Day 9 – Traveling to Monument Valley

Megan’s Take

Today started with Mass at St. Rita of Cascia in Mancos CO. I really like visiting new churches when we’re traveling. In our experience, the churches out West are smaller and fewer and further between – not as many Catholics in these parts. St. Rita certainly wasn’t the smallest we’ve been to, but it’s maybe 1/10 of the size of St. Bartholomew at home.

Emilia was really impressed by how small it was. But it was pretty and welcoming to visitors, and, based on the announcements at the end, it has a very active congregation. They have “cookie Sunday” coming up for Father’s Day, and I wish we were going to be in town.

We had a Walmart pickup (last Walmart we’ll be near for almost a week) and some mishaps with the trailer lights, which put us a couple hours behind schedule.

But we made it to Hovenweep National Monument.

I wanted to skip it to save time, because it was simply a detour en route to Monument Valley. But Phil insisted that we go. I’m glad we did, because the 2 mile square tower group loop was so much fun with the kids! At the start of the hike, we descended into a small canyon

and climbed out of it, and then we walked along sandstone rock along the rim where we could view ancestral structures.

It’s rated easy and relatively flat for Utah, so it was doable for the kids. They had a lot of fun climbing up and down and over all the rocks. 

After that, we (Phil and I) enjoyed a beautiful drive to Monument Valley.

The kids played some kind of make-believe pretend game with each other, chattering in the backseat, but they eventually devolved into screaming and crying. Fortunately Emmett took a late nap on the end of our drive, which gave us some quiet to enjoy the scenery. 

We rolled into Goulding’s RV Resort, and it has paved roads that are great for bikes. I found a small loop where Emmett and Emilia raced each other like Lightning McQueen and Jackson Storm.

Phil’s Take

I don’t have much to add, except to say that there was more to the trailer woes than she mentioned. I have been experiencing some weakness in the brakes on the trailer, so I popped the cover off of the main junction box where the trailer plug going to the truck meets the wiring going to the rest of the trailer. I pulled stuff out and looked at it to see if anything looked suspicious. Nothing did, so I put everything back together.

When we headed out, I got a trailer wiring fault warning in the truck, which was new. I narrowed it down to brakes, because it did it when I squeezed the manual control on the dash. This happening right after I messed around in that box tells me there is a wire or connection that was nearly broken. A few tests and it went back working, so we headed out. I knew we weren’t heading anywhere fast, with roads being mostly county roads, so there was unlikely to be any problem. We seldom saw another car on the road the whole way, so I was right.

While the kids were doing their bike ride, I traced the wires and redid the junction in that box for the brakes using the splice connectors I bought for fixing the lights earlier in the day. Hopefully that fixes it. I’ll know tomorrow.

We took a ton of pictures of our adventures today, so enjoy the gallery below.