Back to the Present

So while Hanna whiled her days in San Diego, I was visiting with these two characters, my dad and nephew in Charlottesville. Valdemar is 4 and visiting my parents from Copenhagen where he lives. The whole family was in town, brother, sis-in-law, nephew, other brother, mom, dad, dog and cat. The whole clan in one place never happens so we celebrated Thanksgiving a little early and Valdemar helped my dad carve the turkey. Intrigued, but not quite sure we should be doing that to a bird.





Upon my return we said goodbye to Pete, Toni, and San Diego and headed for Las Vegas where absurdity reaches its zenith. This is the view from our hotel room at the Monte Carlo where we stayed two nights, gambled away a bunch of money reserved for entertainment, and saw a psychedelic topless light show ... thing. We learned the Vegas way that expecting to win money in Vegas is like expecting to sleep with the stripper at the strip club. Generally, not going to happen, although there are the lucky few.





It's terribly unfortunate that we saw this sign on our way out of town, since we always like our cold beer with dirty girls. After two days in the hazy reality of Money Town, we were ready to skip the bikini bull ride. Our misfortune.





Can you sum up two days in Vegas better than this face?





After leaving Vegas, we stopped for the night outside of Laughlin, NV, a strange little town on the flaccid Colorado (below both the Hoover and Davis dams, it sort of peters to a limp). Mohave County Campground: perhaps the most American campground we've found, and the starting point for possible future road trips if we can convince some grant panel to give us money to study the oddities of the semi-permanent itinerant campgroung movement. These places generally rent by the day, week and month--and there's tons of them in the southwest where people set out for when the weather in the rest of the country turns sour. Next to us on one side was the skullmobile, which you see pictured. A decorously tatooed native couple and their racoon-chasing cat lived here. On the other side of us was a woman who looked like a textbook small town stripper, with her two-year-old, Meredith. They pulled up after dark, in a dust storm of cursing, mostly about lost love and misspent money. They seemed to have just moved there from another similar facility nearby, and were living in two house-sized tents. Further on down were seven Mexican guys, who drank a lot of beer, slept in the same tent, played what sounded like circus music at top volume, and were gone at the crack of dawn -- we think migrant workers saving a buck on housing. We were the only folks there for just the night. Compounding the oddity on our first night back in "nature", sometime in the middle of the night a giant casino boat steamed past our tent with lights blaring and the bingo caller's voice ringing off the rocks.





Yesterday, in the middle of our continued journey east through NV and AZ, we decided to detour up to the Grand Canyon, only about an hour north. We were initially met with rain and cold (one of our water jugs burst from the freezing overnight temperatures -- a marked change from the desert climate of the last week), but we woke this morning to watch the sun rise in clear skies. (The sun rose at 6:45, a sure sign of changing seasons, as the last time we woke for the sunrise in Maine, we had to be up and at 'em by 4:30.) A gorgeous sight turned spectacular when we got to see fog pouring over the lip of the south rim, pooling into a cloud just inside the canyon. Probably most of you have been to the Grand Canyon (John had already seen it as a child), but we were both struck (I for the first time, and he anew) by the immensity of it. It almost leaves you feeling flat, as your brain tries and fails to process the depth, width, breadth, color, and infinitely changing aspects of the spectacle. Morning was the best time to see it, though, as the deep shadows reduce everything to large, simple shapes and you can skip the dizzying feeling of being inadequately equipped to appreciate something so incredible.





John takes in the sunrise.


So, we left the Grand Canyon this morning, and find ourselves now in Sedona, AZ. It's a bit of a loopy town, but it's one of the most beautifully appointed. It sits in the bottom of a deep canyon, with the alien red rock formations of the southwest for neighbors. We're moving east and south, heading for the White Sands Desert in New Mexico. We chose to skip Utah, for reasons of time, but may make it all the way north through New Mexico and into Colorado before continuing east. We're full tilt again after kind of a lazy, meandering month among family and friends. We hope to make the most of the rest of the trip, and avoid the automatic shut-off we had begun to feel in San Diego. Voila. We're finally caught up.