After our week in Green River we moved our rig a whopping 70 miles southeast to Moab, an exciting town we discovered on our first foray to Arches National Park. Here is a photo of our campsite which was very conveniently located near the heart of town, just a short walk from an excellent grocery store called City Market, a short bicycle ride to the creek trail through downtown and across the street from a microbrewery restaurant.
The locals said it had been a cool, late spring but the hot weather finally arrived just before we did. Oh joy. Temperatures reached the high 90’s daily during our four day stay in Moab.
On the first morning we bicycled to the lovely, shaded, paved creek trail that snaked through the town. We explored for a couple of miles altogether, cycling past residential areas, community vegetable patches and Rotary Park (more on that later). Then we returned to our RV to change into our decent duds and drove over to a Mexican restaurant at the far end of town to have lunch with the Rotary Club of Moab. It was only an hour meeting (not like in Port Perry) and the Rotarians were glad to meet us. We presented them with one of my autographed Doors of Port Perry for their fall auction fundraiser and they gave us their Moab Rotary pennant. Their guest speaker was a Rotarian from Toronto who was a professor at U of T and he spoke very eloquently about his department’s ongoing research into climate change. He flies all over the world doing presentations about this. After the meeting we stayed and spoke further to him and he gave us some tips about the best trails to hike in the area. It was a lovely visit. (He has a vacation home near Moab.) We drove back to the RV and went for a walk up and down the downtown strip for the remainder of the afternoon.
The next day we drove into Arches National Park to do one of the easier hikes (2 miles total) called Park Avenue. In the photo below you can see John starting down the canyon. The other photos show some of the unusual rock formations we saw.
After our Park Avenue Hike we drove along the Colorado River for an hour or so. We saw several rafting excursions on the river.
Unlike our blue rivers in Ontario, the Colorado River is an opaque brown colour due to the suspended dirt in it. Disolved mountains…
We saw this interesting natural cave (below) at the top of an enormous rock ridge. Very impressive.
When we arrived back at the campground we retreated to our air conditioned trailer and had a nice cool nap for over an hour. Then we got on our bicycles and rode to the creekside trail back to Rotary Park. I brought my camera with me so I could photograph a unique feature of the park – it had a permanent outdoor installation of percussion instruments made by a company called http://www.freenotes.net/.
There were lots of different xylophones and the hammers were attached to the instruments with cables. Also there were drums of various types as well as cymbals, maracas and tambourines. We had fun composing some tunes on the various xylophones.
Some young boys were playing on the instruments too (below)
All the sounds were fairly muted so the notes were soft, kind of like wind chimes, and the ‘music’ people create does not disturb other visitors in the park. The installation was near a picnic area and next to the bicycle path. We thought this would be a fabulous idea for Palmer Park in Port Perry if the instruments can withstand winter conditions.
July 21st, 2009 at 12:34 pm My thoughts exactly! Canadian winters are tough. But what a neat idea if they do!