Flagstaff

July 10

 

We took the bus to town Wednesday.  Santa Fe is really spread out.  Cerrillos Rd (the main route to the Plaza) is lined with Wal Marts and Walgreens and full of a lot of traffic, but the sidewalks are great and the drivers are extremely cyclist friendly.  Devin ordered some of the best chicken tacos at a little restaurant called the Shed.  Almost all the architecture here is adobe, it blends in with the landscape and helps hide the number of people living here.  I feel kind of like a mud-dobber going in and out of all these tan little round hovels. 

 

The next day we packed up and headed out to visit Taos.  Thousands and thousands of giant charcoal-brown boulders stick out of steep, rocky mountainsides that hem-in the river.  The scenery is fantastic.  An expansive green valley (100 times larger than our own little one in Roanoke) stretches between sparsely placed giant mountains, while the shadows of clear, bright cumulous clouds migrate across the landscape.  Cutting through the middle of all this is the Rio Grand River Gorge and it’s hard to see it as the two thousand foot deep scar it is, because the view from the road is ten miles away.  You look across this wide flat land and see snaking through the middle what looks like a little black river, but what you’re seeing is the shadow of the long cliffs that make up the sides.   Looking at it from the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge is breath-taking.  Pictures can’t capture the scale.

 

July 11,

 

We visited a Pueblo Indian village and met some really cool people who put out this centered, non-stressed aura.  They were so friendly.  I keep imagining the early Spanish Catholics with their fear, guilt and holiness crap descending on these contented souls and just totally messing it all up.  At one of the churches I reluctantly visited (next to the oldest house in America) there is sign that reads something to the effect “all the ghosts here are friendly.”  Yeah right, you murdered relatives, you desecrated holy sites, tore apart families, inserted your own perverted superstition, forbid old customs, and every (dead)body’s happy.  The lies we tell ourselves are tragically funny.  

 

We left Taos without seeing enough to satisfy Ursula.  We’ll go back.  Heading toward the Grand Canyon, we decided to camp at a little State Park called Blue Water Lake.  We chased the sun to get there before dark, but pulled in just after all the light went out of the sky.  After a quick late dinner of grilled pizza from Trader Joes (not bad at all), we went to sleep and woke up the next morning to see wild horses staring at us from across the campground.  We left after a little hike to look over a cliff that stood above the dam making the lake.

 

Heading toward Flagstaff , we visited the Painted Desert, saw the Petrified Forest, and the ruins of a thousand year old Indian camp with famous rock art, and then saw Meteor Crater national monument (that’s cool).  The meteor must have slammed into the earth at an almost vertical angle because the crater is almost perfectly round.  The size of the “whump” and what it did to the rock is mind-boggling.

 

We stopped for fuel and I left the gas cap on the door.  About a tenth of a mile down the interstate, Ursula heard it fall and I trudged the tenth of mile back and luckily found it on the side of the road.  We got to Flagstaff, set up camp, went shopping to buy the Camera Devin so desperately needs before we see the Canyon, and cooked hamburgers.  I’m typing this looking up at the mountain on the northeast side of Flagstaff in a KOA in the 6 AM morning chill.  A blue bird just came by to sit on the number post of site next door.  Time to see if I’ve got wi fi and check email.