Colorado, Four Corners: Where Four States Meet

Not too long after we had left Mesa Verde National Park, we stopped in the town of Cortez, Colorado, for a quick bite to eat. For anyone following our "US and A" travel journals, you won't be surprised when we tell you that we ate at Taco Bell, a well seasoned favourite of ours anytime either one of us visited the States. Hunger wasn't even discussed when we left Mesa Verde, probably because we were still feeling nauseous from the mould that was growing inside Dan's chipotle wrap during our lunch at the cafe inside the park. As soon as we saw the well-known sign appear off in the distance, upon arriving in Cortez, we just had to pull over and snack on something from there.

The Taco Bell stop was well worth it for another reason besides delicious and fast Mexican food - prairie dogs. No, we didn't find traces of the little critters in the beef and cheese quesadillas that we had ordered; we also didn't find anything remotely related to a prairie dog in the large bean burrito that we shared. We did, however, see about five or six of the animals hanging out on the lawn in front of the fast food place; if we could have called it a lawn, that is.

There were small mounds of dirt on the ground in front of Taco Bell, where there was very little grass. At first, we thought maybe some work was going to be done on the ground, but then we saw movement as we pulled into the Taco Bell driveway to park our rental SUV. Dan spotted the first prairie dog, since Kyle was obviously paying attention to where he was driving. Once we parked, we walked over the only-a-little-bit-grassy area to check them out.

They weren't afraid of us, really, so we were able to get close enough to them to take some photos before they ducked away in their holes. More than likely, they were hoping that we would pass them a burrito supreme or chicken soft taco, and as soon as they discovered we were without eats, they went inside their homes. That was as good a point as any to go inside and get something to eat ourselves, for our not-hungry-but-in-the -mood-for-a-Taco-Bell -snack stomachs.

The food was great; there was no need for us to tell you that, but we did anyway. After finishing off the last few bites, we refilled our soft drinks and headed back on the road to Four Corners, USA. Four Corners was an area within the United States where the borders of four states met in one location. The states we were planning on standing on all at once were Colorado, Arizona, Utah and New Mexico.

We arrived at the Four Corners area after 6:00pm and there was not very much going on there. There were only a few other tourists besides us, but enough people were there for us to find someone to take our photo (thanks to the Japanese tourists we cornered), where we actually stood/crawled in each of the four states at the same time. The photo had us looking more like we were playing a game of Twister, but we can still say that we achieved the task.

By the way, every time we placed our hands in a Colorado, New Mexico or Utah quadrant of the Four Corners, we had to pause to change the time on our watches. The reason was because we had changed them to Arizona time as soon as we crossed the Arizona state line to enter the Four Corners tourist area; Arizona did not have daylight savings time and in the summer ran on a different time schedule to the other three states, which was a real pain, since we ended up changing our watches so many times at Four Corners.

Seriously, do you believe that rubbish we just wrote? The truth is that we didn't know about Arizona's lack of daylight savings time until we reached the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert the next afternoon, when we found out we had extra time to view the national park. We just wanted to toy with your mind a little bit.

After we spent about fifteen minutes at the Four Corners area, we hopped back in the car and started to drive towards Chinle, Arizona. The next stop on our road trip was going to be Canyon de Chelly National Monument, which we found right on the edge of the large Navajo Nation Indian Reservation in Arizona. The drive from Four Corners to Chinle took a couple of hours and we arrived there after dark; luckily, we found accommodation quickly and painlessly. There were only a few places to stay in the small, eastern Arizona town and the woman working at reception inside the Holiday Inn gave us a government rate that was lower than another place we had checked, a much less comfortable place that we had looked in for a room.