Day 6: Grand Canyon - Blanding

We had breakfast at the hotel restaurant. It was an expensive but quite good buffet.
Today is a day of driving, with only a short visit to Monument Valley. I had read and seen a lot about it and my expectations were quite high.

We drove back into the national park and drove right at the first crossing. This road goes to Desert View, which is the last viewing point of the Grand Canyon.

It was pretty cold and we stopped at Desert View for only a short period. We visited a shop with a great view of the Canyon.
When we exited the park we followed road 64 to Camaron. There we took road 160 to Kayenta, which is quite near Monument Valley.
The road was long and cut right through the desert. The scenery wasn't very interesting and the little villages we drove by were all Indian Villages with a lot of trailer parks. How is it possible that people can live here? And why do they make such a mess of their villages?

In the early afternoon we drove into Monument Valley. It was very cloudy and everything looked a bit sad.

 Monument Valley is well known for all kinds of movies (Back to the Future II) and commercials and has always fascinated me. Unfortunately, with this cloudy weather The Valley didn't have the chance to look at it best, so I was quite disappointed. We stopped for a while and took some pictures. The weather still wasn't co-operating so we drove further to Utah.

Driving trough Monument Valley is (surprisingly) free, but you have to pay if you want to go to the visitor center and museum. It is also possible to book horse or Jeep rides.

We passed Mexican Hat, which is a tiny village in the middle of the desert with only a few hotels. Mexican Hat is called after the rock formation you see below. We had considered staying overnight there, only it was too expensive, though when we saw what the village looked like we were glad we didn't.

We reached our destination, Blanding, at 3 p.m. The village was also disappointing. It had only 3 hotels, 2 supermarkets and 3 restaurants. Our hotel was nothing special, though the rooms were clean. We decided to drive trough the villages a little, but nothing to see we were back pretty soon.

We had dinner at a little restaurant next to the hotel and I decided to forget about this day as soon as possible. I do realize though, that if the weather had been co-operating everything would have looked a lot better.

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