Moab or Bust

Friday morning, we packed up the tiny guy, his gear, our stuff and headed out on the road a little before noon.  Along the drive, I recognized many cities and landmarks from my past trips to Moab, but it had been a long time, and it was surprising to see what had changed.  There are now giant windmills at the base of Spanish Fork Canyon.  The classic Arby's where I ate so many lunches in Wellington is now gone.

We stopped about halfway, around Wellington, to eat a late lunch.  Frankie had slept pretty much the entire way by this point.  Then we continued on to Moab.  Frankie slept the rest of the way!

After checking at our hotel, we headed out to Arches National Park to meet our friends Aroon and Aarthi at the visitor center.  From here, we drove to Balanced Rock and combined cars to head toward the northwest corner of the park.  We ended up hiking all the way to Landscape Arch in quite a bit of wind.  There's a lot of sand on this trail, and Frankie didn't care for the blowing sand.  He doesn't like to keep his sunglasses on, so it's hard to protect him from the wind.  Misty forgot to put her hiking shoes on and had hiked the entire way in her sandals.  At this point we weren't so sure about going to Delicate Arch in the morning.

Upon returning to Balanced Rock to reclaim our friend's vehicle, we notice the full "super" moon was out and in great view behind Balanced Rock.  Aroon got out his tripod and I snapped some hand held shots. It was at this point that Aroon somehow 'lost' his tripod. We have come to the conclusion that he accidentally put his tripod in someone's car!

After sunset, we drove back to Moab and ate dinner at Pasta Jays.  Dinner was tasty. Misty had the 'Baked Lorenzo,' linguine baked in a tomato cream sauce with crumbled sausage, topped with freshly grated parmigiano cheese. Yum!

We found that Frankie had admirers at the nearby tables.  One lady, as we were getting ready to leave, stopped us and said something like, "You probably wonder whether your baby is really cute, or if it's just your parental bias... well let me tell you, your baby is *really* cute!"

After dinner we headed back to the Moab Valley Inn for a much needed night of rest. For dessert we took a piece of the 'Lemon Berry Cake' to the hotel and it was light and perfectly sweet. It was such a big piece, it took us two nights to finish it!