We woke up, packed up and gassed up in Mesa Verde National Park, then ate lunch at the Burger Boy Drive-In (400 E Main St Cortez, CO 81321) in neighboring Cortez. There was nothing exceptional about this drive in, except maybe the 3-D Burger that George ordered. I wisely stuck with the single patty. This fast food restaurant just happened to be on the way to Four Corners Monument, the only point in the United States where four state borders intersect.

Four Corners Monument is about an hour from Cortez and absolutely nothing is in between the two except a stretch of desert. Since the land is on a Navajo reservation, the members of the U.S.’s second largest tribe (the first being Cherokee) encircle the raised plague and platform with tiny shops. We took a number of photographs while touching all four states at once. Then, we treated ourselves to a snow cone and I bought a shot glass. It said “Four Corners” and depicted the boundaries of the states.

We both had trouble receiving cell phone service out in the middle of nowhere, but wanted to see if this was truly the middle of the four states. To do that, we loaded up the Twitterfone application for iPhone, which allows Twitter users to add their GPS coordinates to a tweet via Google Maps. Our intention was to take a half hour at Four Corners and move on. But, because we attempted and failed to send the tweet from this data-desolate area so many times, it ended up taking twice as long. Just as I was about to give up, my tweet finally posted (George managed to post his, too) along with this twitpic of me in four states at once.

We are now able to proceed to Utah and Arches National Park.