We “moved” to UTAH! 🚐🏜️ | Monument Valley, Valley of the Gods, Goosenecks State Park, & more!

We've got some big news. After four months living with Katherine's parents in Austin we have officially left the state of Texas and we are back on the road. We went back and forth for months about when we should hit the road again and while we had a great time in Texas we really really missed living in our own home which is this van. So we've decided to move to southern Utah for two months. Our goal when hitting the road again was to find a general area to live in in our van and just do local adventures around that area. That way we have limited interactions and we're moving a lot slower than before and you may be wondering why southern Utah and there are a handful of reasons and one big one is that there's tons of free places to camp at night and a lot of them have cell phone service. So what that means is we can be out in nature we're not going into towns nearly as much and we were out east and like in the midwest I guess last year we basically sleep in walmarts and cracker barrels every single night which means we're hopping from parking lot to parking lot to parking lot from town to town every single day so now we can kind of just stay put in one spot and be really isolated. There's also tons of outdoor adventures we can go on where we can be socially distant from people. The weather this time of year in southern Utah is incredible which is very important when you live in a van and you have a special dog friend with you and there's five national parks we've been to two we want to visit the other three and go back to the other two. So we've already been driving for about 11 hours we left Austin yesterday and we're currently just outside of Albuquerque New Mexico camping at a pretty sick free camp spot for the night so we're just going to relax for the rest of the night and then tomorrow we are going to finish the final five ish six ish hours to Utah. Wait was that real? Oh no. We made it to Utah finally. And our first stop is Monument Valley which is probably one of the most iconic places in the United States and somewhere we have always wanted to visit. Monument Valley is an almost 92,000 acre valley located on the border of Arizona and Utah on the Navajo Nation Reservation. This area is made up of sandstone buttes, mesas, and rock formations which formed over millions of years as wind and water eroded the plateau. Some of the most iconic features are the Mitten Buttes and the Totem Pole which is a tall Due to COVID, Navajo Nation parks are currently closed so the actual Monument Valley Tribal Park is not accessible but we're going to see as much as we can from the road. One of the most popular things to do in Monument Valley is come to a spot called Forest Gump Hill which if you've seen the movie Forest Gump this is the spot where he ends his cross-country run. So the thing to do here at this spot is to recreate the scene from the movie stand out in the middle of the road you can stand there take a picture you can run do something crazy we saw a guy skateboarding here but sounds kind of sketchy it's 65 mile an hour road thankfully in this stretch here immediate stretch they lower it to 35 that guy's not going to 55 if you just saw that but thankfully you can see very far on either side so you just watch out for yourself. We're kind of nervous but we came all the way here yeah so we're gonna give it a shot we did it we ran the shot in the footsteps of Forest Gump well Adam did I just took the photos but it actually wasn't as hard as I thought it would be there's traffic on the road but they come in groups so once a group passes it tends to clear up and it was not busy here at all we saw maybe like three groups total trying to get photos so you know to like fight for the road yeah it wasn't too bad if you punch in Forest Gump Hill in Google Maps it can kind of lead you astray it'll take you to the top of the hill where there is a sign that says Forest Gump Hill but the place to get the shot is a little bit down the hill back towards Monument Valley and there's a concrete scenic pull-off where you can pull off and that's where you'll probably see most people and it's where the speed is reduced so yeah it wasn't too bad it was fun but we're gonna keep heading I guess this way which y'all don't know which way that is we're gonna keep going north because we have a pretty awesome free camp spot for the night we're camping tonight at Valley of the Gods which is a gorgeous area it's about a quarter of the size of Monument Valley but it has a lot of the similar same features all these columns and mesas and buttes it's just awesome out here and unlike Monument Valley this is BLM land which is Bureau of Land Management land which is public land whereas Monument Valley is Navajo Nation land so this area is totally free to access there's a 17 mile road that runs through the valley and you can just camp all around the area off the side of the road for free it is absolutely gorgeous out here our spot is perched up on a little hill so we have 360 views it is perfect and we're kind of tucked away where we can be totally by ourselves remote and just enjoy this without having like tons of neighbors close by we are just so pumped to be back on the road and be back out west which is the west has our heart so we're just so so happy for dinner tonight we are making one of our new van favorites Vietnamese pho but we kind of cheated a little bit and bought the broth pre-made already because simplicity is key in the van first step you need some rice noodles second step you add some beef this is raw as you notice but the key what you do is you have your broth boiling hot and you're gonna dump some in here and that's gonna cook traditionally when we've had it in a restaurant you can add for your toppings you can add lime cilantro a chili oil jalapeno bean sprouts there's all kinds of stuff we have lime cilantro and green dragon sauce from trader joe's that we're gonna add in there that is freaking good we were so tired last night we went to bed at 7 45 p.m to be fair that's 7 45 p.m mountain time so maybe in our texas brains that's 8 45 p.m but it's still it still was early but we're up bright and early because we're gonna go check out sunrise at a spot called gooseneck state park oh wow whoa that's huge crazy the goosenecks is one of the world's best examples of an entrenched river meander that's a mouthful but the san juan river flows through here for six miles there's six miles of river but only advances a mile and a half on its way towards lake powell you may remember about two years ago we went to page arizona we went to a very popular spot called horseshoe bend which has a very similar look to gooseneck state park but the biggest differences between goosenecks and horseshoe bend is that goosenecks has multiple bends horseshoe bend kind of just looks like this view right here but here the river just cuts through the rock multiple times and there's multiple bends to look at it's also cheaper to come here it's five dollars per car for the day don't remember how much horseshoe bend was i want to say it was at least ten dollars a car or a person you can also camp here on the rim for ten dollars a night which is a steal and it's so empty here there are people camping but no one's actually out here looking at this right now so we have it all to ourselves which is very rare at horseshoe bend next up we're headed to the milky dugway which is a road that was constructed in 1958 by a mining company and it was used to transport your transport uranium ore from the happy jack mine in fry canyon to a processing plant in mexican hat and the reason that the milky dugway is a popular thing to do while in the area is because it's a crazy steep road with some of the most wild looking switchbacks we've ever seen this is what it looks like on google maps i'm pretty nervous to drive it it looks absolutely wild they say don't go if you have an rv but we're a van we're not really an rv we're pulling something yeah if you're pulling something or if you're over a certain weight we've read that people and sprinters can do it we'll just take it slow and go in low gear on the way down yeah we should be good got a nice little surprise there with some little baby cows super cute it looks like we're just driving into the canyon walls apparently there's a road that takes you to the top of it but it doesn't look like it doesn't look like you can barely see the bottom of it but you can't tell where it goes oh and we forgot to mention it's a completely unpaved road to the top hairpin turn number one oh wow look at that view cool this is pretty crazy very steep those little mounds of dirt are guardrails yeah we made it good job once you get to the top of the mokey dugway there's this road off to the left pretty much immediately it's a dirt road that takes you to a spot called moly point which is supposed to have some really nice views of the surrounding area to kind of put things into perspective of where we've been this weekend right out there you can see monument valley which is where we started our utah adventure and then just right behind me you can see all of the goosenecks from goosenecks state park now we're here at muley i said it wrong earlier i think it's muley point which i thought would be more of like a touristy spot but there's no signage telling you where you are you just go on a dirt road and there's like this big open area you can camp out here it's just so cool to see everywhere we've been all at once and then all the way out there you can see a mountain with snow on top of it which i just think is so cool to see out in the desert what an amazing start we've had to our time here in utah we are so pumped and so happy to be out here i think we have about 15 more videos that we're planning on filming here in utah so get ready for lots of that coming your way but for now we are going to head west to the area that we're going to be basing ourselves in for a while so we will see you guys there first step though we've got to go back down the mokey duck way made it off the dusty windy part i made it out alive back on solid road back on solid road we made it to utah the goosenecks is one of the world's best examples of a meandering river entrenched river meander okay hi guys how are you similar features like you do it it's got wind too