Dear Maia, Isaac and Virtual Wanderers,:

Here I am in January 2023 catching up on my travel blog! I had to upgrade for more space, so now we are a .blog officially. PS – I will post date the blog so it shows up with the correct date. BTW our road trip this year is called Maizzy’s Magical Memories because she had been to many of these places with us.

I don’t remember every detail of our second day at this point, but my YouTube was recorded that day and has some awesome information. What I remember is a LOT of driving because I got the crazy idea that it would not be that much longer to go to Monument Valley first. I am a crazy optimist some days. What I do remember is that it was EASTER SUNDAY and I thought it would be cool to visit Monument Valley with my dogs in their Easter clothes.

First, though, we stopped at the petroglyphs in Bluff – the Sand Canyon Petroglyphs. We actually ended up back on part of this route in August of 2022 on our summer camping road trip. We spent 2 nights at Sand Canyon then.

After Sand Canyon and Monument Valley, the drive got long and boring until we finally got to Canyon de Chelly. This is one of my favorite places because the canyon has unique sandstone. I lucked out and found a Navajo artist vendor and got some cool rock paintings for not too much money. We walked to the Spider Rock viewpoint – I had not been there before. The photos are of the south rim.

After that, we had another longish drive into Chambers. The motel there is a common stop as we cross Route 66 on our way to see the saguaro cacti every year. This was an EPIC EASTER with two beautiful icons of the Southwest – Monument Valley and Canyon de Chelly. I was pretty ready for the hotel grub when we arrived.