Mother's Day 2012- It was a good, good day.
 First we eat Garlic Knots.  Don't forget to dip them in the marinara sauce.

 With my "baby" and his babies.

 Now we have garlic knot pizza. 

 Ian almost ate a whole basket of knots and then a couple slices of cheese pizza.

 Miss Melanie can also eat lots of knots and pizza.

 Ian wanted to go to the Museum of Nature and Science so Alison and I let the others go home and we took Ian to the Museum.  He fed the sabertooth tiger, played in the Discovery Zone and then created stars in space odyssey with "too much mass", his favorite.

 We picked up Grandpa and went to Smart Cow Yogurt for a delicious treat.

I chose the pistachio and expresso flavors in a twist.

Dinosaur National Monument Fossil Quarry

Today we visited the newly renovated fossil quarry.   A ranger leads you up to the quarry from the visitor's center in a car caravan.   You are up there for about 40 minutes.   What was so surprising was that the paleontologists are no longer working on the rock quarry and the lab inside the building is gone now.  It just doesn't seem right not to have the excavation of dinosaur fossils going on right before your eyes.  Where are the guys in the white coats and hard hats with the drills and picks?   We visited this building in the 60's and the 70's and didn't realize that bentonite clay was causing the cracks and the windows to separate from the structure.  There is only one paleontologist there now and he works offsite.   The ranger did tell us that there are building a site by the field house in Vernal that will house a lab for extracting the fossils from the rock.

After a stop at the visitor center gift shop, we drove to the Colorado side of the monument and drove up to Canyon Overlook.  We had our picnic lunch here.  We were still 15 miles from the end of the road at Harper's Corner and wanted to stop by the visitor's center on the canyon side.  Unfortunately when we got down there, it was closed and not opening until May 15. 

Vernal is booming with the quarry opening again and the oil and gas business on the rise.  The Marriott was sold out and they told a prospective guest that they were even oversold.  A Town Place Suite was being constructed next door.    The Best Western where we stayed in 1969 and 1978 is still there.  

 The Newly renovated Quarry house.

 This was cool.  You can now stand by the wall of fossils and touch then.   Larry at our picnic table at Canyon Overlook.

 How the quarry looked in 1958.  The round structure was the gift shop.  It is no longer at this site.  Some of the fossils that were left on the rock site.

 Below is view looking into the canyon.

Tonight we are staying in Steamboat Springs and our dinner here was a 100% better that our dinner in Vernal.  I may even have to make a comment on Trip Advisor about them.  Vernal still doesn't have any good places to eat, other that fast food or the Utah favorite, a steak house.

Rifle Falls State Park

We are finally making the trip to Dinosaur National Monument in Northwest Colorado.   The Quarry House had been closed for renovation and then reopened last fall, but everytime we tried to drive here, there was a snow storm.  We are in Vernal Utah tonight and will tour the Quarry tomorrow.  The last time we were here Michael was 3 years old.  I had read about Rifle Falls in John Fielders book so we took advantage of driving in this direction to have our picinic lunch and then hike to the falls.   It certainly isn't Iguazu Falls ( these were the falls we saw in Argentina) or Yosemite Falls but still a nice stop on the way to our destination.

Canyon de Chelly National Park,  our last stop on our road trup.

 View of the canyon from the south rim drive looking down at white house ruin.

We took a 3 hour jeep tour and this was our vehicle.  There was another couple and they happen to be from Switzerland near St. Moritz.

 We saw ruins from various time periods, mostly Anasazi.   This is white house ruin.

 We saw petroglyphs.  These are Navajo, the last people to settle in this canyon.  There are still families living here, descendants of the original people.

 We traveled in  a 4 wheel drive jeep with a Navajo guide and most of the time either in the stream which had been higher the day before due to spring runoff,   I took this photo from the jeep as we were traveling.

 Our guide was very experienced because we saw this twice during our tour.He tried to wench this truck out but it had settled on a sand bar and was not moving. We didn't get back until 7:30.

That worked out well because this is what the sunset looked like on the red rock.

 The train ride in Verde Canyon. 

 See the rock that looks like a turtle.

 The train has a firstclass car, coach cars and a caboose you can rent for 6 people.  Each car has a dedicated open car to observe also.  The round trip was 4 hours.

 The canyon of the Verde river has the beautiful red rock seen in many parts of the southwest.

 Larry in the open car.  It did have a shade over the top.

I asked Larry to take my picture after we got off the train at 5 pm so it would look like I was on the trip. 

 We got home late last night and drove today to Flagstaff.   We drove out to rincon Mountain on the east side of of Tucson in the morning to visit Saguaro Park on this side.  It is busier because it is closer, and the saguaro cactus are bigger and older.  We drove on the cactus forest road which is paved and took this picture to show how tall some of these are.

In the afternoon we drove up to Mount Lemmon to Sky Center for a nightly observation tour.  We were in a dome with a 36 inch scope.  It had an eyepiece for us to look at various objects.  There was a smaller reflecting scope also to look through.  Astonomers do not use these as as rule because they download what they are looking at in a digital format and then analyze it later on a computer.  There was a dome across from where we were that is operated by Koreans only they are never there.  They can get up in the morning, have a cup of coffee and do it remotely from Korea.  Tucson is the astronomical capital of the world and we learned of many more public programs like this one.  We went outside to focus our binoculars and used Kitt Peak which is 56 miles outside of tucson and we had driven 27 miles up Mount Lemmon to the top.  There is a ski area up there that still had snowon the runs.  We were at   9157 feet and with the wind it got rather cold.  Still worth it to see planets, nebulas, a super nova, and so many other things.   We could have spent the whole week visiting all the observatories, etc around Tucson.  Maybe we will come back some time and just stay for a week.

 If there had been no clouds, we would have seen a green top on the sun as it was setting.  Still so pretty.  I drove us home down the mountain and we got to bed around midnight. 

 We took a scenic route outside of Phoenix to Payson and stopped at Montezuma Castle Indian Ruins on the way to Sedona.

 These are some of the ruins that early settlers and soldiers called Montezuma because they thought the Aztec had built them.  The Indians who settled and farmed here were the Sinagua who came here around 1125.

We continued our drive to Flagstaff by way of Sedona and Oak Creek Canyon.  It was so pretty driving up from the south to Sedona.  I was disappointed in Oak Creek.  Sedona itself was "so touristy", and the canyon was full of RV parks, souvenier shops and "cabins" on the creek.  We are driving to Verde Canyon tomorrow for our 4 hour train ride.  It should be very relaxing and scenic.

 Lots of cactus today and also a little of some heavenly bodies. We drove up to Kitt Peak and took one of the guided tours.

 After our tour and a peek at the 2.1 meter scope, we stopped by the solar observatory to take a look at some spots on the sun.  This is funded by the NSF and astronomers can submit proposals for use.  There are dorms for people using the observatories to stay while there.  Only 3 public scopes are there for viewing.  The rest, and there are several on the top of this mountain, are from other Universities.  CU has one here. 

 We have a nice picnic lunch before drove the 12 mile road back down the mountain.

 This part of Saguaro is on the west side of Tucson called the Mountain district.  Tomorrow we are visiting the Rincon Mountain side east of Tucson before driving up to Mount Lemmon for our nightly observation tour.

 Here some the cactus

 Look at this big boy.

Prickly pear ready to sprout.

 Chiracauhua National Monument, Arizona

This was our main destination today before we drove on to Tucson.  We crossed the continental divide outside on Deming as we were drivin on the the part of I-10 called the Pearl Harbor Memorial Highway.  The formations above are the result of 4000 feet of ash from a vocanic eruption that compacted and is now still eroding from wind and rain.  The name is from the occupation by the Chiracauhua Apache who lived here in the 1800's until Geronimo agreed to stop fighting.   A family who settled here and ran a guest ranch taking their guests up the canyon by horseback was instrumental in getting the National Monument designaton.  We are now in Tucson and planning tomorrow's outing to Kitt Peak and  the western side of Sagurao National Park.  I think I will be calling this trip "Rocks and Cactus".   I did see yellow wildflowers along the interstate today.  Hopefully there will be more blooming as we drive around.  We are in the Sonoran desert and left the Chihuahuan desert when we left New Mexico.   A desert is a desert.