Hello, sunny Utah

So we’re finally on track when it comes to our objective of an eternal summer.
After the cold weather in Yellowstone, we slowly but surely made our way down to Utah. With the weather being super nice, it’s no hardship to spend our days outside again.

First stop in Utah: Bear Lake. A beautiful lake with gorgeous blue water, nicknamed ’Caribbean of the Rockies’. The latter set the expectations quite high. It definitely looked pretty, but I did miss the warmth of the water and beautiful sand, you would find in the Caribbean itself. Nevertheless, I was very excited to camp right at the beach, soaking up the sun from my chair and even video call with family. Surprisingly after days without signal, it was solid enough there and I enjoyed showing off, sharing a glimpse of my environment with them.

From Bear Lake we made the trek to Arches National Park (Utah), crossing via Wyoming and Colorado. It’s crazy to see how big the US is and how long our daily drives are, just to get to places. The routes are scenic, but for me it’s taking some getting used to sitting in a car for 3 hours or more and not leaving the US (unlike the NL). Ben and I keep referring to how we 90% of the time would always fly somewhere in Europe if the drive was longer than 2.5 hours.

The views in Arches where spectacular and like Yellowstone and Grand Teton, the park is set-up in a super accessible way. Ben and I spend most of the day walking trails to different sites together. To close it off we decided to stay in the park for the sunset, enjoying the change in color as the sun slowly moved away. In Moab we also took some time to wash the RV on the outside. This was more labour intensive than I expected and I felt the pain, when we drove through dust 5 minutes later already.

The next few days we changed scenery again, visiting Canyonlands National park, Natural Bridges National Monument and Capitol Reef National park. Amazing / dramatic views and these visits were also very culturally responsible. I now know the difference between arches, natural bridges and the vegetation we’ve come across. If you are Dutch and are missing reading in your favourite language, you don’t have to worry as they surprisingly have information in Dutch written hand-outs.

Right now we are in Escalante and getting ready for Bryce Canyon. Our shuttle to the Peek A Boo & Spooky Slot canyons trails proved why some roads really require a 4×4. Talk about getting shaken up!

If I ever come back here, I would certainly stop again at Mimi’s bakery & deli. They were really warm, took great care of me, are a good source of info and the freshly made food is so yum. I also had plenty of opportunity to talk about life in Amsterdam as the lady behind the counter recognized my accent straightaway with her mom being Dutch/having studied in Amsterdam.

To wrap up…This environment is so different than the Netherlands, where it’s flat, wet and luscious green all year round. You really have to see it with your own eyes, to understand the vastness and the variety of the desert.