Ruly Holiday Road Trip: Day Eleven, Moab to Mancos

Day eleven on the road and we began the morning on a gorgeous drive headed toward southern Utah. This was some of the most beautiful country during our entire trip. All you had to do was look out the window in any direction and you were surrounded by amazing landscapes that morphed and changed every five minutes. It was almost meditative.

We stopped for lunch in Moab, Utah at the Sweet Cravings Bakery & Bistro. This was a gem of a place where everything was delicious and perfectly made. My quesadilla had a crisp but flaky tortilla which was excellent. The kind chef was happy to accommodate me when I ordered a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with the crusts cut off for my daughter. It came out served with a small slice of gingerbread and some applesauce. My children ate every bite.

After lunch, we drove quickly through Arches National Park. I have only ever been in this park in the summertime. It is just as delightful in the winter. The landscapes are structurally almost identical, with red rocks and sagebrush but because of the difference in the way the light is cast, they look different somehow.

My children could not wait to get out of the car and run around in this surreal landscape. We went to the “Windows” section where we hiked the short trails to get an up close view of two gorgeous stone arches.

We would have loved to have stayed longer but were were outrunning a winter storm—a theme that would plague us the rest of the trip home. Gray stormclouds were rolling in rapidly and my husband rushed us all into the car.

We drove on out of Moab and into Colorado. Our altitude increased as we drove and at one point the clouds were so close to the ground it looked like you could reach out and touch them. We drove on through snowy small towns cloaked in heavy fog that seemed dreamlike.

We were headed for the little town of Mancos, Colorado. It was windy and chilly as we checked into our motel. We cranked up the small heater and were just about to leave for dinner while the room warmed up. Then the first crisis of the trip happened.

“Where’s my purse?”

We searched the car, the luggage, the hotel room. It was nowhere to be found. I searched my memory for the last time I remember seeing it. We decided it had to be in one of two places…at the restaurant in Moab or somewhere along the Windows trail in Arches National Park, where I kept setting down my belongings to run into self-timed family shots. My husband hoped it was the former. I left a desperate voicemail to the cafe.

Losing a purse is a horrible event. I felt completely unsettled without it. Was someone out having a shopping spree with my cards at that very moment? The only upside of the situation is that I managed to take my phone out of the purse and put it in my coat pocket and I also had my camera with me. The phone and the camera somehow seemed far more important.

Since nothing more could be done about the purse crisis at that moment, we went to dinner. We ate dinner at a fun Mexican restaurant called Chavalo’s a few doors down from the motel. It was fairly crowded and seemed to be the local favorite.

We feasted on fajitas while the children decided the rice was their favorite. They ate it heartily and there were grains of rice everywhere by the time they were done. We ordered churros for dessert for my daughter and the server brought it out with 5 spoons and a cheery, “OK, amigos, here you go!”

A fellow tourist saw my children staring at the oversized gumball machine in the restaurant while my husband and I finished our meals. She put in a quarter to buy a gumball and my son went crazy as he watched the large gumball circle down the spiral column of the machine to the exit. The woman was so thrilled with his reaction that she did it again. My son grabbed the second gumball before she could grab it herself and put it in his mouth! Horrified, I apologized and offered to buy her another gumball. “Oh, no! That’s not necessary,” she said. “I just don’t want him to choke on it.”

We trudged back to the hotel, where we spent a moment perusing the television channels many of which seemed to be created by BYU. We browsed a couple of online Christmas shopping specials and then fell soundly asleep.