Have you seen Galaxy Quest? Do you remember the scene where Tim Allen fights the rock monster? If you answered no to either of the questions, go rent and watch it. Two reasons:
- It is a funny movie(especieally if you watched any Start Trek growing up)
- We camped there on Sunday night.
The Goblin Valley is this surreal red rock landscape filled with mushroom/phallic rock formations. It is pretty otherworldly, hence it’s cameo in Galaxy Quest. We only spent a night, but we had plenty of time to cavort amongst the mushrooms. A word of advice, if you want to climb on top of a mushroom, do it statically.
As you can probably guess from the picture, it’s hot, it’s dry, and it is dusty. We forgot our towels, but it wasn’t a problem, because by the time we walked the 50 yards from the showers to our camp site we were all basically dry. The night was nice and chilly so we built (and cooked on) a nice fire.
Speaking of cooking, have you ever made a foil packet? You chop up meat and veggies, spice and marinade them, and then them wrap it all up in tin foil. When you’re done it looks a bit like a foil brick, which you can just throw on the fire and let bake. It’s a bit like making a miniature roast. Christie’s family ate a lot of camping meals this way, but it was a new trick to me. Ours were pretty simple: garlic, onion, carrot, potato, beef/chicken with salt, pepper and olive oil, but with a little more effort they could be turned into gourmet dishes(Jason added a can of cream of mushroom to his once).
All in all, a nice quick car camping trip.