Part 2: Arches, Canyons, all that jazz

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Time for some pictures from the second half of our UT road trip. I've just been reminded that all the cool kids are on Twitter, and that (being cool) I should be, too. If I were already twittering, you'd have had a verbal description of all this over a week ago. So, I'm sorry about that. You'll just have to make do with the photos. Late.

One thing we noticed, in between the amazing natural beauty, was the incredible desolation. Once you're off the interstate, many of the small towns in Southern UT are just falling apart. Particularly noticable was the succession of depression-era cars, simply abandoned and untouched for maybe eighty years. Here's an example:


The best one, I didn't get a photo of. It was a railroad car, on a single pair of rails, completely isolated. I guess at some point Utah decided to close that railroad and recycle the tracks, and I was imagining some intransigent train driver, sitting on his train refusing to budge, til they just removed all the tracks from around him.

Back to the cool scenery. After small town desolation, we moved on to the tourist hotspot of Moab. Everything there was kind of overpriced, but it was an ideal location for the Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. This next picture is Landscape Arch.


And here's the view from the Island in the Sky, in Canyonlands, with and without us jumping:



As I tried to explain earlier, this whole place was made by aliens. Finally, do you recognize this pose?


What are Pierre and I pointing at? We may never know.

After Moab and the parks, we dropped into Salt Lake for a night on our way up North. It reminded me how terrible Hilton hotels are these days. And from there it was a long, long drive homeward! This time without snowstorms.

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This song is pretty cute. Unfortunately, it's in a chip commercial here, but I gather in the UK that Slow Club still retain some indie-ness.