t get to some of the spots we would’ve liked to get to, like the confluence of the Green River and the Colorado River.  It would’ve been fun to get to that spot, since we knew we’d be heading up to the headwaters of the Green River a bit later on in the trip.  But the hikes that we did get to were great.  We were able to hike some short and amazing hikes and still allow everyone to see what we were close to. 

I mentioned the cooking thing earlier on too, and here was a spot where we were able to practice that. After we left the park, we went to another campground, just to use the campground table.  We set up our two-burner stove and got the water boiling so that we could cook up our backpacker’s meals.  Having these little backpacker meals is great when you need to get some good food in pretty quickly.

We had a storm heading our way and wanted to get things moving, but it was still a good 45 minutes back to camp, so the backpacker meals were an excellent choice this time.  While one of boiled the water and waited the 15 minutes for the meals to rehydrate, the other two got the dogs running again so that once we got back to camp, they were all ready to settle down for the night.

Our dogs are pretty good about not roaming too much.  Having said that, the younger one does have a larger range at the moment than we really like.  The older one, well, he wanders from his food bowl to a tent or a lap and back.  He’s 13.  He’s not going far, but we do keep them on a leash in the campground, especially when other campers are around.  That night, though, some other campers didn’t follow the leashed pet rule in the campground and around 11 pm, I was awakened by Kona’s growl.  He was in Matthew’s tent, so I got up to find a cute little basset hound mix sniffing around our picnic table.  I wasn’t in the best mood having been asleep for a bit already and escorted him out of our campsite.  He was friendly enough, but when you’re in a campground with dogs…leash your dog.  You never know what other dogs are around and how they will react to your dog.

After four days at this site, it was one to our next spot…which included several consecutive nights at a hotel!  I never thought I’d be so excited to stay at hotel, but boy the idea of a hot shower, only walking about 10 feet to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night…it was pretty exciting to me!  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed everything up to this point in time, but sleeping on an actual mattress, well, I was ready for it!