Utah - beautiful, hot, and very, very red

So... Utah.  Oh. My. God.

I doubt I will ever see a more beautiful landscape.

Lance on the North end of La Sal Loop Road - you may recognize this scene, they shoot a lot of Western films here

Something about the way the red rocks have a different personality depending on the time of day and the way the light hits them. And no rock outcropping looks like any other. And they seem to have faces and shapes hidden in them.

Something about the way everyone is so friendly.

First we stayed in Escalante.  Lance and I arrived a day before my folks, who trailered their Goldwing and stayed in a cabin on the same property.  The wind hammered us from the side all the way from LA - it felt like a 50 knot wind at least, and so we used that first day or so to recover, and do a little dirt exploring on the bikes.  The wind was bad still and we got sandblasted so it was a very short ride.

The route from Escalante to Moab had a couple of options: the Google Map direct way was up 12 over Hogback Ridge, a ridgetop road where the earth drops away on both sides of the road for thousands of feet (we shot some video - you won't believe it - we'll share the Youtube link as soon as we figure out how to do all that).  Oh, there's also a couple spots with grades up to 14%.  We could have gone the long, freeway way.  We went the direct route.  Not sorry.

The bus handled the elevation like a champ, although we got quite slow on occasion, and we did find some more crazy crosswinds, but it was totally worth it to see the beautiful canyons along the way.

Now we know our bus can handle big inclines, and heat, and long steep declines (engine brakes are a very good thing).  Now we can choose to work the Rockies into our plans if we want to do so.

We found that we cannot run both air conditioners on the 30 amp service we were given in Moab, and for some reason our site is the only one that gets full sun all day, every day.  The temperatures are expected to continue to exceed 100 degrees for the duration of our stay, so we broke camp and moved to a different site, one with a 50amp service and some shade.  Much better.

This morning when dumping the gray tank I noticed some small leaks in the hose, the same brand-new hose we installed right before leaving home.  We can use the shorter one but since we don't know what's causing the leaks so fast we are likely to run into the same problem if we can't identify the source, perhaps there's something sharp poking the hose when it's stuffed away (subsequent investigation found this to indeed be the problem, the sharp edge was smoothed and the faulty hose was removed).  And the jacks just won't settle in the deep gravel. Frustrating.  Newbie problems probably. I think I will walk the dog around the compound and see what I can see.  Surely someone's figured this jack thing out, just need to find me a guru...