Saturday 30 July 2016

No Mountain High Enough

July 29th
I can’t keep track of the days nor our schedule so I’m gonna try and see what I remember. We are currently on our way from Cortez to Monument Valley. We were supposed to visit Mesa Verde National Park but apparantly part of it collapsed a couple of weeks ago so we couldn’t go there. Instead we went rafting. The first thing my sister said when she heard was ‘are you sure that’s a good idea, seeing how clumsy you are?’ But it turned out the water level in the river was very low so it was an easy route. We did get shipwrecked on the rocks a couple of times in the beginning but after a while we figured it out and we weren’t half bad at it. It was actually pretty cool and I’d love to do it again, maybe on a river that’s a bit more challanging.

We spent the night on the most beautiful campsite so far. It was surrounded by mountains and the sunset was amazing. Yesterday evening we didn’t do anything special, we just had a relaxed night at the campsite, playing games. Yesterday’s drive took us from Santa Fe to Cortez so we crossed another state line, from New Mexico to Colorado. Colorado apparently has some of the highest mountains in the US. I’ve spent most of the drive gazing out the window, the scenery was amazing! Every state we cross has me thinking I could live there but this was the prettiest part of the trip so far.

Santa Fe was really great as well. It’s the oldest town of the US and it was really pretty, the people were nice and the food was great. In the morning, we spent some time exploring the city and shopping for souvenirs. The nigth before we had already gone into the city to eat and one of the other girls and I listened to some music at a festival in a nearby park. Before coming to Santa Fe we explored the caves of Carlsbad. We went to see the bats fly out at dusk, there were hundreds of them, they just kept coming, it was a really cool thing to see. The caves were amazing as well. It was 750 feet deep (don’t really know how many metres that is?) and quite steep in some places. Thankfully we didn’t have to climb back up as there was an elevator. The cave system was massive. I think it took us about an hour to get down there and then almost another hour to walk around the big underground ‘rooms’. It was really cool and very pretty (as long as you don’t think about the amount of rock above you).

The campsite in Carlsbad was next to a highway (again, just like the one in Austin the day before) so I didn’t sleep much. But at least the restrooms were close. Our way of judging a campsite is basically this: toilets need to be close. We’ve had lots of different campsites, some on grassy fields, sometimes sand, one was in a desert like place and scattered with rocks (really comfortable..), next to highways, one was next to a train track, some had really big showers, one had a toilet that was basically a hole in the ground, most had a pool but last night’s one had the most amazing view. Althoug the one in Santa Fe was also really cool because you could see so many stars, and even the milky way.

I think I’m almost to the point where I ended my last blog, when we were on our way to Austin. It was really hot that day so we went tubing down a beautiful river. It was very relaxing and a great way to cool down. After the tubing we went into the city to explore a bit. We had bought spray paint so we went to test our skills at an outdoor ‘gallery’ but it suddenly started raining so we decided to grab some food and go back to the campsite.  










I think I mentioned before that we play games on the bus to pass the time (when people are not sleeping). One of those games is called ‘Horse´. Everytime you see a horse you scream ‘horse’ and the first to do that gets a point. If you see a horsebox you can ‘steal’ a horse from someone else but if we pass a cemetery everyone loses their horses. One of the girls was obsessed with winning and it was hilarious to hear her scream ‘horse’ all the time, because we saw loads of ranches yesterday. I’m really looking forward to my time in Wyoming after this bustour, all the horses made me realize I prefer riding through beautiful places like this over visiting cities after all.  



 We also went to Roswell, where they claim Aliens crash landed in 1947 :)




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