Quick Update -- Finally in Colorado

Lots to report, but bedtime now. We were packed and ready to leave Moab this morning but had to wait for UPS to deliver the 3/8" BSF screws I needed -- thanks Tim Jayne of Dennison-Jayne Motorcars for getting them out to me through overnight UPS. They finally arrived at 11:05am, and I put them in with blue locktite. The other two screws that hadn't fallen out were loose, so I took those out too and put blue locktite on those threads. I also repacked the waterpump. We were ready to leave at 12:35pm, but now it was already 100F outside. We got more distilled water and ice, filled up with fuel and headed to Arches National Park. We vapor locked there, so before heading out towards Colorado we went back to Moab for a late lunch/early dinner around 4:30pm. We took our time, hoping that 6:00pm would be late enough to get going and avoid vapor lock.

No such luck. We had to stop twice for vapor lock issues -- the second time we stopped for a long time in the canyon in the shade (we took route 128, which folks called River Road). This did the trick, as we didn't leave until 8pm and the sun was down. We were fine for the rest of the ride.

I couldn't decide how long to drive. I considered driving all the way to Manitou Springs (about 6 more hours), but we would have arrived at 2am and missed seeing the whole drive over the Rockies. We could drive until just before the mountains, but even that would be late. Instead, we stopped in Grand Junction where we're going to sleep now by 10:30pm, and we'll be on the road by 7am to head straight to Manitou Springs so we can relax the rest of the day, get up early Friday morning, and head up Pike's Peak.

Tomorrow I'll try to write more about our experience with Moab Adventure Center and our excellent guide Bryon who took us on a Sunset Hummer Adventure on the rocks -- in short, awesome!