We did a few of the shorter, easier hikes out to some of the more popular places. We were so early that there was almost no one else on the trails. Most places we had to ourselves. If we ran into five people anywhere along a trail, it was a crowd. (This is versus later, when the huge tour buses show up and fifty or more people pour out of them at each place.)
The sky was cooperating that morning, too.
As was the weather.
After walking around a bit, we stopped by the visitors' center. It doesn't open until 7:30 a.m., and both days we arrived so early that we had skived in without paying an entrance fee. So we stopped, made a donation double the cost of the entrance fee, had a look around, and visited the gift shop.
As we drove out of the park, we planned a future visit. There is no way to see this place in two days.
We went back out and had breakfast at one of the little bakery/sandwich shops. It was fine. Nothing inspiring, but quick, easy, and not fast food. We took coffees back with us to our room to have while we packed up.
We hit the road quite early, just after 11:00 a.m. We stopped for gas on the way out of town and then, maybe for coffee reasons, had to stop in just about every tiny little town on the road. In Utah, there are these convenience stores called Maverick Adventure's First Stop. They are almost aggressively well stocked with every snack food produced in the continental U.S. It was crazy. (We opted for Corn Nuts.)
Then we were on our way again. As we neared Cortez, Colorado, Dave suggested that we stop for lunch. We checked online and found a restaurant called The Farm Bistro, which serves a kind of farm to table menu. We shared some zucchini fritters and I had steak fingers and salad and Dave had a black bean burger and salad.
It was kind of a strange little restaurant, apparently set up by someone who had never been to another restaurant ever, just heard bits and pieces about how restaurants are run. You walked past an unmanned podium with menus on it to get to the very back of the restaurant to a counter where you placed your order. They gave you a copy of your order and some random plastic toy animal as a marker for the server to identify you.
The server would bring out your food and, when you were finished, you would take your copy of the order to a register off to the side, near the middle of the restaurant, to pay your bill to whichever server happened to see you standing there. It was bottle-neck city, even though everyone who worked there seemed relatively good-natured about this weird Rube Goldbergian place. The food was decent though.
We hit Durango in the late afternoon, checked into a place, and went out to the grocery store to pick up a few things to make a salad for dinner. We thought we might go out to a movie, but when it came time to actually leave the room, we both decided to just stay in and watch bad cable TV.
It was an early night.
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