Nov. 4-10, 2014
Moab and Ken's Lake were wonderful: We hiked and explored the town and La Sal Mountain Loop, had great food, and got a trailer part replaced (the electric tongue jack failed). But we began suffering from 'hitch itch'--the urge to see what's over the next hill--so hit the road for Goosenecks of the San Juan State Park, Utah, where we'd heard from many that the sites were ''really nice".
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| We agree. View from our site at Goosenecks. |
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| Not far from our site. It's easy to see that the San Juan river has carved a series of 'goosenecks' because we're camped on a cliff 1500 ft above it. |
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| Reading in the morning. Quiet...very few other campers here, even though the cost is a reasonable $10/night. Our site, though, is beyond the state park boundary, on BLM land, and so was free. |
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| What's not to like! |
Our routine: Get up, have coffee, maybe read, then walk...or maybe run back along the approach road:
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| Morning walk on approaching Goosenecks State Park |
Next, maybe another walk, this time along the rim:
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| Our site in the upper right corner |
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| Long way down. Looks like we're right on the edge, but we're really about 20 feet back. |
Sometimes, after walking/running and maybe some photography, we'd drive the 10 miles into Bluff, Utah for breakfast or brunch at Twin Rocks Trading Post:
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| Pretty good restaurant, especially for a town of only about 260. |
On the second day at Goosenecks we noticed a small class B/C motorhome, a Phoenix--one you never see, and one with a superb reputation for build quality. Anyway, we ended up meeting its owner, Gail, a new full-timer, and recently retired air traffic controller. She showed us her rig and she's really done a good job of customizing the interior. I had 'rig envy'.
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| Inspecting Gail's rig |
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| Gail and Leah, in front of Gail's Phoenix. Note flexible solar panels leaning on rig, far right. |
But then she saw my camera and asked what it was. "A Nikon D7100", I answered. She allowed that she would love one like it, as it was light and capable. "Oh", I said, "What camera do you have?" "A D810"! (This is Nikon's latest and greatest, a 36 megapixel full-frame DSLR. Now I had camera envy, as well. She not only has a good camera, she takes fantastic photos, too. Turns out we have quite a bit in common. She also follows several bloggers, just as I do. And one of them is
Tioga George, now retired from full-time RVing, but the inspiration for many new full-timers. She said she read his blog from the beginning to the end, a total of nearly 10 years of daily blog entries! I did the same, but started following him when he began blogging, in 2003 or so. If you follow the link above, you'll see his most recent post. However, the interesting stuff begins in 2003, so click on 'Archives", and navigate to 2003. Start there.
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| View of our camp site from Gail's |
On our walks along the rim, we noticed that other campers had created various types of rock art and rock structures, perhaps inspired by the Anasazi rock art (petroglyphs and pictographs) on rock walls all over the 4 corners area.
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| A spiral or maze, very well done, at our camp site on the rim at Goosenecks... |
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| ...perhaps inspired by spirals like this one, chipped into the rock near Bluff, Utah, about 1000 years ago. |
Spirals, we later learned, are among the most common types of rock art in Southwest, and are thought by some to symbolize migration or abandonment of one place for another.
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| On one side of our camp, the spiral... |
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...on the other a large stone fire pit...
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| ...which we put to good use at the end of the day. |
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