We visited Moab in April 2016, as part of Big Trip #1. Read about our second quickie visit in 2016 here, and our third visit in 2018 here during Big Trip #2.

[If you’re reading these posts in order, you may be confused right now since the previous post was about a quick overnight in Moab. Sorry. The regular posts take longer to write so the “day in the life” post got slotted in out of chronological order! Our overnight in Moab comes later in the trip 🙂 ]

[To further confuse you, you can read about our stop in Moab on Big Trip #2 here!]

Campground

We stayed at Canyonlands RV Resort and Campground, a quiet and leafy, if close-packed, park backing up to a high school on two sides, which gave it a more private feel. They give you cookies when you check in! It was a short walk into downtown, an even shorter walk to the brewery across the street, and we loved it. It was our new favorite campground (until we got to Durango).

Supplies

We checked off a few wishlist items while in a town with so many outdoor stores–one of which, GearHeads, was a block from our campground. We’re now the proud new owners of a cast-iron skillet, a simple and cheap camping coffee drip cone to replace my crappy Oxo French Press, and a collapsible camp table for our “yard.” Yay!

Eating

Our first stop upon arriving in town was at the Quesadilla Mobilla food truck for really delicious, yes, quesadillas. We sat on the dog-friendly patio with Bugsy for an enjoyable lunch.

I had a post-lunch coffee from Moab Coffee Roasters, and their gelato looked incredible. Unfortunately, we got gelato later that day at Moab Brewery instead, and it was not that great.

We hadn’t had sushi since leaving home in February, and we were craving it. You may question the advisability of eating sushi in a landlocked state, but Sabaku Sushi‘s fish is flown in fresh from Hawaii several times a week, and it was divine.

Walking home after our sushi dinner, we couldn’t resist a shake from Moab Diner. Ugh. Really good, but really terrible, as milkshakes tend to be.

The next day, we got sandwiches at Moonflower Co-op for a post-hike picnic. I love a co-op. Moonflower sells Chapul cricket protein bars, and seeing them there was my first time seeing cricket products in the wild. Fun fact about me: I am a cricket protein enthusiast.

Our last night in town, we had dinner at Miguel’s Baja Grill. I had fish tacos and margaritas (of course) and we enjoyed the scene on the little semi-outdoor covered patio.

Drinking

Utah has some complicated alcohol laws. There are no regular bars, where you can have a beer and take off; before they’ll serve you a drink in Utah, you have to order food, unless the establishment has a special type of license–club or tavern, I can’t recall. The type license held by the restaurant affects the strength of beer it can serve, too: a regular license limits draft beers to under 4% ABV.

We had a beer at a restaurant on the main drag with a cool-looking outdoor patio on a warm day, and because we wanted to drink a beer we had to order some food, so got the cheapest thing on the menu: a piece of cheese pizza. The pizza was fine and the service was good at Zax Restaurant, and we enjoyed a few local beers there while nibbling at our single piece of pizza.

Later we visited our neighbor Moab Brewery and learned about the licensing that requires the different strengths in beers. The Moab IPA, which J had been drinking like water in cans, is brewed at two different strengths to comply with the laws. The red can is the “light” version, and the blue can is the “heavy.” The bartender could serve the heavy version in a can only, and had the light version on tap, so could give us a side-by-side taste test to show the difference in flavor, and it wasn’t a subtle difference. Fortunately, both versions are tasty, so we now that we’re educated, we can choose red or blue depending on our beer drinking goals. J wrote more here about the brewery.

Hiking

I’ll write separate posts for the two National Parks we visited (Arches and Canyonlands), and the one BLM hike (Negro Bill Canyon Trail) we did (twice) while in Moab. Moab famous for mountain biking, but we went for some memorable hikes on the famous red slickrock, visiting arches, towers, natural bridges, cliffs, and canyons, with incredible views.