It’s Tourist Season, Can I Shoot Them?
May 10, 2026 — Day 47
Monument Valley KOA, Monument Valley UT — Sun Outdoors Canyonlands, Moab UT
“You’re in no shape to drive,” he said, and she didn’t disagree. Susan was sick. We could have stayed here while she recovered, but it was dusty, hot and in the middle of nowhere. Let’s go to Moab.
Moab. This is Jeep mecca, mountain biking mecca, never in any of our planning did we think we’d visit Moab. But why Moab? We wanted to get out of the heat. We can’t remember if we mentioned this earlier in the blog, but the plan was to leave Phoenix and follow the bird migrations up the Mississippi, we’ve never done that route south to north. But that possible tornado experience made us want to just plain avoid the Midwest in the late spring, early summer. Susan had found a full hookup site north of us in Moab. So, north to Moab it is!
On the way out of town, Paul pulled over, he wanted at least one shot of the Gump background.
Honestly, on the 24th of May we had to scratch our heads thinking about that shot, why did we take it. Is it the background from Gump Point.
Speaking of that…
This is Forrest Gump Point looking away from the famous image. The sign says to watch for pedestrians. You’d think they’d be aware that a 30,000 pound 53′ thing is bearing down on them, right?
You would be wrong. There were now more people milling about in the middle of the road.
Paul had to honk the horn multiple times and these clueless idiots continued to stand there. Paul kept inching along and with a few more honks — surprising a couple people which in turn surprised us that they were that unaware of their surroundings — they cleared from the middle of the road but were milling about over the fog line. What we’ve noticed both from having lived on the Cape and from traveling in the RV is that people lose their street sense/survival instincts that they have when their brains aren’t in vacation mode.
We made it into Moab without any problem and turned into the campground. Sun Outdoors Arches. That’s curious. We thought we were going to Sun Outdoors Canyonlands. Had they changed their name? Well, Paul had put the wrong coordinates into the GPS. No, that’s not it. Google had given Paul the wrong coordinates. Really, it had, go check it out, well wait.
The nice clerk checked our reservation and sent us north a few miles. We parked, leveled, hooked up our utilities. We didn’t know it then, but we were going to be here a long time.
Yes, we’re back to the full USA map, we’re coming home!
Daily: 156 miles.
Total: 3,519 miles
Return Driving miles/Day: 121 miles/day (7 days driving)
Return Overall miles: 847 miles
Total Driving miles/Day: 251 miles/day (12 days driving)
Total Overall miles/Day: 75 miles (yay, this number stopping falling, oh wait, we’re going to be stationary for 2 weeks, oh well…)