Fri 8/12 : The rest of the way.

Today was (mostly) according to plan. The mostly came about because our 7:00am wakeup call was promptly delivered at 6:00am, and at least for a little while we simply thought that our phones were getting their time zones confused. Thankfully, we figured this out before we left for the caverns, and were able to spend the time relaxing in bed. (OK, watching cartoons.... It was Lynn's idea, I swear.) We arrived at the caverns just before they opened up, and were literally the first ones the begin the hike down the natural entrance.
While there can be no doubt that the Big Room that everybody who goes down the elevator sees, I remain convinced that the natural entrance is even more impressive. I can't say exactly why, except perhaps that the sense of constant descent, and the amazement at the people who first explored it are both amazing.

By the time we reached the bottom about and hour and a half later, we decided to immediately take the elevator back up and begin the drive towards Moab. The drive was estimated at 12 hours, and the front desk closed at 11:00pm, so we wanted to get there in time.

While I still feel that I am now more tolerant of long drives than I used to be, today was still a LONG day of driving, made all the more so by the fact that much of it was done in New Mexico. I remember being very annoyed at the habits of the New Mexico highway department last time, what with the silly speed limits and incessant "safety corriders" which seemed only to serve the allow them to double their speeding fines. This time around, I was pleasantly surpised that most of the speed limits seemed to be more reasonable on the route we took, but they found another way to mess up the experience. We encountered a number of "construction zones" along our route. These typically took the form of a couple of guys doing some relatively minor work on one lane of the road. This would not have been a problem at all, except that for no discernable reason New Mexico seems to believe that construction zones cannot be less than about 5 miles in length. Despite the work only actually occupying about 10 feet of distance, each work site was proceeded by literally miles on lane closure with reduced speed limits.

Despite the frequent slow downs, we did reach Moab in time, and are now checked into a cabin at the Lazy Lizard Hostel for the night. Tomorrow we switch to one of their rental houses (Grammas House) which will accomodate the rest of our group when they arrive. The cabin is sparse, but will meet our needs.