Day 4 – Mesa Verde

We got up on Day 4 of our trip and headed out to Mesa Verde which was about a half an hour from where we were at the campground. It cost $15.00 to get into the park and you had to drive 15 miles up a twisty canyon mountain road to get to the visitor center. It was really something, how they had built the road on the mountain.  In this picture you can see the road going up the right side of the mountain. 

We were really worried about the camper and the brakes overheating, but it did really good.

We bought tickets to do a guided tour of the Cliff Palace Dwellings at $3 each. The tour lasted about an hour and a half. We had to walk down these tiny tiny steps that were between big huge boulders. We didn’t really get to go into any of the dwellings, just walked on the outside of the dwelling and listened to the tour guide. The dwellings were built about 800 years ago and they think had about 150 rooms in it. It was really cool. We rode the scooter around the park instead of taking the camper from the visitor center. It was cool when we got there, but warmed up pretty quick, but the weather was still nice, very comfortable.

This is one of the views from the road we drove in on.

They had a big fire in the park, can’t remember what year they said this one was, you can see some of the burned up trees in this picture.

We could see for miles.

More of the trees burned up.

 

This was a dwelling that we could see while we were waiting for our tour to start.

We then headed out toward the Grand Canyon. I took quite a few pictures of the monuments in the distance. It’s pretty country.  The camper has done really good in all this traveling. We’ve put one quart of oil in it so far and it’s been getting about 7 or 8 miles to the gallon in gas. We’ve been fighting a lot of wind though which probably hasn’t helped and been on a lot of two lane roads.

We finally made it to the Grand Canyon right at dusk, we got to see the sun set on the canyon, which was really pretty. It was $25 to get into the park for a 7 day pass. We drove toward the main visitor center and pulled over at some places to look at the canyon until it got really dark and we couldn’t see. Kasey fell asleep during the drive.

We got lost inside of the park trying for find our way out, it was pretty crazy place. We finally found a campsite outside of the Grand Canyon that we could park at, cost $45, with a full hook up and it was really just a gravel parking lot, all the campers were squished in the site. We found out when we were hooking up the camper that night that our two back rear tires were bad. So we had to get that fixed the next day.  I didn’t take a picture of this campsite because it was so cruddy.  :)