TUESDAY, 16 JUNE -Moab, Utah

 TUESDAY, 16 June

We had such an amazing day today. It is hard to explain all that happened.
We got up early and went into town to the local diner.  There we met up with John Howard of Coyote Outdoor adventures. He is an off road instructor and he is going to spend the day with us to teach us all about jeeping. 

We had breakfast and chatted giving him the opportunity to learn about us and us about him and then we set off.

We went out of town to a run called Sevenmile Rim. He told us it has a little bit of everything; rocks, sand, water, stairs, steeps, drops, Off cambers and lots of other stuff. Crazy and sometimes scary stuff.  

The first thing he thought was how to guide. He taught the hand signals, directions and what to say for the various amount we want the steering wheel turned. It was really helpful.  

At one point he had Rob driving/climbing up rocks with his eyes closed while constantly giving him directions. 

From there he taught us how to pick our route.  To get out and spread your arms like an airplane and walk the route place small piles of rocks where you want either the driver’s or passenger’s wheel to climb. 

He taught us that we should not take it head on, but rather let each wheel climb up independently. That way you don’t scrape important components off the bottom of the Jeep.

It was an amazingly beautiful area.

He put us in some pretty precarious places to teach us how to get back out.  Not to mention they made for some pretty interesting pictures.

 This one was particularly precarious 

And the final result!

More cool stuff we climbed around on

And interesting terrain we followed him through

Off in the distance is the Monitor on the left and the Merrimack on the right. They were named after the two battle ships. The question was, which one won the battle?

The answer was neither one!  They lost each other in the fog and never completed the battle. 

The Monitor

The Merrimack

We continued on through some pretty good confidence building stuff. 

We even learned how to use the wench to get someone un stuck as well as other apparatuses we could use to get ourselves unstuck. It was all pretty awesome. 

We ended the day driving fast through a a dried up, sandy river bed. It was really fun slipping and sliding around curves and racing with John. 

We got back to the highway and back to town around 7 pm. Really long and very full day.