Well, I planned to travel to Durango that night, but I still thought about stoping along the road and trying to get to the Arches NP somehow. There was a italian woman on the bus to the salt lake, and it turned out that she'd just arrived in Salt Lake City that day ( and had checked into the room I left just a couple hours ago ) and thought about what to see in Utah...and it didn't take us long to make up our minds to go to see the Arches together....or at last give it a try to get there. We picked up our stuff at the hostel and headed for the bus terminal...and almost missed our bus, as someone had given us the wrong address ( giving directions in salt lake city is like playing " sink the ship" - 600 south300west:nothing...300south600west: bingo-here we go: greyhound bus terminal)....so we were 10 minutes late, but managed to stop the leaving bus and get some tickets at the same time. We arrived in Green River ( the closest place- or let's say truck stop - to the Arches NP you could reach by Greyhound, about 58 miles in the northwest of the NP-entrance ) at 2.45 am, got some hours sleep at a motel and tried to find a way to get to Moab/Aches NP in the morning...and of course there was no way but hitchhiking....a real nice mexican truck driver picked us up and took us to Moab, it was more like sightseeing than hitchhiking...we stoped along the road, all got off the truck, walked over to those magnificent red rocks and took some pics....we made it to Moab and saw the Arches in the afternoon - AWESOME!!!! And what a wonderful, unbelievable day. We went back to Green River the next day and I took the bus to Grand Junction, where I stayed for a night before heading towards Durango, a town about 36 miles in the east of the MESA VERDE NP- entrance, which meant another hitchhike- adventure, but I made it! I didn't even have to pay the entrance fee, as the older couple which had picked me up at the entrance owned a golden age pass. I've seen a lot of cliff dwellings, one-room houses and whole villages like Cliff Palace, Balcony House ( we had to climb a 32 ft. ladder to get up there ) and Spruce Tree House... I'm still wondering how the ancestral puebloans managed to build those places a long time ago. I went on to Albuquerque for a short stopover along the historic Route 66 and to see the old town before heading towards Santa Fe, where I'm right now.