Wheres Wanda and John Now

We left New Mexico on Tuesday and drove into Utah.  We're staying at an RV park in Bluff and there we met up with our friends Dale and Karen.  Tuesday afternoon we took a short ride north to Sand Island which is a park on the San Juan River known for it's petroglyph panels caved into the cliff sides.  It was a short hike up the path to the 100 yard art panel with carvings that are 300 to 3,000 years old, including Pueblo, Ute and Navajo styles. After Sand Island we stopped at a cool place just outside of the RV park called Bluff Fort.  It’s a replica of an 1880's Mormon pioneer settlement. Yesterday we drove down to the Monument Valley region to pick up our Navajo friend Nathan.   He has grown up all of his life there and was able to take us on an amazing hike up to a rock formation called the tear drop. We then hiked up to some of the many caves carved by the wind and water sculpting into the rock. One of the cliff caves had an ancient structure still stan...

  Well...even though we are right outside of Chaco Canyon we are not getting in AGAIN! This is the 4th time we've tried to make it to the canyon and just a few days before we arrived, there was a huge rain storm that washed out the north road. So it goes. Instead we visited another Aztec site just north of our campsite.  The Aztec Ruins National Monument is an area of preserved structures built by the Pueblo people between 850 and 1130 and then discovered again in 1878 by anthropologists. The photo below shows the entire site (not our photo) We were able to walk around the site and into some of the buildings.  (the rest of the photos and videos are ours) The large circular building in the center is called the Great Kiva.  A Kiva is a gathering place for spiritual ceremonies, religious rituals and political meetings.  The smaller rooms around the outside were used for food storage, cooking, eating and sleeping. We wandered around inside some of the rooms and it w...