Mesa Verde, then Family!

 8/15/11

 

I love Mesa Verde.  I remember loving it the first time I came here as a little kid.  This was my third time here, and its effect over me hasn’t diminished.  It has a mythical feel to it.  You find yourself staring into the rooms and daydreaming about life here.  I like those kind of places.

Here's some of the gorgeous drive up to the Carbondale / Aspen area.

And the highlight of the day- making it to Dad’s place near Aspen and starting a week of family and friends!

Can you believe that view?  And that's only about 1/3 of it in the shot!

Grand Canyon to Mesa Verde

8/14/11

As those who have been there know, the Grand Canyon is pretty indescribable.  Pictures come closer than words, but still fall short.  Here are a few:

As I mentioned, Tun lived here for a few months when she was in college (she got back just a few weeks before we met in Thailand, in fact).  So it was fun for her to be back in a place she once called home and see and experience with new eyes- no longer a resident, but also not like every other tourist (myself included) who just rolls through for a couple days in his or her life.  Tun could’ve been in front of this cart 6 years ago:

Maybe not a glamorous job for a senior in college, but a great experience for her.  It was her first time to come to the States (or anywhere else outside of Thailand/Laos) and when she first arrived her English wasn’t that strong.  She was brave and smart enough to resist the temptation to live in a cabin with 80 other Thai students who came with her program, and instead lived in a dorm with a mix of American and international kids.  She learned the language well, and things about Americans, our culture, and work environment you can’t learn in a classroom in Thailand.

Tun in front of her previous home here.  How crazy is it that the employee housing is a 100 year old historic stone building a 100 feet from the canyon rim?

On our way to Mesa Verde, we chased an incredible storm, enjoying it’s lightning show from a distance.  We never caught it, but we witnessed it’s aftermath.

It slowed us down a couple hours, but we have hours to spare.  The slowly crawling traffic never allowed me to get away from the wheel and forced my first “Tun, find a cup for me to pee in” moment of the trip.  She did.  And I did.  Thanks Tun.

We stopped at the 4 Corners along the way.  The guy in the entrance booth, who was a Navajo, thought Tun was a Navajo also.  You may think that's a funny and perhaps surprising mix up, but it's so much more than that!  It's redemption!  Four years ago or so I was reading a magazine or something that had some old photos of some members of the Navajo tribe in it.  I told Tun that one of the ladies looked a lot like her, and ever since then I occasionally call her my little Navajo.  Cute?  Yes. Culturally insensitive and borderline racist?  Perhaps, until today!  Thank you man in the booth! 

Jokes aside (that is a true story, though) it is surprising how similar Thai, Lao, and Cambodian faces are to Native Americans.  That's not true of other Asian and even SE Asian people.  I often met people in Thailand, who, had I met them in SW America, I would have sworn were American Indian. 

Ravens

8/13/11

Grand Canyon

For those of you who haven’t met Mojo, he’s a pretty chill dog.  He’s a terrier mix and as such his genes are supposed to tell him to chase every little animal he sees, but whatever the strange concoction of breeds that came together to make up this pup must have canceled out the terrier’s natural tendency to chase small animals, because Mo has no interest.  He has never gone after cats or squirrels.  Our neighbors domestic bunny escaped over a year ago and has been living in the lavender bush in our front yard ever since, and Mojo just ignores him.  The only siblings that he’s ever had were three chickens, and they chased him and not the other way around.  OK, so you get it, Mojo doesn’t chase other animals.

 I realize the story I’m about to tell is ridiculous and perhaps pure coincidence, but I’ll tell it just how it happened.  So we got to our campsite and there were lot’s of ravens with their big-old beaks around.  Squawking in the trees, rummaging through the garbage left out at other campsites, and generally strutting around like thugs.  Tun and I started talking about our last experience with ravens.  Four years ago, when we moved out to Portland, we drove through Yellowstone and stopped to see Old Faithful.  We were driving the pickup truck we had at the time, with a U-Haul trailer behind it and our Triumph Bonneville in the truck bed.  After watching Old Faithful do her thing, we come back to the truck and there are two ravens sitting on the seat of the motorcycle, ripping into the leather with their beaks and pulling the stuffing out.  Some helpful tourists were watching and taking pictures of it all, apparently too caught up in the majestic natural behavior of the exotic raven to think of shooing them away and saving Bonnie’s seat.

Anyway, after reliving the memory, we turned to Mojo and in that annoying I’m-talking-to-either-a-baby-or-a-dog voice, said “Mojo, you need to protect Lucy from the ravens.  You’re in charge of campsite security tonight.”  Ha ha, we smile at ourselves for being cute.  Less than three minutes later, the raven that had been eying us from the other side of the road hopped over and came about 10 feet into our campsite.  As I lay on the mat, a brown blur of scruffy furry explodes behind me, jumps over me, and bears down on the raven, barking, growling, and raising up on his hind legs to make himself look bigger.  Oh, forgot to say, Mojo never growls and almost never barks.  The bird retreats about a hundred feet away.  This scene repeats itself another three times that night.  Mojo never leaves the campsite, but pours his heart into each performance until he reaches the camp’s boundary, then trots back to receive a petting for a job well done.  Chipmunks, squirrels, and small non-raven birds were permitted to come and go as they pleased while Mojo was on duty, as he hadn’t been charged with keeping them away.

After the fourth time, apparently word got out in the raven community that this dog means business, because there were no further attempts. 

Nevermore.

Back on Track

8/12/11

Lucy’s back and doing great.  The valves were tight and did need adjusted, and my hunch was right- cylinder # 2 wasn’t firing.  All that happened was the wire to the spark plug came loose a little and while it looked like it was connected, it wasn’t transferring a spark.  So the shop fixed those two things and she’s running great again.  We had about a 4 hour ride today to the Grand Canyon, about a third of which was along Route 66.  It was some beautiful desert and mesa scenery the whole way, with some cute towns too.  

 As we headed up toward the canyon, the sage and brush started to be replaced by pine and other trees, the air cooled a little, a bit of that dry sauna feel coming out of it. 

It’s nice being back in a vehicle that encourages people to wave at you.  I owned a Jeep for 5 years and all other Jeep owners would wave as you passed.  On the Triumph Bonneville, most other motorcycles you passed would wave also.  Being in a Bus brings this to a whole new level.  Yes, all bus and Vanagon drivers wave, but lot’s of other people do too, whether in another car or walking on the street.  Many of those who don’t wave smile and point.  This is especially true when Mojo has his head hanging out the front window, which is pretty often.  Peace signs from folks in their 60’s, the hang loose sign from a group of European tourists, and lots of smiles.  It’s a nice way to travel.  It helps to diffuse some of the stress that can come with long days on the road.

We rolled into the only campground at the South Rim at about 4:30pm on a Friday in the peak of summer without a reservation, and wouldn’t you know signs were up everywhere saying campground full.  Not the end of the world, we can drive back a few miles and just head into National Forest land a ways and remote camp for a couple days, but Tun was hoping to stay in the same park village she called home a few summers ago, and toilets, water, and being walking distance from the rim are all nice, so it was a little bit of a bummer.  But not to worry, Lucy has connections!  The ranger in the booth says, “Yeah, not a good idea to show up in the summer without reservations… but that sure is a nice Westy.  We may just have one site left for someone driving a nice bus like that.”  Kid you not, that’s what he said and here we are sitting in our site as I type this.  We saw 2 groups before us and 3 groups after us be turned away.  He had owned a ’68 and ’74 camper Bus and an ’84 camper Vanagon.  I assume it was a recent cancelation that enabled us to get our site and a nice family isn’t sleeping in their Camry somewhere tonight, but I prefer to not think about it too much.

Happy Birthday Kate!

8/11/11

Happy Birthday Kate!  Hope it was great!

For us, today was a rough day.  We didn’t get out of Vegas until about 11:30 am and we were heading towards the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.  We went over the Hoover Dam which was great:

It was beautiful, but as the day went on we got hot and cranky.  I was being snappy and short with Tun, and she was exercising her formidable stubbornness in all kinds of creative ways.  After a couple hours Lucy starts running like she only has about 60% power and it’s hard to keep from stalling when at idle.  But we’re 40 miles from the nearest town, so we chug along at 50mph on the highway, dropping to 3^rd and sometimes 2^nd to make it up the hills.  Lucy’s not feeling her best.  Perhaps she caught a Bug (zing!).  We eventually roll into Kingman and quickly find a local VW guy after asking around.   

We’re going to start by adjusting the valves in the morning (engines need to sit cold overnight before valves can be adjusted) and then we’ll see.  That may do it, or it might take more.  It was running like it was down a cylinder, so maybe one cylinder’s not getting spark.  We’ll see.

Oh, and when we rolled into town we lost our phone.  So for two hours we tore apart the bus looking for it.   I walked for 40 minutes in 100 degrees to revisit everywhere we had stopped.  Eventually Tun found that it had fallen through a seat cushion and wedged itself in a weird hidden corner of a cabinet.  One of those days.  So it goes.  Hopefully we’ll be rolling into the South Rim sometime tomorrow, a homecoming of sorts for Tun as she worked at a resort there one summer during college.