Driving, Shopping, Food between Hikes

Colorado Travelog #9
Fruita, CO - Sunday, 3 Jul 2022, 1pm

After we wrapped up our visit to Rifle Falls this morning it was time to hit the road again. We continued west 70-ish miles to Grand Junction, Colorado. We'll be staying the night here tonight... but not yet. Days are long this time of year, and we're looking to take full advantage.

So how did we take advantage of this long summer day first? We went shopping! There was a gem store in town Hawk wanted to visit. Then, because I don't particularly enjoy standing around gem stores while she does the actual shopping, she let me choose lunch. I picked pizza. Unfortunately the pizza place nearby wasn't that good. But it was still pizza. 3/5 stars, wouldn't go back unless I was famished.

After that we headed toward Colorado National Monument, a beautiful park where we plan to do a bunch of hiking and sightseeing today... but first, more shopping and more food!

"Shopping", in this case was buying gas. We stopped in the town of Fruita, just outside the park. Our rental, "Taco", hit just north of 23 mpg on the tank. I was surprised. As much as it struggled climbing the passes west of Denver (going from "mile high" to more than 2 miles high) I thought it would post something around 18-19 mpg. EPA ratings are 19 City / 24 Hwy / 21 Combined, so getting 23 mpg through 412 miles of this highway but high elevation driving is impressive. Our Nissan Xterra SUV would only manage about 18.5 mpg in similar conditions.

Also in Fruita we spotted a Dairy Queen. After underwhelming pizza for lunch, and with temperatures in the 90s outside, it felt like a perfect time for ice cream. Hawk got a caramel sundae while I tried one of their new Blizzard flavors. Both were great. Now we've got to do some hiking to work off the calories....

Short Hikes at Colorado National Monument

Colorado Travelog #10
Colorado National Monument, CO - Sunday, 3 Jul 2022, 3:30pm

We're visiting Colorado National Monument this afternoon. It's a relatively compact park, and it's possible to see most of the highlights from the main road that runs about 25 miles through the park. We're not ones to simply car-tour a park, though. We've hopped out to hike several times!



That said, just car touring is nice... because even the road is amazing. The photo above shows a bird's eye view of the road climbing up through a canyon at the north entrance. And this was our fourth hop-out stop to walk a bit and take pictures.

Next we stopped at the Visitors Center. Even though we'd chosen and mapped out a few easy-to-moderate trails to hike (two or three at 1/2 mile to 1 mile each, and one at about 2 miles) in advance we always like stopping by the Visitors Center to check conditions, grab a printed map and any printed trail descriptions they have, and... shop. We call it "liberating birds". If they have any hawk toys we don't already own a copy of (or have already chosen not to buy) we buy one. This time, as is usually the case, there were no compelling stuffed hawks we don't already own. But there was a sheep. A bighorn ram. And not a stuffed sheep— actually, there were a bunch of stuffed sheep, but of two models we already own examples of— but a Lego sheep.

We decided, "Enh, we don't need a Lego bighorn ram."

I think we're going to regret that when we never see it again.

Update: We did regret it, starting only a few hours later. 😞

Update 2: But we got a second chance 4 days later when we saw the ram at another park— and a hawk, too! 😄🐏🦅

Anyway, back to hiking....



There's plenty for low-effort tourists to see here. But with even a little effort put into hiking there's so much more.



There were so many fun places to hop out and hike a short distance to see amazing views. We ended up going off our original plan with more stops and more hikes than anticipated. But hey, no problem; we can call an audible on this one easily. We'll put off the longer, moderately strenuous hike until tomorrow morning. We planned a bit of flexibility in our schedule exactly for situations such as this.