Day 1993

 We got up at 8, did the pet stuff, and had breakfast.  We weren't in a particular hurry, so we didn't leave until almost 9.

The road to the dinosaur monument was as bad as I though it would be  It went up 2,000 feet, down farther, back up again, and then back down again.  It was all secondary road, some of it pretty rough.  On the Utah side there was a 5 mile long stretch of 20 mph switchbacks.  It's not a road for trailers, ut we saw quite a few on it.  Luckily there was almost no southbound traffic when we were on it.

We got to the monument about 10.  They said we needed tickets to get into the quarry.  They gave us tickets for 1:30.  That turned out to be fine  There was a road that went through other attractions at the monument.  There were 15 stops and we hit them all.  It was fun.  There was good scenery and two places to stop to see pictographs.  We got back just in time for our tickets.

The quarry had been rebuilt since I was there over 50 years ago.  Surprise.  When I was there they were still digging out the fossils.  Now they are all done.  There were some neat interactive stations that allowed you to identify which kind of dinosaur a particular fossil came from.  I thought it was great and so did Ellen.

Because it's Federal property masks are required in the building and on the shuttle buses.  In addition the employees are supposed to enforce social distancing.  The people at the buildings were making no effort to do so.  In the shuttle bus this meant people were supposed to sit 1 person per two person row.  There were lots of people waiting.  The driver asked if anyone cared about social distancing.  Everyone said no.  In fact, everyone was cheering the driver for asking the question.  So the bus left with every seat taken.

In both the buildings and the bus half the people had their masks pulled down below their noses.  Nobody cared.  I only saw two idiots wearing masks on the trails.  They were Asian, so maybe they were used to doing so in their home country.

When we started to go home the CEL was on in the truck.  I thought it was the regen thing again since we'd had one on the way down.  It wasn't.  The code is for some sort of communication error between the engine control module and the transmission.  Fortunately the truck seemed to work fine on the way home.  I'll take it to the dealer tomorrow morning.  I'm pissed.  I've never had a vehicle throw a CEL before and this truck has done it twice in 10 days.

We didn't have any lunch, just protein bars at the monument.  When we got home Ellen fixed the last of the Costco bacon wrapped chicken things.  We also had the fry bread we bought from the Indians.  We'd never had it before.  We're not impressed.

The rest of the evening was TV, videos, and surfing.