Day 4: Cortez CO - Kayenta AZ

Still no internet Monday morning, but then you knew that because you'll already have read the belated Day 3 entry.  What do you mean, you haven't?  Stop reading this, read that and don't come back until you've redeemed yourself!  Anyway, the view out the back of the hotel is much the same as it was in 2014 only this time I managed to get a picture without lots of construction machinery in the way:

If you go a few miles up the road towards those mountain-like objects and then turn right you will find yourself in Mesa Verde Natioanl Park.  I have driven past the entrance more than once and never even noticed it was there, partly because it's right where a bunch of pages in the road atlas meet.  This lot - this year's obligatory truck-based European-registered 4x4 camper - found it though, and I wish they'd done so after me, because their vehicle only does 15 mph up the hills.  The moral here being "never join the queue with the motorcyclists in it".

Austrian-registered Mercedes camper, Intrepid Travellers for the use of

The Mesa Verde is a gert big mountain thing and various bits of it were inhabited from about 550 AD until about 1300, when the inhabitants strolled off southwards for no known reason.  Unless they had a hankering to visit the Scorching Plains™ of New Mexico, obv.  They are sometimes known as the Anasazi, a term which X-Files fans will imediately recognise from that episode when Mulder, chased by baddies through a quarry outside Vancouver painted red to resemble this part of the world, found himself in a railway wagon full of dead alieds.  There are various relics of their period of residence in the park, as well as the usual jaw-dropping scenery.  Go and look at the photos, of which but a small selection are presented here:

Use your Junior Pocket Microscope (model 3a) to spot the Shiprock
at top dead centre and 70+ km distance

Step House site - contains early pit houses and masonry ones from a Several of centuries later

Pit house.  The line across the picture is a chain to stop idiots from falling in

Later stone houses at the Step House site

So-called "Sun Temple", because no-one knows what it was really for

Cliff Canyon.  Must have taken them, oooh, seconds to come up with that name...

Even an inspection as cursory as mine took a Several of hours, because the place stretches out for about forty of your Earth kilometres, but quite a fair few sites within are only accessible by guided tour and/or involve lots of walking, steps, ladders and getting very hot and sticky because you left that bottle of iced water in the car like a great big feckin' eejit.

At departure time it was also Emily time.  Clearly she was sulking due to not being required all morning.  "1000 Main Street, Kayenta, if it pleaseth you!"  She does not know of Main Street, Kayenta.  "US-163 in Kayenta, then!"  She decides that Kayenta starts about twenty miles north of where it is actually located and tries to take me that way.  I gave up, since all you have to do is turn left out of the park and follow US-160 until you get here then, as instructed by the Wetherill Inn's helpful billboard, turn right at the lights and drive a mile up, er, Main Street aka US-163.  She spent the next 140 miles rebooting herself.

Kayenta is not big enough to support a Walmart, Target or similar Vendor of All Things, because if it did I would be taking advantage of the current piss-poor exchange rate and buying a new TwatNav.  You have been warned, young Emily.