Day 8-Monument Valley

We took a tour with a Navajo guide through Monument Valley in a van.  He had such a quirky sense of humor but played the flute beautifully and sang some songs for us.  It was fun to take a tour with him.  Unfortunately the light was not right when we got to the park.  Our tour was in the morning and all my photos needed to be taken east.  Oh well, it was still nice to see all the monuments.  N2 loved not being in car seats but they had trouble staying in their seats.  There were 3 rows of passenger seats and they sat in the back row but didn't stay still so we had to always have them sit with us.  They enjoyed getting out and looking at the various sites around the park.

Brian thought that the hotel at Monument Valley was used in Quantum of Solace but we found out that it wasn't.  But it looks similar!

Here are the 3 sisters

We got to go inside a hogan and it was amazing how those were built.  The inside is entirely logs and then the cracks are filled with mud.  It was pretty spacious.  There is a hole in the roof where the smoke can go out.  It is never covered.  Inside the hogan there was a woman who talked about weaving and showed us some of her patterns.

We got to see several arches on our tour.  Here's moccasin arch.

This one is Big Hogan arch.

Ear to the wind arch

Eye of the sun arch

There were petroglyphs there near one of the arches.

Here's a better picture of the mittens.

After Monument Valley we made sure to find some fry bread.  It wasn't as good as I remembered it being.  Maybe we just didn't have good fry bread.  I talked to someone there who told me how I could make my own.  She said there's a learning curve and the first batches might not be good.  I'm not sure I'm brave enough to try time and time again!

We drove to Page, Arizona and along the way we stopped at Navajo National Monument.  There wasn't a lot to see there.  Brian hiked the trail to see the ruins of cliff dwellings and said he could hardly see anything from the overlook.  It wasn't worth it for us to go.  While he went on the walk (it wasn't long), N2 and I did their junior ranger program.  This was the worst one we did.  They had special books for young kids and there really wasn't anything educational about it.  They had a lot of coloring.  In the visitor's center they had 2 Navajo artisans there-one woman who was weaving and one woman who was making pottery.  N2 were fascinated watching them!  They just sat and watched and watched.  I don't think it was worth the stop there.