Letters From Home

My birthday. Among other things. (Huh… editing the entry makes the link not change to a different color any more. I wonder why that is?)

Although I considered the whole trip to be a birthday present, F’zer also got me a very nice card. We packed everything up, checked out, and toodled over to the same restaurant (Old Smokey’s) where we’d had breakfast last year on our way home from New York. They still make spectacularly good coffee. F’zer had their “all you can eat” buckwheat pancakes, and once again, since the pancake is a bit larger than the plate it arrived on, “all you can eat” turned out to be “not quite one whole pancake.” I had eggs, hash browns and toast, and they do a great job with those, too, especially the hash browns, which I think were cooked in butter. At least they tasted like it. Nobody eats diet food while they’re on vacation, right?

And then it was off toward home. We watched the GPS screen scroll through a lot of pretty much nothing. I think I’m going to buy the Garmin “Roads and Recreation” disk next time I see it on eBay for a reasonable price. It was discontinued two years ago, but it says it adds in a lot of rest areas, side roads and so forth to the standard display. That’d sure make it a lot less boring to look at!

Going west is a bit faster than going east, because it’s downhill most of the way (a 7000′ elevation at the Grand Canyon, to not-far-above-sea-level here). We got an earlier start on the trip, too, so we had daylight all the way. Once again, the scenery in Arizona was a lot more interesting than the scenery in California, and we stopped to eat lunch at a restaurant called Juan Pollo in Barstow. It turned out to be part of a small chain, where they prepare slow-roasted rotisserie chicken in several tasty ways. Alas, the nearest one to us is in East LA, where our travels seldom take us, but the food was good enough it might be worth a side trip someday.

And when we got home, the cats were ecstatic to see us. We were pretty darn happy to see them, too, and even more so to see the kids and Girlfriend a bit later that night for my birthday dinner. Vengeant and F’zer both got me great presents, which was a bonus!

So, definitely one of the better weeks of my life, and it came to a great conclusion!

This was our day for un-packaged travel.

After the standard-issue buffet breakfast (this was the last such thing included in our package) we headed off to Meteor Crater, about 65 miles east of Williams. This is a place I’d wanted to see for a long time. I had thought I’d read about it as a kid, but according to what we heard while we were there, it wasn’t officially recognized as having been caused by a meteor impact till the 60s. Hmm.

At any rate, the prairie scenery along the way was spectacular. There was a winter storm swirling around us, and the combination of wide open spaces, distant mesas and clouds… well, I just hope my tape of the trip turned out, that’s all I can say, because there’s no good way to describe it. At one point, the tape captured the radio broadcasting in Navajo, too.

Since it was cold and extremely windy with snow in the air, there weren’t many other people at the crater, which suited us just fine. We started out by listening to a brief presentation from a Navajo guide (who introduced himself to us in proper Navajo fashion, naming his “born to” and “born for” clans) and then watched a film about the creation of the crater and the white-peoples’ explorations in it. I was surprised to hear that the crater and surrounding area are all privately owned, and not a national park.

Then we got to see the crater itself. I have watched many a show on the Discovery Channel (et al) where some geologist or other sits on the rim and talks about meteor impacts and dinosaur extinctions and so forth, but the reality of the place just can’t be captured in something like that. The crater is so big that you just have no sense of perspective at all (something I have found is very common on wide Western vistas of all kinds). At the observation platform, they have several telescopes set up in fixed positions so you can see various landmarks. One of the scopes was pointed at a 6′ tall mannequin in the bottom of the crater. It took me quite a while to pick it out down there without the telescope, but once I did, then I began to be able to put things in perspective.

Although we were down below the rim of the crater and thus somewhat sheltered from the winds (and thus not quite as cold) we still couldn’t stay outside for all that long. We took still photos and video of everything and then headed inside to the museum, which had various space- and meteor-related exhibits, a place where you could stand in front of a photo mural so someone could take a picture of you appearing to be in the bottom of the crater (we passed on that), some interactive exhibits showing where meteor craters are visible on Earth today, and the largest chunk of the original meteorite that’s ever been found (not all that large, but because it’s nickel-iron, over a thousand pounds worth!) After we’d browsed and pushed buttons to our hearts’ content, we walked over to the visitor center’s Subway restaurant for lunch.

And then we browsed the gift shop, where the prices are surprisingly low. Of course, they do charge a fairly stiff admission fee, so maybe that’s why. I got a chunk of fossilized Triceratops bone and a tiny Trilobite in matrix, so I managed to “collect” my two favorite fossils. F’zer bought a beautiful slice of polished agate and a stand to display it, and we also bought a geode that we’ll be able to crack open ourselves one of these days. The shop also had various desert plant seeds for sale and I was going to buy some saguaro cactus seeds but I forgot. Drat.

On the way back to Williams we took a side trip through Flagstaff, which is one place on our list of possible retirement relocations. We spotted the sign for the Lowell Observatory and decided to stop off there, too. I’m glad we did that. Even though it was freezing cold and icy outside, we managed to catch the last guided tour of the day, and we and one other couple had the guide all to ourselves. We saw the wooden telescope domes, and the scopes inside (one was the scope that Clyde Tombaugh used to discover Pluto) and also an exhibit inside another domed building that included replicas of Tombaugh’s original photographic plates and a blink comparator (I hope I’ve got that term right) where you could see the moving dot that turned out to be Pluto.

And then we headed home through darkening skies, had dinner at a local Williams cafe (the town has a surprisingly wide variety of restaurants) and snuggled into bed once again.

Williams, Arizona to the Grand Canyon and back

The package tour. OK, so we were real live tourists! 🙂

The company that owns the train (and the hotel, and the depot) goes to a reasonable amount of effort to make sure the people who travel to the Grand Canyon have a good time. The train cars are all “vintage” but very well maintained and clean and comfortable. F’zer and I decided to spend a bit extra for “first class” travel, which meant we got better seating, a small buffet of various snacks, and free beverages.

The train car we were in on our way out to the Canyon was constructed with seating on both ends and the bathrooms (with small “lounges”) in the center with a narrow hallway running between the two sides of the car. In our half of the car, we sat with two other families from California, but oh, what a difference between the two. The family immediately in front of us came from a notoriously wealthy community not far from where we live, and I think it sums it all up to say that they were traveling with their two mostly unsupervised small children, McKenna (girl) and Troy (boy). Those two were, if I remember right, three and not-quite-two. The mother also had a daughter who was 20. Mommy looked to be of an age where the older kid was most likely a teenage indiscretion from a previous relationship. Mom and Dad mostly spent the trip saying things to each other that were supposed to be funny, but were mostly of the “hee hee, I’m sticking a knife in your back, ho ho” variety. That got old about as fast as the “lookit me being cute” antics of the children.

However, the family across the aisle made up for it. They were a Hispanic family that included a married couple who looked to be a bit younger than F’zer and me, the wife’s elderly mother, an older daughter (she was 20, if I remember right) and two boys, ages 7 and 4, who were spectacularly well behaved without being unnatural about it, if you know what I mean. Because Mrs Yup-Yup in front of us was incredibly nosy, we found out that the mom and grandma were originally from Equador. (Yup Yup Mama also actually said “What language are you speaking?” apparently living so far in the ozone, usually, that she had no idea what Spanish sounded like. Uh HUH.)

Each car had a host or hostess who told the passengers about the areas we were passing through, answered questions, served drinks and generally tried to keep the atmosphere lively as we traveled through yet more rather unremarkable scenery. Ours did a good job. After a while, a “cowboy” with a Gibson guitar came through, settled himself in, sang us some songs, told some jokes and generally helped to keep things interesting in the car, although the yuppie puppies weren’t interested in listening to him and kept running around the aisles.

I tried to take a series of “video snapshots” with the camcorder, starting at the beginning of the trip in Williams. I haven’t looked at any of that tape yet, and I’m hoping I can dump it to the computer for editing, because otherwise there will be some embarrassing spots where I started taping with the lens cap still on. Duh!

After the train pulled into the Grand Canyon depot, we all wended our way over to a series of buses parked nearby. We had hoped to stay with the Hispanic family, but as it happened, we got separated and ended up on different buses. Our bus driver was a real relic of the 60s and it would be impossible to reproduce the way he talked as he shuttled us from overlook to overlook. But he obviously knew a lot about the area and we two old hippies found him to be a familiar, kindred spirit.

I don’t think there are words to describe the Canyon itself, and we only saw a minuscule amount of what there was to be seen. We are already planning to take another trip, where we can stay at the Canyon longer and see a lot more of the area. We even talked about taking a mule trip to the bottom and staying there, but the upper limit for weight on the mules is 200 pounds… um, well, we both have to plan far enough ahead that a pre-trip diet is included in the preparations. 🙂

Another buffet lunch, which again, I wouldn’t go out of my way to try again, but it wasn’t bad. And since our bus was filled mostly with people our age and older, the dining room was pleasantly quiet.

Our tickets placed us in a different train car on the way home. This one had the bathrooms at one end of the car, rather than in the middle, so there were more people to interact with along the way, although we didn’t talk with our neighbors as much this time around. The hostess was very lively and talked a lot about herself as well as about the scenery and so forth, and a different cowboy entertainer came through and stayed with us a bit longer than the other one had.

We saw a herd of deer off to one side of the road, and lots of ravens. Supposedly there were elk somewhere around, but alas, we didn’t see those. We did see one spectacularly antlered mule deer, though.

Just as it was beginning to get dark, the train stopped. That was so the “train robbers” could get on. As the hostess said “We couldn’t find anyone who was willing to jump from a moving horse to a moving train for minimum wage.” The robbers came through and did their thing, and a few minutes later the “marshal” came through in somewhat less than hot pursuit. The kids in the car, of course, had great fun telling the marshal that the robbers went thataway.

After the marshal marched the bad guys back up the train and made them return anything they’d persuaded the passengers to give up, the hostess served us sparkling cider or champagne. She managed to pour from two different bottles into slim flutes without spilling any, on a moving train, which I thought was nothing short of remarkable.

And then she told us more about the scenery as we chugged back through the twilight. She talked about how there’s a lawsuit going on between some ski resort owners and the Hopi tribe over whether one of the Hopi’s sacred mountains will or will not have a ski resort on top of it, making snow with recycled water. She referred to this as a case between “progress” and “cultural sensitivity,” which made it pretty clear which side she was on. I doubt she’d see it as “progress” if the Hopi decided to put up a casino in the middle of the Crystal Cathedral!

At any rate, that was the only small sour note on the entire trip. We pulled into the Williams junction just as it was approaching full dark, got stuff unloaded in our room, had yet another fairly good buffet dinner, watched House and drifted off to sleep.

From Los Angeles to Williams, Arizona.

We got off only half an hour later than I had hoped, which for this family is nothing short of remarkable. The weather report mentioned storms, and we’d had a bit of rain here overnight, but we hoped to drive through the worst of it and be into sunny skies for most of the trip. This turned out to be the case. We went through quite a cloudburst on our way to the high desert, but after that, the weather was windy but otherwise fine.

Naturally, I had caught a cold right before we left and was heavily into sneeze-and-sniffle mode, but when we stopped in Barstow for lunch I got some nose spray and some Ricola drops, both of which helped a lot. And we stocked up on tissues before we left!

The scenery between here and the California border varies between spectacular and spectacularly boring. I happen to like desert scenery, but between Barstow and Needles, there’s just not much to look at. Once we crossed into Arizona things got considerably more interesting, but of course at this time of year the sun went down early and the last three hours or so of the journey were in the dark.

The trip takes about eight hours when you factor in rest stops, meal breaks and so forth. It’s a comfortable day’s drive, and the roadside facilities seem to be spaced just about right. There was one long stretch in Arizona where the highway department was repairing several bridges in a row, and one rest stop was “closed for repairs” (with no evidence of any repairs under way) but that turned out not to be a problem.

When we got to Williams, there was a light sprinkle of snow in the air. The Grand Canyon Railway company runs what they call the “Polar Express” during the holiday season as well as their usual daily trains to the Grand Canyon, so by the time we hit the hotel parking lot, every space was full! We had to lurk around a while till the riders of the early Polar Express train unloaded and piled into their cars to go home, and since that involved wrangling a lot of children with associated paraphernalia, we oldsters just had to be patient. The hotel had obviously gone to a lot of trouble to decorate the whole area (including the train depot) for the holidays, and they’d done a great job with the lights and inflatable figurines (including a Grinch with his dog) and so forth. So at least we had a lot of pretty lights to look at while we lurked in the parking lot.

The dining room was still open when we finally finished dumping all our stuff in the room (we’d been a bit concerned about this) and we had our first buffet dinner. I wouldn’t go out of my way to eat the food at that place, but it was reasonably good and there were a reasonable number of choices.

The hotel bed was clean and comfortable, and even we waterbed sleepers had no problems with it. They had put some kind of mattress topper on, which made the transition from waterbed to regular mattress a bit easier. We forgot to turn on the heater in the room, which meant we had to snuggle up for warmth. This is not a bad thing. 🙂

Fell asleep easily that night. No surprises there!

She’s a bit wobbly, and her brother is a bit sulky, but she’s home.

She made a dramatic comeback over the weekend.   The vet still doesn’t know what happened to her, and about all we can do now is feed her a special diet and hope for the best–but she’s home.

And we’ve all got something for which to be truly thankful.