My Wife's First Trip to Moab—Here's What We Did!

Good afternoon everyone, the pictures you just saw are of us driving through the Uent Mountains, on the eastern edge of the Uent Mountains in northeastern Utah, we left the house and I say that we, like Cassie and Bowser, my

wife

and my dog, we are with me on this journey. We left home a few hours ago and drove the 80 miles straight, but it took us a little longer to get t

here

on the roads. We drove the 80 miles through the mountains to about 8,400 feet and came back down the other side. We are now in the city of Vernal Utah and I wanted to start the video with this mural on the side of a car wash in Vernal.

Greetings from the land of deen. Vernal is known for a couple of things: dinosaurs being one of them and oil and gas. The industry really is the other one and t

here

is a pink dinosaur in town. Look, that pink dinosaur on the letter A is kind of a symbol of Vernal and her name is Dina, so greetings from Din Land, cool mural, you can see the mountains we have. We go up and over those snow capped mountains in the distance, we're at about 5300 feet here so we're about 3000 feet lower than the highest point we drove up there and we're going to continue on.

On that dinosaur theme, our

first

real stop of the day is about a half hour east of here. I'll meet you once we get there. Now we're at the Dinosaur National Monument Visitor Center, complete with Stegosaurus and the pretty epic Rocky. Hills uh, this trailer here is

what

I think is a temporary Visitor Center for the National Monument. I think the real one is here, but it's currently closed, so I don't know

what

the deal is with that, but Cassie is actually here. With me, what have you been up to since the last time you were on the channel?

What's been a while? When was the last time you were in a video? I think our family camp read marathon oh yeah yeah that was 6 months ago something like that yeah. What have you been doing in the meantime? Just working on the house, choosing floors, yes, yes, the apartment saga has been ongoing and we thought we had it figured out, we thought we had found a floor that we liked, that we liked, but then it was gone. stock, so we found a different one that we liked, but the

first

one is now in stock, so we're still trying to figure it out, but anyway, as far as Dinosaur National Monument goes, we're getting back in the car and I'll drive a few more miles down the road until I get to what really is the main attraction in this part of the park.

This fancy new building is the Quarry exhibition hall and, uh, there's some kind of dinosaur Quarry wall here with a bunch of fossils embedded in it, okay guys, so you come in here and there's a huge slab of rock with thousands of dinosaur bones which is cool and I'm like with Whispering because it's really quiet here, but there's a skull. which you can clearly see right there and then all kinds of other bones, this building has two levels so we're on the top level and eventually we'll get down here, just bones on bones on bones, piles of those piles. of Bones and originally this slab would have been flat, this was an ancient river and many dinosaurs lived in the area and then there was a drought and many dinosaurs died and eventually they were all washed away into the river.

Look at this, I don't know if it's vertebrae or a tail or what, but this is incredible and to give you an idea of ​​the scale, there's Cassie down there, this used to be a lot bigger, like two or three times as wide. or three times as tall, just a huge wall of dinosaurs, but they were dug up and sent to museums and universities and that kind of thing was discovered by scientists in 1909 and then for a couple of decades afterward, all sorts of specimens of it were excavated. top quality and this is what's left which is surprising because I mean it's amazing but there aren't many completely intact specimens here just a lot of bits and pieces one of the signs here says there were 500 dinosaurs or 500 pieces dinosaurs found here and a full list of which, along with other animals found here, is here.

You can pause that and go find them if you want. Here is a cast of what one of the dinosaurs would have looked like. Of the smallest ones, the largest ones here were about 90 feet long, for example, this thing is just the femur of one of the largest dinosaurs and here is a little map or schematic showing what we currently have, this section brown and then this is What was the origin of this much larger section? So Cassy took this little map, I guess, of the bones and somehow identifies some of them and you can see a stegosaurus here and you know how it has those plates on the back, right here.

It's one of those dishes, how cool is that and then here's Bowser, he's been in the car but we're about to go on a little hike. This is a dog friendly hike. A very short walk from here to here. The quarry showroom was great. super cool, I have never seen so many dinosaur fossils before and we just started the hike and it ended now we are on this little cliff where there are some petroglyphs, there is this little Al Cove here at the end of the trail that is currently divided by a very hard shadow, but you can see a lot of petroglyphs here, they seem to be mostly human or humanoid figures with some pigment there, so some pictographs are also on the left side which is in the shade and then on the right side in the sun, I think it'll be a little bit harder to see them, but there's a lot of them around here too and then this guy here, I just noticed he has big feet, so that's part of it.

Bigfoot also has claws so he's part Wolverine and then he's got a lot of horns with this guy and by the way, I don't think I've really explained what this

trip

is so this is a three day four

trip

uh. I think it's going to be two videos, so this video and then the next one and we're going to go to some places that Cassie has never been to before and that I've been to a lot, so I've been to Vernal a lot. of times we are going to go to Grand Junction Colorado now we are like I don't know 20 or 30 miles from the Colorado border here in the northwest or northeast of Utah and the objective for the rest of the day is basically that to get to Grand Junction and how Cassie and Bowser are with me, this trip will be a little different than many of the ones I take, we're not actually going camping on this trip, we're getting a motel.

In Grand Junction tonight, so I guess we'll go there like I have a several hour drive ahead of me. I don't know exactly how long it is from here to Grand Junction. Let me check. real quick, it's 2 hours and 38 minutes, so I'm not going to record a ton of that. The ride should be pretty smooth, pretty easy, pretty fun, with scenery, you know, like this open desert landscape, except for one part where we go up. and about another pass, another pass that's like 8,002 or 3,300 feet uh, I think it's called Douglas Pass, it's there in Colorado. You could record some of those images with the GoPro or the Drone.

I do not know, we'll see. We'll see how much daylight we have and we'll see what it's like when we get there, but, yeah, otherwise we'll meet you guys at our motel in Grand Junction, okay guys, it's about 7:30, we're in our hotel in Grand Junction for the night, this place is called Red Roof, okay it was $63 for the night so not bad and then we had dinner, this is at a place called Ginger or Ginger Oriental Restaurant or something like that and uh yeah, it was a good day and I think my favorite part of the day was the dinosaur wall, the fossil wall, mine too.

I like that they had bones on the bottom where we could touch. I like to touch the bones, yes, because I have never been. a place where you can do that and especially see so many at the same time, yeah that was cool. Never, yes, I have never seen anything like it either. A really unique place and the trip was fun. I really like that trip. I have made this trip a couple of times in the last few months from Rock Springs Wyoming where we live through Vernal Utah to Colorado to Grand Junction. It's a great drive, the beautiful High Desert Drive, except for those couple of times when you go up. and over a mountain range uh, just a lot of fun, really cool.

Drive on, let's finish this here and then I'll meet you in the morning in downtown Grand Junction. This video will continue until tomorrow, uh, basically, The first half of tomorrow will also be in this video, so I'll see you later, good morning everyone and good morning Cassie, how did you sleep last night? Excellent. I wasn't too cold or too hot and I slept the entire time. I think I slept better in that bed than in our bed at home. Our bed at home is too soft and the other one is a little harder. That's better for my back.

We are in downtown Grand Junction and we are. We go to a bagel place on Main Street and that bagel place is right here, we're right across the street, it's called Main Street Bagels. It's now 2:45 in the afternoon and we've driven about an hour and a half from uh. from the end of the Colorado National Monument to Rim Drive, that Scenic Drive that goes through there and we are closer to the Moab area now maybe I don't know half an hour outside of Moab and really the theme of this trip is that I wanted to show Cassie a couple of my favorite areas, you know, these are areas that I've spent a lot of time in over the years.

I've been to Grand Junction probably 15 or 20 times. I'll be in Moab later today. I've been to Moab like the Moab area probably a hundred times, at least several dozen, probably approaching 100 at this point and this particular place we're at right now is called Fisher. Torres and this is a spectacular area. I've climbed several of the towers here and the views are just fantastic, the colors are great, it's a really nice area and there's a trail we're following that's dog friendly, so we've got Bowser. with us that goes between the towers, makes its way, winds along the towers, so we'll show you a beautiful view of some, some beautiful rock formations, so this is the first time I've been here or anywhere in this area and seeing all these land formations and everything is just stunning it's beautiful like I see in Tristan's videos but being here in person I keep trying to take pictures and I just don't so if you've ever seen the videos from Tristan and you're like wow, that's amazing, he did a really good job of capturing them, but I also keep stopping to take photos and I just like sightseeing and I'm like, oh, let's take a photo, let's take a photo, this is a cool place. but Tristan's threshold for spectacular views and beauty is very high here because he's been to incredible places and I haven't, so to me it's like a rock wall, it's impressive, but to prove it, he says, um, there are views much better, about A/4 mile down the road, about 10 feet to the right, yes, but I'm having a great time and getting a little dizzy.

I'm just wandering around looking at all the amazing things, but I'm glad Tristan finally got me here. that we could make this a trip, wait, I can't get off this rock, it had a butt, okay, but yeah, this is all cool, look at that and then I like to see the priest, that's his name, you can't. I see it right now, but the priest in the distance that has been our backdrop for much of this walk, the rock operation is in Castle Valley, so Castleton or Castle Rock and then the priest and the rectory and Periot Mesa, everyone over there, okay?

I'm done, I also know people are going to say oh you should have Cassie in the videos more, you should have her talk more in the videos. Cassie doesn't particularly like to talk in videos. I don't care to talk, I just don't know what to say I mean, yeah, because we go to that's the battle Yeah, we go to your places and you say, oh, this rock is called that, this place is that's the story of this and I say , wow, it's as pretty as what. I'm going to say that I don't know, but just so you know, I'm not like telling her not to talk, like a moment ago she told me that she wanted to take the camera and talk and I said great, that's amazing. but usually that's not the case, so you know she's in it as much or as little as she wants.

I'm not forcing her to do it in any way. Hey guys, it's actually the next day. Now we've just been enjoying it. our time in the greater Moab area is uh it's sunset the next day actually we've come to Dead Horse Point which is a state park near Moab in kind of Canyon Lands National Park and we're here to see the sunset and We are going home tomorrow morning. I haven't really been filming today because we wanted to just enjoy our time together, but we had a great time. We went to Arch National Park this morning and again, I didn't really film. but I have filmed many Arches videos in the past.

I'll link to some of them below if you're interested in them. But I'll give the camera to Cassie so she can tell us what she thinks of Arch National Park because, this was her first time there. I've been there literally dozens of times. I wrote a guide to hiking Arch National Park. I'm veryfamiliar with the park. Cassie wasn't like that. It was Cassie's first time, so let me show you the view here on this side of the point and then I'll hand you the camera. Over to Cassie, here she is looking towards Moab. Moab is in this direction.

By the way, there are some pots like settling ponds in case you're curious and it's quite windy so I apologize if the audio is difficult but these are the Lal Mountains. go up to about 12,700 feet and then look at this beautiful, beautiful country, absolutely epic scenery here's Cassie and here's Bowser and look at this, this is Canyon Country, okay, actually I think we're going to enjoy the sunset first and then. I'll give the camera back to Cassie uh I tried to give her the camera and she I can't think right now there's no time we only have a few minutes of sunlight left yeah so let's do that and then talk and update you guys on everything , okay guys, I think the sun has almost set, it's almost completely behind the horizon or below the horizon, there is an epic place, a great place to end the day, a great place to end the trip, what ?

You think it was beautiful, it's beautiful because we're still here, it's amazing, I love it, okay guys, excuse the wind noise, excuse our hair, we're kind of crouching behind a little cliff here, but it's just doing so much, still it's really really windy an amazing place though a really fun place to catch a sunset and tell us what you thought of Arches National Park today what was your favorite part of Arches it was towards the end we stopped in a little area picnic and the Lal Mountains were in the background, what was that Balanced Rock picnic area?

So we stopped at a picnic area to let Bowser out and from there you can stand on a bed of rocks and see the snow covered blue mountains with the Red Rock formations right there, oh. It was just beautiful and when we were driving through the park today I thought, yeah, the Earth is old, like when you're there in person and you can see the millions of years that you know the rock has layers. I can see how old the Earth is just a very old landscape very eroded very broken it's been there for a while yeah and anything else you want to share about the trip I'm glad I finally got to see it because Tristan has been here a million times and it was kind of a legend to me, so I'm glad I finally got to see it with my own eyes and Bowser got to see some of it too from like a foot off the ground to 10 inches off the ground. raise it up so you can see more of the scenery and uh, again, we didn't really film in Arches today, but we did take a bunch of pictures with our instant camera.

Cassie was using a Fujifilm Instax 210 and then me. she was using this guy, so as I finish this video, I'm going to play them with some music and some of the little snapshot impressions that we took. I hope you enjoyed the video, thanks for watching, let us know what you think, let us know what your favorite part was let us know if you have any questions and I'll see you next time. Can you edit it together? Be sure to visit Aventura. Check out my new site where you can get access to a map of all my free campsites plus monthly bonus videos you won't find anywhere else.

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