Day 9 (29-Sep-13) Moab - Page (283 miles)

After the previous night’s excesses, bodies and minds were very fragile when the ‘Gang of 5’ assembled for breakfast at 08:30hrs. In contrast to the barely contained excitement and engaging conversation of just 24hrs earlier, breakfast today was a decidedly muted affair. Simon, in addition to suffering various self-induced and transmitted physical ailments (and possibly one or two congenital psychological ones too), also found himself owning a sick computer, as the hard disk had completely crashed. I personally would have succumbed to a fit of epileptic rage had that occurred to me. Simon, however, to his great credit, exhibited ‘True Grit’, accepting the gravity of the situation with great aplomb and a level of stoicism not seen since Major-General Gordon was heard to say ‘Oh Dear’, just before he was beheaded, following the complete annihilation of his forces at Khartoum by local rebels, in 1885. 

Following decidedly muted recollections of our trip to Canyonlands and discussions of plans ahead, we went our separate ways to attend to personal errands. We then convened one final time for tearful farewells in the car park at the La Quinta, with Dave & Kerri flying back to Houston, while ‘Q&A’ plus ‘Third Wheel’, continued on to Page, Arizona.

The journey to Page was uneventful, but as with every car journey to date on this holiday, very scenic. The transect of Monument Valley park through Navajo lands was particularly spectacular – we half expected to see John Wayne emerge from behind one of the many buttes. Again, the clear sunny skies and verdant plains (the result of recent severe storms that spanned Arizona, Utah and Colorado) perfectly offset the many freestanding ochre red buttes and massifs dotted across the park. Other than a few stops for obligatory snaps of the pristine and almost extra-terrestrial landscape (many ‘photo-bombed’ by Simon), we made our way, slowly - very, very slowly – to Page, with ‘Aunty’ (Simon’s schizophrenic half-blind doppelganger of ‘Mother’) at the wheel.
 

Once in Page we immediately made for Antelope Canyon Tours to try and get Simon a place on our particular tour of this famous slot canyon, scheduled for the following day. Alas, they we temporarily closed for a ‘pow wow’ among staff. We thus headed to our hotel instead, and after numerous phone calls, managed to get Simon a place with another group. With no escape routes from this very deep and narrow canyon, and even a pin drop reverberating with deafening cacophony off the canyon walls, I fear for the sanity of those entering the canyon with Simon tomorrow - lambs to the slaughter on a scale that demotes Passchendaele to a brief military skirmish by comparison.

With the imminent demise of so many weighing heavily on our minds, we elected to do a little exploring around the Glen Dam, which took 10 years to complete, and opened in 1966. Situated on the Colorado river, Lake Powell quickly formed behind this massive structure, with the city of Page growing around the dam during its construction. The views of the lake and the canyons around its edge are truly stunning.