Wednesday 19 October Washington to Monument Valley

Up very early, a quick breakfast and a snooze in the long shuttle ride out to Dulles airport, which is approximately half way to Denver.

The joys of air travel in America. On check-in, we discovered a new "refinement" of the American air transport process: you don't get your seat allocation when you check in - this is done at the gate lounge. The check-in person took one look at our bulging suitcases and decided they needed to go through the "special" channel. So we got checked in, then had to tke the cases around to the other side of the terminal, wait in another queue, and watch them go through the x-ray and disappear onto a conveyor. Then through security screening, where we were both "selected" for a more detailed examination of our bags and ourselves.

By the time all this was done, and we got to the gate lounge (in a different terminal building, by bus) our flight had been called.

Sorry folks, you're too late and there are no seats left.
What!!?? We've had confirmed tickets since April!!!
Well, there's lots of other people who didn't get seats either. Never mind, we've got another flight going in an hour - you can have a seat on that one.
We wanted to go on that flight but it was going to cost us an extra $100 each! We're rather peeved by this situation.

The upshot was that we got nice roomy exit-row seats on the next flight, plus two free return tickets for anywhere in the 48 states, valid for one year. It's unlikely we'll be back here within a year, so offers for the tickets will be duly considered.

At Denver airport we located (with some difficulty) the check-in desk for Great Lakes Aviation. The desk is shared with something called Hooter Air. Oh dear!

Your cases are both overweight, I'll have to charge you extra.
OK, how much?
A hundred dollars
!!!
Well, you could buy a new case and spread the load so that none of them is over fifty pounds.

So we dug out an overnight bag we had inside one of the suitcases, transferred some of the load from each case to the bag and saved ourselves a hundred bucks. The actual flight to Farmington was in a Beechcraft 1900, a 20-seater turboprop. Not the most comfortable, but OK for a short trip.

Road movie. Some of the great movies involve a car trip through the south-west of the USA. Our trip is no different, though we travelled by Chevrolet Malibu rather than a T-Bird. We picked up the car at Farmington airport and headed west. A couple of stops for supplies and burgers for dinner saw us arrive at Monument Valley four hours later after a pleasant and uneventful drive.

We stayed at Goulding's Lodge, which is actually a motel of pretty reasonable quality. We later disccovered that Gouldings own just about everything in town including the tour service, restaurant, fast food, trading post, service station and general store. There's also an airstrip adjacent to the lodge, and we presume they also own the aircraft.