Driving from the East you get your first look at the incredible landscape that is Monument Valley.  In fact that road that you drive in on is the same one where Forrest Gump, after running across America 3 times and garnishing some devout followers, all of a sudden stops and tells his followers that that it, he's going home.  The view still wasn't enough to get me to want to run.  Because it was getting late all we did was drive up to the Visitor Center to have a quick look before it closed, but what a view.  They chose this place well as it is positioned perfectly to capture THAT view, the 3 butte's lined up with the plains stretching behind.  Being late we didn't linger and went to find a place to pull over and sleep and in this area there is no better place than Gouldings, truth is I don't think that there is even another place to stay.  There is the Gouldings Lodge, Camp Site, General Store, Laundry, Tour Company, hell I think the airport is even named after them.  But it probably should because without the Gouldings, Harry and Mike, Monument Valley might not be as popular as it is today.  When they arrived here, they were the first white people to set up a trading store and interact with the Navajo Indians.  After about 10 years and enduring the Great Depression, the Gouldings heard about a movie director who was looking for a place to film his westerns.  The Gouldings took their last $69 dollars and went to LA to put forward the case of Monument Valley as the perfect place to film.  The director loved it and with his main actor went to the area to film.  The Director's name; John Ford, the Actor; John Wayne and the Film; Stagecoach.  The rest is history.  Any decent Western movie had no choice but to film around this place to be taken seriously and the rest of the world got to see what the real Wild West looked like.  The reality is that this is only a small portion of a much greater landscape that doesn't look anything like this but is still spectacular none the less.

Those dark clouds from yesterday dropped snow overnight and we woke up to a clear but freezing morning.  We weren't deterred though and we booked a tour through, you guessed it, Gouldings, a full day one that took us not just into the Monument Valley area but to Mystery Valley also.  In the end it was just the 2 of us and the guide in his big truck, a personal tour he told us.  It wasn't long before the clouds returned and started to drop hail, a lot of it.  In the back we didn't have glass windows, only the tarp variety, and the cold was really seeping in so we asked to have the heater turned on, but that was so loud that it drained out the commentary from the guide.  Being a little warmer or listening to the guide and his explanations, that is the question.  Answer: keep warm and do some internet research later.  After a while it stopped hailing only to start raining and then that stopped only to have it snow.  All 3 in the space of an hour, it's a first for me.  We stopped at a few locations to see the vista's but with the conditions as they were it was a little disappointing.  We saw a few ancient Anasazi ruins and some special places that the Navajo hold sacred before we stopped in a dead end canyon for lunch, a BBQ lunch in the snow I might add.  After lunch it was time to enter THE Valley.  It is definitely a great site even in these shitty conditions and due to the multitude of films that have used this place as a location it feels like you have been here before.

This would have been a highlight of our trip but the weather really did spoil it a bit.  Half the time we were trying to stay warm rather than enjoying the views, that's when they weren't obscured by cloud and rain, but it was good to see where Tom Cruise was hanging off the Mesa in Mission Impossible 2, where Micheal J. Fox hid the Delorien in Back to the Future III and where Seth McFarlane and Charlize Theron sat around the campfire getting high in A Million Ways To Die In The West.  One thing that I do know is that Audrey and I have a lot of films to watch now that we have seen where they were filmed.  We left in the morning after another freezing night and a couple of loads of laundry done.