It Ain't Fun If It Don't Cost

One of Debbie's stated goals for this trip has been to revisit the Rocky Mountain National Park.  We were here last in 1993, with three children in an aftermarket GM van pulling a Rockwood pop-up camper with a 12-foot box.  The kids quickly learned it was their job to set up the camper at every stop and we used that van for family and Boy Scout trips for another decade and a half.

Anyway....

We spend four nights at Ridgway, Colorado, when we had planned only two because, arriving down the mountain road nine miles short of our goal, Debbie complains the coach steering feels funny.  And then it's very hard.  And then she's hauling on the wheel like a stevedore, determined to get to the camp before stopping to fix anything.  Then the engine overheats, so we stop anyway.  The coolant is low and we pump a gallon into the tank.  We also notice pink slimy fluid everywhere in the RV's engine compartment and all over the towed Honda.  Also there's a puddle on the ground under the RV chassis.

 We limp into Ridgway and John buys two whole quarts of hydraulic fluid because the skimpy User Guide doesn't say how much and his experience with cars show they don't take a lot when the dipstick is low. John is woefully under educated about diesel truck engines --by more than a gallon!  It gets us to the campground, anyway.  Of course(!) it's a Friday and nobody can do anything for us until Monday at the earliest.  Eventually, we are able to be towed on Tuesday.

Ask for “Thomas” if you need a heavy-duty tow from Western Towing. He impressed us with his expertise and care.  His home is in Grand Junction which sits in a broad valley among mountains and phenomenal flat-topped mesas, so he was able to suggest we take in the Colorado National Monument, west of town, and Grand Mesa, to the east, while waiting for repairs.

Good advice, although the Colorado National Monument's name makes it sound like a statue.  The actual truth is a 23 mile long road along the uplifted rim of a vertical wall that extends two thousand feet above the town. The uplift is strikingly stunning.  And that –as our pictures– is a severe understatement.

The Grand Canyon is more– well, grand but–– this is somehow more personal.  It is every bit as craggy and gorgeously canyon-like, but for some reason you feel closer to it.  Like, somehow, you could put it in your pocket and pull it out to admire from time to time.  Or– John does, anyhow.  We drove our Honda up the west entrance –quite a climb!– which is very picturesque from above. 

The Redlands Fault is part of the big Uncompahgre Uplift that we have toured over the past week-plus.  The USGS makes quite a point of believing it is a Quaternary Fault, but you really need more geological training than we to understand why anyone cares.   Redlands is a fairly recent event, a mere 10-million years ago.

We saw many people pumping their low-geared bicycles up the Mesa (on both ends) and were advised this western entrance is longer –i.e.: easier– than the shorter challenging climb from Grand Junction, at the other end.  For John this scenic drive is the most memorable of any on this trip.  Debbie points out that, if our coach had not developed a cracked hydraulic hose, we never would have experienced this stuff.  Grand Junction wasn't even on our radar in plans to get to the Rockies.  Life is like a box of–– uh, well...Sweet Surprises, if you're open to them.

Our coach is being fixed at Driven Diagnostics, and they need us out of it while they work, so the next day, Thursday, we decide to drive to the east side of town to see why Grand Mesa also impressed Thomas.  It claims to be the largest flattop mountain on this planet, with a 63 mile scenic drive.  Rich, the owner of Driven Diagnostics, doesn't expect to be done repairing before Friday, so we plan for a two-day tour on Grand Mesa, with a motel stop in Cedaredge while our house-on-wheels is in the shop.

The mesa is, indeed, flat –the way the surface of a golf ball is flat. The dimples collect snowmelt and form many beautiful lakes, one of which hosted us for lunch. 

Eventually, one week and a hundred expensively towed miles after Ridgway, we are handed a bill for 12 quarts, a new pressure hose and lots of labor. The good news is that we don't have to buy a new turbo charge-air pump.  Driven Diagnostics, in Grand Junction, CO, is owned by a born in Sparta, graduated by Ferris State University man named Rich Willis. Small world. We believe he treated us well. If you break down near there, call him.  Rich calls from the shop on Thursday afternoon, a full day early!   The turbo charge-air pump in which he thought he'd detected a large crack, turned out to have merely a scratch in its paint.  But we had already checked into the motel, so we'll wait till tomorrow to reunite with Bry RV.  When we do, we ask Rich where good public land camping might be found, and he said “Dot Zero.”  What?!   It turns out to be Dotsero, Colorado, not quite two hours along Interstate 70 through such a spectacularly narrow canyon that the East and

Westbound lanes actually are stacked vertically! The payoff is a free-to camp USFS site along another intriguingly named dirt road guarded by two cows who are reluctant to let us enter the public land above a lively noisy creek.  Nothing sounds as good as running water in your dreams! 

That even made up for the hummingbird that conducted a close inspection of John's face (happily wearing glasses at the time!) and the midnight raid by a four legged bandit on our camp chairs.

Racoon goes hungry.

––

BTW and FWIW: Garmin, which sustained John's situational awareness in the woods for decades and navigated his plane cross country many times, continues to disappoint us.  The B!tch never heard of the village of Dotsero right along I-70 and is even unaware of US-6, a federal road at the interstate's Exit 133.   Bad enough her voice software can't understand the word “Park” when so directed; her disgustingly ignorant replies are “Searching for Parking lots” and “Searching for Amusement Parks.”  Repeatedly!  Do her programmers even speak English?
Nevertheless we continue to use this thing we paid for, even though we complement it with the vastly more accurate Google Maps, which came with both our phones for free.

 

Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?

 –Chicago, somewhen either side of 1970

We spend nearly a week without being sure which hour of the day we occupy. Everybody's on Mountain Time here, but Arizona doesn't recognize Daylight Time, which is why there's a separate clock on each side of the road over the Hoover Dam. When we cross the border into Utah and return, as we do a few times in our sight-seeing, John's Mint Mobile phone server can't keep up. He imagines the thing throwing up its little foxy paws and, muttering imprecations not worth repeating, deciding to simplify its life and screwing up ours while the Brys argue about whose phone is correct. “Hey, Google! What time is it where I'm at right now?” Debbie cannot abide hors d'oeuvres before 5pm while John never eats on a fixed schedule, anyway.

Now we're in Arizona's Valley of Fire, where the time is Standard and high temperatures are above 100^o and the big horn sheep maintain their ancestral claim on the ember-red rocks perched on the scorched sand that we try to occupy for two nights. Debbie declares, “thrilling!” John knows we are the interlopers here.

This is a State Park and the campground is named Atlatl.  For the first time in his seven decades of life, John learns to pronounce this word properly (at-LAH-t'l) but still cannot grok the physics involved in nearly doubling the striking power of a thrown spear with this tool that smarter-than-he people invented thousands of years ago.  Some of them even lived right here, sleeping in naturally hewn caves among the eroded sedimentary rock that is everywhere locally.   

← This view is from under our awning each night as we enjoy our pre-dinner drinks and cheese.  

Debbie fantasizes this outcropping looks like a bird's head.   →

The people before us left their pictures scrawled on the rocks here and there and, as we pointed out in Capitol Reef National Park some years previously, 2019/05/canyonlands-arches-capitol-reef.html, the government bureaucrats consider the ancient graffiti more valuable than anything we moderns might scrawl. (That woman's quote still rings in John's head!)  Here, the Arizona Parks built a big scaffold with many, many stair steps to view the petroglyphs up close and personal.  Not being schooled in translating glyph, we don't really bother.  John can't tell a Monet from a Van Gogh anyway, thinks Picasso must have been a total stoner, and isn't the least ashamed that you now know that.

The state park is rather large, but fairly homogeneous in its makeup.   It is a Valley of Fire with the red sedimentary rocks predominating in this area.  This is said to be Aztec sandstone mingled with other sedimentary types.  This red rock is from Jurassic period, nearly 200-million years ago –which is to say about the time that the Pangea supercontinent was breaking up.  No humans existed then, of course; they first moved into this area only 11-thousand years ago.  The ancient red rock actually formed of precipitating little pieces of iron rich organic debris that built the floor of the ocean then.  As Earth aged, this area was crushed into solidity, later uplifted, even later dried out, and much later eroded 

from water and wind (and earthquakes and other seismic cataclysms –recall the relatively nearby Meteor Crater? –recall the Chicxulub meteor crater that is thought to have extinguished the dinosaurs by crashing into the Gulf of Mexico with more than a little crustal bell-ringing? –recall all the continent changing volcanic disturbances of which Mount St. Helens was only the latest little burp?).  It's a time frame beginning long before North America was its own continent.

While we're here, by the way, Verizon's 4G Jetpack internet ramp delivers the fastest connection we'd seen in a few weeks.  It's been frustrating to see Download speeds less than Upload to the point where Debbie used some “free” campground internet connections to download Netflix movies for our pre-bedtime cinema that she always falls asleep in the middle of.  Verizon will send us a new SIM card they say will fix the service.  We won't get it until we're back home, though.

We haven't had our fill of rocks yet. We leave the Atlatl campground to move to the Kaibab Paiute RV camp located in one of the many Indian reservations in which our government settled the various groups of overrun primitive people in the past century and a half.  The park is just up the road from an historic museum and not far from the Tribal headquarters, but we were too focused on other sightseeing: in retrospect, a shame, really.  In spite the heat and lack of shade –trees are unknown in much of the Southwest– we like the Tribe's RV park.  Most campground showers are little more than a spigot behind a curtain, but Debbie speaks highly of the frosted glass panel door in her shower.  John's is nice and spacious, too, but– a plastic curtain; what're ya gonna do?  However, it's good to have water under more pressure than the coach's pump delivers.  With a fresher outlook the next day, we reprise our visit to Utah's Zion National Park.

We had wanted to use the scenic Utah Route 9 the last time, a few years ago, but the coach is 12+ feet tall and the tunnel in that part of Zion would've scraped everything off the roof. This year, we used our Honda toad –uh, towed-vehicle, for those late joining this party. The tunnels are rough-hewn inside and longer ones have big windows chipped out the sides allowing us to see the mountainous terrain outsi––

Wrong!

As Debbie learns, the side holes in the tunnel were not for our enjoyment. Instead, they were dug to provide a way to dispose all the rock chips from the digging. Unlike the tunnel engineers' plan in The Great Escape, the waste was not hauled back to the entrance to be dispersed down the prisoners' trouser legs. Nevertheless, the views from-and-between the tunnels are stunning.

Back in Arizona (what time again?), we break camp the next day to head to the Coral Sands RV park along Rabbit Brush Road, another intriguing local place name; apparently rabbit brush is a legitimate descriptive phrase here'bouts.  Here'bouts also is Utah (what time?). The question is important as we head for Monument Valley –which is in Arizona, an hour... ––which way?! We're losing track.

Approaching, Debbie excitedly creates her own version of the “iconic Forest Gump photograph.”

John's at a loss; he had yawnnn interest in the movie and equates Life Is Like A Box Chocolates with the same sappy script writing that gave us Love Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry two or three decades earlier.  Blech!  {John's at the keyboard now; can you tell?}

However, seeing these monumental rocks thrust skyward from the landscape is exciting, indeed! As you approach from the north at 65mph –Debbie says, “Oh, absolutely, no doubt because of the movie”– at the very top of the hill when the scene punches you in the eyeballs, the DOT posts the long downslope at 35 and declares No Stopping, No Parking along that one mile.   So, of course, every car in front of us, stops and parks for the picture gawking.  One stupid couple stands in both travel lanes for their photography. John has to stop or run them over.  After 30 seconds he beeps the horn to wake the idiots up.  They just glance, annoyed, and slowly amble off. (John declares they're obviously from California; beeping probably did the world a disservice.)

Debbie wants to spray paint 
a dot at Jenison's location on
this "Mitten Monument"!      

Some other travelers insist one can see it all while traveling along US Highway 163, but we elect to take the privately developed Navajo (or Navaho –you spell it!) sightseeing road among the dusty rocks themselves for $8/person.  The hours-long road closes at 4pm, leading to another My Clock Says discussion.  “An Adventure!” declares John, who eagerly wishes he still had his old Jeep Wrangler for navigating the road that's a stony, dried-out, treeless version of a deep-in-the-woods deer-camp road back home. 

“An ordeal,” laments Debbie, crying loudly at every rut, bump, and sizable cobblestone along the very unpaved, barely scraped surface.  If John is never ordered Don't break an axle! in stridently urgent tones again, it will be a much happier life.  Both our Honda's axles survive just fine, by the way.

After our Monument Valley Days, we head across a small corner of Utah –confusing the phone time yet once again– to find Debbie thinking that Arizona's US 191 “is worthy of being a Michigan road!” Miles after miles of terrible, frequent, jarring bumps.  Worse than the M-6 freeway at home in the early 2000's, this is very bad all the way to Utah.  Then, Utah's US 192 also is tortuous. Debbie says, “they need two different signs to indicate Bumps: one for a normal bump in the road and another for Oh My Goodness This Will Give You A THUNK!”  We slow to well below the limit, hoping not to damage either of our vehicles.

We didn't, that we can prove.

[ Oooo! Foreshadowing! ]

So now it's June 6^th and we leave the time confusion behind us to find a camp at the Circle C RV Park in Delores, Colorado.  Nice place with a clean, okay shower on a raised platform in a spacious room (with plastic curtain).  Debbie snags a freely loaned DVD and our cinema that night is the worst movie either of us actually has seen before (not counting that Love flick mentioned above). The morning finds us near the bottom end (depending on how you look at it) of the San Juan Scenic Byway.  State Route 145 travels curvy mountainous roads.  The C-RV makes it just fine, though, and Debbie decides we can pass this way safely in our Bry Bus and thereby changes our often tenuous plans so that we will stay at Ridgway State Park in Colorado (with electricity for the air conditioning!) instead of going to a barebones camp in the boondocks of a baking Moab, Utah.

No doubt that we're actually among the mountains with this new plan. The breeze is gloriously cool! The phone's Altitude App displays 10,200'. The sky is blue and the air is clear. There are alpine meadows below the treeline and, frequently, snow remaining on the ground above it. Lizard Head peak is unique, although both of us fail to see the lizardiness of it.

Lizard – Wizard.    John sees the
dandelions define a “Yellow Plant Road.”

We do lunch in Ridgway, which it turns out we will visit again soon, at a restaurant that calls itself Taco Del Gnar. There's a spray can on the counter hand-labeled Cougar Spray and our server explains that her hunky-looking, twenty-something male coworker needs it to fend off the horny older women. So, y'see, it's that kind of place: mostly tacos and tater tots in some sort of gnarly fusion. Quite tasty, though, and we want to come back for the food –and the beer and margaritas. The next day we take a break from sightseeing to shop in a bigger town and do laundry. The restaurant we find there serves simply terrible sandwiches despite the online reviews of Debbie's research.

Tomorrow we'll head up the same Route 145 in the Bry RV to Ridgway State Park.  Stay Tuned.  It's always an Adventure!

Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, & Las Vegas

After two nights at the “Take It Easy RV Park” (see how the entire town simply lives off that one song?)...

 For a lament, the song appears to have a happy ending, judging by the girl from the flatbed Ford in the upstairs window with him, 2^nd from the Eagle (get it?).

...we move on Tusayan, AZ.  That's the first town from the south entrance to the Grand Canyon National Park. We're just up Forest Service Road 302, then left on FSR 2713. Tall Ponderosa Pines everywhere. The nearest other unit on this relatively unregulated public land is nicely “dispersed,” almost out of

sight; there probably weren't half a dozen occupied camp sites, including one tent with a mountain bike next to a tree, in the first half mile of dirt road.  We have drop-in visits twice from a trio of handsome horses that look well-groomed, lusting after whatever's growing near us.  We have our five o'clock appetizers on the carpet of fallen pine needles each evening.

There's a riding stable a mile or so away and they must know their way around the fences.  Unlike the person(s) in the tent, we didn't even pee on the forest floor, having our own water, electric generator, and sanitation on-board Bry RV.  So quiet at night that we can hear the elk scream over the next hill.  We're sure it wasn't a wolf or coyotes, and if it were a human...?  Well, we lock the door and try to pretend we are safe.  And ya know what?  We are.  John loves being outdoors.  Even if we're a mile not quite off the end of runway 03/15 at KGCN with several sightseeing helicopters flying over our heads during the day and the occasional rich-tourist private jet on final approach.

Oh– did we mention we're up high? 6,600 feet MSL means we have very livable temperatures for six days; a couple times we even fire up the (diesel) furnace with the approaching dawn.  John loves being outdoors –with technology.

We had been to the Grand Canyon with the kids in a popup tent camper behind a GMC van, both north and south rims, 30+ years ago.  Back in the 1990s, the kids had their heads buried as we traveled and would look up briefly if either parent were to announce, “Scenery Alert!”  Their replies always came in smart-alecky unison: “Ooooh! Ahhh!” before going back to their books, games, squabbling, etc.  

Even John is glad we returned; the vista is much more grand than his memory. 

After spending a day in the geological museum, the next day Debbie hikes the Hermit's Rest Trail on the extreme west end of the park.  It features a stone inn to which early 1900s tourists would ride horses/wagons.  

Another day, she hikes 760 feet down the canyon wall on the east end because of Ooh Aah Point that we'd noticed at the visitor's center.  This is far above the bottom of the Kaibab Trail.  Her hike is a mile each way, a grueling 14% grade on average!

 Debbie admits to using all four limbs on occasion.  And then she says that the Hermit Trail actually is rougher with more elevation gain!

The Kaibab "trail" is very steep

Someday huge boulders will
crash onto the Kaibab Trail below

We take a day to do a scenic drive on San Francisco Peaks Scenic Drive (no relation to California), which includes driving up a mountain to the Snowbowl Ski Resort, a more than 2,000 foot climb in the car's first gear (with no snow near the end of May).  Debbie calls congratulations to the solo twenty-something blonde who'd pumped her bicycle right to the resort's closed gate, touched it, then drifted off to stare out and down at the scenery.  We liked biking ourselves back in the day (and Debbie still exhorts her friends to accompany her on long rides each summer), but never would consider a 2,000' elevation change!  We pass more than half a dozen other (young) people on bikes our way down.

This drive took us to Flagstaff, where we find some real stores and we also do lunch. Debbie finds a small, unremarkable shopfront eatery.  

 We would pass it in any other circumstance, but she had seen good reviews.  The guy next to whom we park out front agrees with that and names every item on the menu with high praise, despite the paper plates and foam drink cups.  He's waiting for the fried bread pudding.  The restaurant had run out and, since making more is a lengthy process and the stuff must be really, really good, he remains patiently in his pickup truck when we leave.  We specify “eating in” at the takeout desk and John eats the shrimp gumbo; Debbie has jambalaya with blackened catfish and declares, “The best stuff I ever tasted in my life!”  Try as we might, we really can't justify another 2½ hour round trip for seconds, even if Debbie allows a to-go order of pulled pork sliders for a reheated lunch the next day –without even batting an eye!  If you ever find yourself within a hundred miles of Flagstaff, Go There!! And thank us later.

(And Debbie's new Creole seasoning that she searched out and ordered to an Amazon Locker remains untried on the pantry shelf.  Boo.  She says she'll try recreating a Satchmo's meal after we return home.)

The next day, Debbie reprises her Ooh Ahh hike and we start planning for Las Vegas.  That is a major sea change in every aspect, except that we sleep in the same tent with wheels.   “Las Vegas RV Resort” shares a five-lane road with several grocery and other stores, the full square block of Sam's Town Casino, and hordes of cars.  Long traffic lights, very poorly planned road layouts, and signage abound in this town.  John speculates the entire Planning Department was drunk. “Well– yeah!” is Debbie's reply, considering context.  We don't utilize lawyers for every little stumble in the Road of Life, however, in Las Vegas we see so many advertisements for sue-ers on every other billboard and every bus side that John swears there must be more lawsuits filed here than in the entire sue-happy State of California.**  Not wasting money entitles us to be critical.   And to have money for the RV.  Put up with it.

Not that this has any deep meaning, but Google Translate tells us that Las Vegas is "the bottoms" or "the pie" in Spanish.  John supposes you could pick either, given this modern city's development as America's pre-eminent city of Sinful Vice.  Less prosaically, however, DealingLasVegas tells the story of a man who discovered a fertile valley in the desert in 1829 and, struck by the lush grasses, named it "The Meadows."  Whatever water may have been there then is long since gone with the huge demand of an overpopulation demanding to satisfy more prurient urges.  Ninety percent of the city drinks from the Colorado River these days.

For lack of water, this desert resort has no overhead shade although there are some palm trees maybe 20 feet high between the RV sites which are very close together, also like Grand Haven's state park although much more classy looking with concrete curbs and crushed gravel filling the non-driving spaces.  We even have a follow-me golf cart show us right into our parking pad amid the hundreds of tightly spaced slots and a few more services, including a gate guard and nice showers. Debbie's found us a reasonable rate –and she just had a week for free in the woods!  After Vegas, we're heading toward another few boondocking days at the Valley of Fire state park which will be just as hot as it sounds and, contrarily, a lot more expensive.

Dam turbines

Dam

But before we leave Vegas, Debbie educates John to a memory she claims he must have forgotten.  She says we took the Hoover Dam tour years ago.  John swears he would remember a Dam tour if he had taken the Dam tour, but she says No, he obviously does not.  So she takes the Dam tour again while John sees the turbines and the unique construction for what was, at the time, the world's largest Dam project –for the first time in his cognitive life.

Oh, and the armed guards at the metal detectors who relieve John of his weapon, the empty cellphone holster, and belt(!) say, “This is a federal facility, sir,” in an astounded tone of voice.   Yeah, well-- this was America once upon a time, too.  With one hand holding his shorts up, John thanks them for not taking his shoes off and volunteers Debbie to return the offensive item to the car so as to avoid having to replace another Swiss Army Tool.   Hah! John keeps his ballpoint pen in his pocket.

Another day in Vegas, we leave the town to visit Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. Years, ago we had come to a Radio convention and stayed a couple more days (on our own dime) to see Death Valley and this Red Rock Canyon.  The slow drive through is very stunning and and is every bit as impressive as we remember. Aside from the unusual coloring, the geologic oddity here is that the red rock is more recent than the white rock.  Normally it would be on top, but the unimaginable subterranean forces that molded these rocks, actually folded the lower layer over the upper one.

Geologists say the layers are normal sedimentary rock, but the pressures and temperatures made them malleable.   We guess if you were a rock scientist, you'd be quivering with excitement at the thought.

Debbie, however, is excited for the real reason we came to this Nevada desert area: our number one son. John IV manages the computer systems at the McDonald's stores in Alaska's Kenai Peninsula.  His new owner brought all his store managers (and John) to a few days in Las Vegas as part of a larger McDonald's Corporate convention. The new Franchise Owner also is a John –McDonald, as a matter of fact. (No relation.)   Our John had hoped to break for a dinner with us one night, but his boss invites us to join himself and his five managers at

Fongo de Chão, which features a Brazilian feast, so we do that instead.  We are excited to know the administrative team that works with our son.  Also, the food is wonderful and far too plentiful.  The coffee is the best John III ever had tasted; well... it's Brazilian, after all!  Earlier, John McDonald also had taken his administrative crew to an In 'n' Out Burger.   It was a first for John IV and he loved it.

Mentioning food, Debbie's SoCal brother Ken had introduced us to In 'n' Out Burger three years earlier and Debbie's husband, John, insists that we return.  She caves in and even follows her brother's advice to order the secret menu item that isn't really a secret.  Double Double Animal Style is not on the menu but is a double-beef/double-cheese burger with special sauce and caramelized onions.   Debbie likes it very much.  John takes advantage of her unexpected appreciation to exact a promise to visit In 'n' Out one more time before leaving this part of the country. (He has a faint hope, anyway.)

One more restaurant to mention: we brunch at Mister Mamas.   The name has nothing to do with maternity and John has a breakfast burrito that tastes simply fantastic.  Debbie agreed the sauce was very, very good!  Being a former Radio announcer, it's important for John to know how to pronounce the name, even if Debbie doesn't.  Our low-key waiter suddenly comes alive on that question and quite animatedly explains that the owner, Mister mah-MAHSS is Greek.  The food there is not, therefore he never made an issue of his name and many local people pronounce it as Mister Mama's anyway.  So, if you go –and John encourages you– feel free to say the name any way you prefer.  Or not all.  Your call.

–– –– ––

** Did you ever think that hotels were such dangerous places as to require specialty litigation? InjuredinaHotel.com has two huge billboards within half a block of our resort!

Hey, Dudes!

The magic of the Amazon Locker that finds us delivers John's new shorts, renews the chemicals that keep our black water tank from stinking, and supplies Debbie with a new chemical she found for cooking: Slap Ya Mamma is supposed to be a Creole blend.  For some reason the taste has been popular in Oklahoma, Texas and other parts well West of N'awleens.  John likes Creole cooking and it looks like Debbie's going to try to satisfy it.  Now we need to buy some large shrimp.  John promises to report.

Also, the B!tch has a new quirk.   As we near the Dead Horse Ranch State Park her ignorantly bright voice, absolutely unaware of the teeth grinding, stomach churning uncertainty she produces, advises of the “Turn right into the Dead {very slight pause} Horse Ranch State Park.”   Debbie doesn't hear it, but to John it sounds as if the navigator just wandered into distasteful territory.  The eww is unspoken but plainly evident to his ears in that pause.  He laughs every time and Debbie becomes annoyed.  Y'see, she is taken with cuteness over the story of the name's origin and assumes any set of parents has similar stories regarding family words and other coinages that have survived the years.  (Only three other people on this planet, f'rinstance, know what a kwa-kwa is when Mommy frequently refers to it.}

In this particular case, according to an Arizona State Parks & Trails publication, Dad Ireys, who was relocating his family from Minnesota in the 1940s, took them along on the inspection tour for the final choice of ranches.  One happened to have a dead horse on the road.  When Dad asked the kids which of the ranches they liked best, they said, “the one with the dead horse.”  And so it was.  And so it was named.  And so, while the ranch has withered into history over a few decades, its name remains to this very day  –mainly because the Ireys family made that a condition of the sale.  As Debbie says, cute.

After waking the next morning, Debbie's notes from No Rain yield fruit once more.  The woman had advised of the scenic beauty of the red rocks among the preponderance of mountains around Cottonwood, we hop in the car with water and lunch and head north toward Sedona, through the Village of Oak Creek.  Just before Sedona, but not as far as Flagstaff, we are taken by the majestic scenery and pull the car off Beaverhead Flats Road {John finds local place names engaging.) while Debbie wanders for picture taking.  Afterward, we discover we haven't even arrived in official tourist country, yet, as the town of Sedona lies just before the Coconino National Forest.   The strikingly brick red rocks carved from the landscape hundreds of millions years old are just so awesome.  By the time we arrive at Slide Rock State Park, which features a smooth rock face that enables younger, more athletic people to– uh, well... slide into the small river, we are ready for lunch and find a table under a shade tree.  The entrance gate guard wants ten bucks to let us in, but Debbie tells him we only want lunch, so the guy says, “I can't do that... But, sure. Okay!”  Lunch was nice –homemade deli turkey sandwiches– and there were more red rocks through Oak Creek Canyon before heading back to the RV.

p.s.: if we knew then what we know now, we would have gone into Flagstaff for lunch – more on that in our Grand Canyon post.

The next morning, we have to relocate the RV for the same reason as at Fool Hollow Lake, but this new site will keep us for four nights.  Actually, it's not much trouble to move this “house” as it's designed for that.  Just unplug and make sure things won't fall over or slip off shelves.   Also we're excited to get it done first thing, because we're taking a train ride early this afternoon.

The tracks had been laid in the early 1890s to facilitate a mining venture originally because the valuable copper ores were mostly in deep, steep-walled canyons miles from anywhere.  Now it's a tourist train, very much like the Coopersville-Marne Railroad at home –but this one has red rocks and deep, narrow canyons, and awesome

scenery.  The cars are Pullman cars, fitted out a bit more comfortably these days and each as its own bar, along with doors to the adjacent flatbed open-air car with bench seats and a sunroof.  They feed us a snack plate and a complimentary champagne just to whet the whistle for John's very tasty Blood Mary.  It was an enjoyable four hours.

The next day, we go up the road to the Blazin'M Ranch for an official Chuck Wagon Dinner and Wild West Show.  Neither of which happens until we first wander around to shoot a “Real Colt .45”, which strangely looked more like a Glock –with wax bullets.  We each put all our holes on the paper. And we
threw axes.  Not like Paul Bunyan's – more like tomahawks. Of six throws, Mommy's solidly thwacked

and stuck into the wood target twice.  She told me to text the kids that she still is The Mom: “Be very afraid!”  And we try our hands at roping a calf.  Well– a practice calf whose plastic head was stuck on a hay bale.

The food's okay –but in the cafeteria line with the realistically battered tin plates, they handed out the baked potato wrapped in foil; John thinks that is the epitome of Boy Scout Camp.  Oh, and the sour cream came in little tough plastic tubes that squirt everywhere all over your hands but not on the potato.  On the other hand, the baby back ribs were great!

The show is not the best theater, but they try: the four piece band includes a fiddle. A good try comes from the lady billed as actually having sung on the stage at the Grand Ole' Opry.  She sings Crazy and couple other Patsy Cline tunes, and the show ends on a high note with Ghost Riders in the Sky while strobe lights flicker to flash-illuminate a Casper cowboy flying past the chuck house windows in the dark.   Wonder what the horse thinks of all that?

This whole Cottonwood area is in Verde Valley surrounded by mountains. On one there is a large white letter J which stands for Jerome, a “ghost town” compared to its heyday before it was named an official National Historic District. (Jerome isn't an official ghost town because it has a lot of tourist activity.)  The home of one of the the rich guys who made money off the copper 

unearthed from the mountain is the tourist attraction's museum.  For the first couple decades of the last century, Jerome was the fourth largest city in Arizona sporting a population of 15,000.

On our fifth day we go back to Sedona for a Debbie hike and then see more great scenery before getting lunch in that town.  We're stalling in a circle around Las Vegas because we're trying to meet son John there on the 31^st  and it's only mid-May now. Debbie sees more red rocks before we relocate to Winslow, Arizona. Anyone from our generation can sing that Eagles song –unless you listen to Patsy Cline.  “The corner” in that town is the only reason to be there unless you were born in Winslow.  The Corner supports several businesses for us Baby Boomer youth seekers.

Actually, we hadn't thought about the song when we started in that direction.  Meteor Crater is relatively nearby.  In the other direction is the Petrified Forest National Park, so we booked into an RV park for two nights.  Meteor Crater is privately owned, as Wikipedia tells us, by the Barringer family... [whose] Barringer Crater Company proclaims it the "best-preserved meteorite crater on Earth".  We can't vouch for that; they want more than we're willing to pay to gaze at an old hole in the ground, so we went to the official US government Petrified Forest National Park for a day with our old Old Folks Free Pass.

The drive through is impressive –all this rock strewn, rough hewn territory is!– and Debbie hikes down the Blue Mesa Trail a piece to take more pictures.

Tomorrow is May 19^th and we'll be in boondock heaven by Debbie's definition; more than 6,000 feet elevation amid tall Ponderosa pines right next to the South Entrance of the Grand Canyon.