Hello all! (late night draft 1)

The first full day in Moab was an absolute blast! Let me first describe the town. This place is perfect for any adrenaline junkie, because everything is here. There are bikers, motorcycles, rafting, jeeps, 4X4 trucks and more hikers than you can imagine. Just about every car I see in town has a hitch, a roof rack full of gear, a bunch of bikes or whatever ready to go! It also seems most everyone I run into is in pretty good shape, and seems ready to go at a moments notice! We took that same spirit and went into town and ordered up an ATV Tour! We got two four seat Razors and a 2.5 hour tour in the mountains.

We headed to the shop to get our helmets and head up to the meeting point. The boys got one machine, and the girls got the other, and we met our tour guide and another family of 4 who joined us in 2 seat ATV's. We started out with a pretty bumpy ride, but got right into it and toured some amazing trails. The guide would stop us and give us history lessons along the way, as we saw a great deal of the region, the mountains and talked history everywhere we could. Sure enough, there was a "S" shaped impression in the sand in one of our trails, and the giude stopped us and jumped off the bike to check it out. It was a sure sign of a pretty big snake, and I was really impressed he noticed that fast. We didn't see it, but it was great to be that safe and check out what could be around the next bend.

We were able to get off the bikes a few times and walked through a cave, which easily dropped the temperature by 20 degrees as we walked through, it was a natural air conditioner. The same cave had ancient indian carvings and even paintings, and we found a black widow spider taking care of an unfortnate critter he got in his nest. We met up with some Jeeps, doing their own four wheeling on the trail and told them what we were going to next. They admitted these bikes we were on would be much faster than what they were driving and told us to have fun. I didn't consider how agile these machine really are, but they took a beating from us with aboslutely no problem!

It is over 100 once again today, so anything you can do to get cooled off really helps. We downed a ton of water, and I dumped some on my head during breaks. Every little bit helps. Finally, we got to a dinosaur fossil area that was abosutely fasinating. There were footprints, and even an "alligator like" belly imprint that the natural resources department found, one of the larger fossil areas around.

After that ATV tour, we went and scouted out the Arches National Park where we are going to hike first thing tomorrow. Since it is so hot, we'll open the gates at 7 AM, a quick 15 minute ride from the condo and see the Arches. Once I get back from that, I'll load the ATV pictures and the Arches. Looking forward to that, however this hike is supposed to be pretty technical, so we'll eat our cliff bars along the way!

Wish us luck!