Skip to main content

Home is Where Freon Is

 I love the word, "wended", so we wended our way home.  We went slowly, by an indirect route.

On earlier trips, we had driven down through California, and up through Las Vegas, once skirting the east sides of King Canyon and Yosemite, which we had seen from the west, but this time we decided to follow the Columbia upriver and turn southeast toward Idaho and Utah.  It was a bit longer, but it had the ultimate virtue of avoiding Las Vegas.  It is not difficult to get through Las Vegas.  It is, in fact, more work to get through Salt Lake City, but it is difficult to decide to go through Las Vegas.

That brought us near Zion, to which we shall return another time.  This time, we were ready to go home.  Going north from Tucson toward Las Vegas means crossing the Colorado River near the Hoover Dam and Lake Mead.  Farther east, where we were going, we crossed the Colorado at the other end of the Grand Canyon, near another dam:  Glen Canyon and Lake Powell.

"I would like to stop at the Cameron Trading Post on the Navajo Nation," Mari said.  "I am certain they have something I need."

"Good!", I replied.  "Me, too!  Lunch."

I had a taco salad, on fry bread instead of a corn or wheat tortilla.  Each time I try fry bread, I sing again the praises of things fried in lard.  Things like me.

The restaurant ceiling was stamped tin, not ancient but, in fact, fairly recent, and it was amazing.  It was not as amazing as the 43 million necessities on display in the rooms next door, but a wonder, still.

We made it home, that day.  The air conditioner had died, but it was soon repaired, at least for the nonce.  The service man said, "Good luck, and God bless you, for all the good that will do!"

Comments

  1. UnknownSeptember 5, 2016 at 9:40 PM

    Zion is on my list of places sorta within driving distance that we want to visit but so far haven't. And we also had to repair our AC a couple weeks ago -- adding freon and a new fan blade. But the motor is still good. (We apparently have a bit in common.)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...
Post a Comment
Read more