Road trip! With photos!

Well. The trip was amazing. And yet I'm glad to be back. It was the right length of time.

Everything went great. Apparently it's been very cold and rainy/snowy in Denver over the past week, so we picked the right time to go. Everywhere we went, the weather was amazing. It was the perfect time to be in a convertible. Traveling with the dog wasn't difficult at all; everywhere we went was stunningly beautiful; we were able to relax and just enjoy being together. It was lovely.

I won't even attempt any sort of play-by-play, since we did so much. I'll just give some highlights. But before I get into that, a general description of the route we took:

• South to Santa Fe for a weekend
• West to Arizona to see the Grand Canyon and other sights and visit my aunt and uncle in Prescott (in the northern mountains)
  
• North to Moab, Utah
• East back to Denver

So, there you have it. And you can see photos of everything we saw in the full set here (this time I even added descriptions). And of course I've included a few of my favorite photos in this post.

So, onto the highlights!

Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona was nothing like I was expecting, but it was absolutely beautiful. Specifically, I loved the Painted Desert. So gorgeous.



New Mexico was beautiful, and we liked Santa Fe. But we were struck by the huge contrast between the obvious poverty surrounding cities like Santa Fe and Taos and the cities themselves that cater solely to better-off tourists. Of course, we fell into that second group so we were only exacerbating the problem. But it was very striking. And we found Taos to be incredibly tacky, despite hearing raves about the town from friends.



The Grand Canyon was spectacular. I've seen it before, but I guess I didn't remember it that well because again, it was nothing like I was expecting. It was beautiful and at times you could see the Colorado River at the bottom, but it didn't look quite like my mental image of a canyon. It was a lot more... three-dimensional, I guess. But amazing.


It's so nice to have family in the west. The three days we spent with them were super relaxing, and we went on several nice hikes while we were there. Plus, they had a dog for Montana to play with, and they live near Sedona, which is beautiful but sufficient to see in a day, as far as we were concerned.



We absolutely adored Arches National Park in Utah. At first we didn't see any arches and we thought we'd gone crazy, but then we started noticing them. And once you started seeing them you saw them everywhere. Though I'm still a little disappointed that we didn't see any of the two-inch arches that the brochure said you could find in the park. And also, dogs weren't allowed on any of the trails, which was really too bad. Although it was good we had a convertible, because we could leave Montana in the car with the top down while we hiked.



The west, especially the southwest, is gorgeous. I'm so glad we live here. Maybe on our next road trip we'll check out the more northwestern states like Montana and South Dakota. I can't wait.