What a Grand Canyon

For a very long time now, I've wanted to see the Grand Canyon. I'd been close to getting there a couple of times. In 2011, when I was in Phoenix in February with my brother and sister-in-law, I thought about renting a car and driving up, but it was snowy in northern Arizona, so I bagged the idea. This spring, I was in Sedona, AZ for spring break, and I thought for half a second about driving to the Canyon, but I knew about this trip then, so I decided to wait. My first glimpse of the Grand Canyon was certainly worth waiting for, too.

We visited the canyon at its south rim, stopping first at the Grand Canyon Visitor Center for my National Parks collectables: a passport stamp and a lapel pin (I don't collect much, but I do collect pins). Next, we walked to the canyon rim for our first glimpse. There's a certain indescribability to this place for me. Immense, amazing, mind-boggling, vast, magnificent...all true, but not quite right. When I thought of the Grand Canyon before I laid eyes on it, I imagined myself hiking in for a short time, at least. As soon as I got there, though, I realized that I'd never do that--at least not in the places we visited. The Canyon drops off in rocky cliffs or sheer drop offs in these places, so the place seemed impenetrable to me. That didn't stop me from seeing its beauty, though. My friend, Cindy, warned me that the Grand Canyon doesn't photograph well--at least not when the photographer is an amateur using a point and shoot camera. She was right. The colors just don't translate. Still, here are a few shots.






So many of the views reminded me of the old stereopticon my parents stored under the couch I'n our family room. You'd slide a special card into slots I'n front of the viewer, and you'd be rewarded with a 3-D view!








We walked along the paved rim trail for a long while, catching new views at every turn. We posed for a few shots, too.









And then we'd drive to a new overlook for even more fabulous views.












After a full day of walking and canyon viewing, we drove back to our hotel in Williams, Arizona, right on historic Route 66. We had dinner in an unexpectedly good Greek restaurant and then did a little shopping up and down a stretch of the route.







We had a great day at the Grand Canyon. It was definitely worth waiting for.

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Death Valley

Driving through the Mojave Desert seemed perilous to me. Inside the van, it was cool and comfortable, but even a short visual inspection of the world outside my window told me that this was no cheerful sunshine; it was deadly. I'd seen my first desert in Phoenix in 2011, but the Sonoran Desert and the Mohave seem like two different animals (granted, I saw the Sonoran in spring and the Mohave in summer). They're both simultaneously grey and sun drenched, but the Sonoran is filled with Saguaros and wildflowers, and the Mohave with only occasional Joshua Trees and grey bushy balls that look like tumbleweeds that haven't yet started to tumble. And then there's Death Valley, the hottest place on earth. We drove into the Death Valley National Park on Sunday, and it was hot--probably around 115 by the time we reached our first stop, a place called the Badlands. We'd been to Badlands National Park in 2004, and the name of this Death Valley spot was accurate. Here are some of the views from Zabriskie Point:
















This spot was so hot that I could feel my feet starting to burn right through the soles of my sneakers. Still, people feel heat differently. Here's a gentleman who clearly did:



Our next stop was a spot called Badwater Basin, well over 200 feet below sea level. This is the hottest spot in the valley, so I was surprised to see even a little water there. These vast salt flats heat up, and you'll cook if you walk on them in summer. Still, people do it. Water collects here after heavy rains, so that explains the badwater.












We drove a while and got out of the car a few times to wander up a rock for a view of the bleak desert landscape or to get a National Parks Passport Stamp to prove we'd been there. The desert here really is bleak--a good setting for a reading of parts of The Waste Land--but there's so much beauty there, too. Rock formations grow out of the desert floor, most of them stark white, but occasionally a red or gold swath cuts the rock.












Nothing much grows out here in the summer: not as far as I could tell at least. In spite of that, there is the suggestion of life. I saw my first mirage in the Mohave, a wide sparkling lake on the horizon that made me believe for a second that I was on some long beach leading eventually to water and maybe even something green. It took me a minute to remember the word mirage and then the word scintillation: the optical illusion that makes heat waves appear to move in the distance.

The hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth was recorded in Death Valley in the 1930s: 134 degrees. This weekend, the forecast says it will be 129 at Badwater. That kind of heat can make a cool van overheat easily. It can make travelers stuck by the side of the road fry in the sun. Like I said: it can be perilous.



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Las Vegas and Hoover Dam

A few days ago, I flew to Las Vegas to start the first leg of a family vacation. My sister, Jane, and her husband, Frank, were kind enough to invite me to join them and their four kids on a tour of western national parks. In addition to me, my nephew's girlfriend would be joining us on our adventure. The plan was to pick up a rental van in Vegas, spend a little time in Sin City, and then head off to Hoover Dam, Death Valley National Park, Grand Canyon, sequoia and Kings Canyon NP, and Yosemite. All in a week!

Las Vegas is like no place I've ever been, though "the strip" is clearly trying to look like a whole bunch of places I've been. There are replicas of the Brooklyn bridge and Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, Arch de Triomphe, and Paris Opera, the Trevi Fountain...it's crazy and colorful.









We arrived on the same day that the annual Electric Daisy Convention extravaganza began, and the strip was populated by scantily clad and costumed young people, bedecked in neon colors, well-placed artificial flowers, and tulle mini tutus. I think it's safe to say they were all drunk all the time. The convention is an electronic dance music event that goes from dusk until dawn for several days each year. We stayed at the Monte Carlo, and so did lots of the revelers, so we had some primo people watching opportunities.


We spent our first afternoon in Nevada at Hoover Dam: holy cow, what an engineering masterpiece!


The dam was built in the 30s, and it rectified flooding problems on the Colorado River, thereby providing a reliable, year-round water supply for much of Nevada, Arizona, and California--not to mention generating a massive amount of energy for those places, as well. We toured the Dam's energy plant, saw some great views of the Dam and of the lake it created: Lake Mead, the largest man-made lake in the country. I really enjoyed the tour. My favorite part was actually the monument erected to the men who built the Dam--it's a real Art Deco masterpiece.









On the mosaic-tiled ground surrounding the monument is the entire solar system and an astronomical chart chronicling the period when the dam was built.



The monument area was cool, but only figuratively speaking. As you can see, it was an incredibly hot day.


After Hoover Dam, we raced back to the hotel, cleaned up, and walked across the strip to The Mirage to see Cirque du Soleil's Beatles Love show. I'm probably the only person left in the country who hasn't seen a Cirque du Soleil show before! I really enjoyed it, though the walk there was a long one on a hot night. Here are the kids before our forced march to the show:



There was one short train ride on our trip to the show, and we took the time to goof off. Here I am with my niece, Maria, and my nephew Andy's girlfriend, Brooke:


The show was great: lots of good Beatles music and some astounding acrobatics. The night ended with a bit of a disaster: more heat, more walking, bleeding feet (teenage girls + super-high heels + long city walks = misery), and lots of trouble finding a decent place for dinner. Still, it was a good first day. I'm no gambler, and while I love my gin and tonics, I'm past the point in life where alcohol consumption is an entertainment event in itself, so Vegas is not a city I'd ever return to for fun. I'm glad I had the experience once, though. It really is a city that must be seen to be believed.


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Every Book's a Bedtime Story

I have a confession to make. I can't seem to read for pleasure anymore. Okay, that has to be an overstatement, but right now it feels like truth. I sit down to read a book--even a really good one--and thirty minutes in, I'm out: fast asleep. I've been reading Gillian Flynn's GONE GIRL for an entire month now. A month! I have a big stack of books from my creative writing group that I don't have a prayer of getting through this summer. I need help!

I'm just dying to get into a book the way I used to get into them. I want that feeling when I'm out and about during the day that I just can't wait to get home to read. When I was a teenager, I'd stay up until two or three in the morning reading. Now, I can't stay up thirty minutes. I'm starting to think I just need a really good book. When fail to read for pleasure during the school year, I tell myself that reading is my job, and that reading for work squelches my desire to read for pleasure. I think that's true, but I can't be the English professor who doesn't read. So, dear readers, if you know a good book--a really well written one with a great story--recommend it to me. It's best that you don't lend it to me, though. I might drool on it during a mid-sentence nap.

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Bike Envy

When I was in Sweden last summer, my friends and I spent a couple of days biking around Djugarden, a lovely green island in central Stockholm. The bikes were wonderful: big fat tires that absorbed shock so well that I could ride over curbs without really feeling them, baskets in front to hold backpacks and water bottles, and wide seats that distributed my wide bottom more evenly and more comfortably than other seats. I loved that bike. We rode and rode, and my sad, degenerative spine barely hurt.

I came home, convinced that I could ride my bike regularly without pain. A couple of bike rides later, it became clear that that wasn't true. My back and knees were killing me. On Monday, I took my bike to the local bike shop and had the height of the seat adjusted and a new seat, wider installed. While I was waiting, the bike guy asked me if I wanted to test ride a bike that he thought might have been like my Swedish dream bike. Yes, I told him my Djugarden story. The bike was a beauty: red with a wide contoured leather seat, a "pedal forward" system that shifts your stance somehow and makes riding more comfortable, and a cool carrying rack on the back. And she rode like a dream. Even my short jaunt through the bike store parking lot told me that this could be the bike that I could ride into my dotage.

By the time I got inside, my new seat had been installed on my old bike, along with a new rear view mirror. I couldn't very well dump the old girl now. I'll give it another try today, but I have a serious case of bike envy right now. Just another example of how travel has ruined me.


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Dalai Lama

A couple of week ago, I did something I never imagined I'd do: I went to a talk by the Dalai Lama! His Holiness was talking about "Engaging Compassion" in Louisville, and my friend, Cindy, invited me to join her. We weren't alone! Thousands of people showed up to see him--one entrance line wound around the arena he was speaking in, all the way across a bridge spanning the Ohio River, ending very near the Indiana state line. We made it in pretty quickly, thanks to Cindy's expert choice of a much faster line. We wandered through the Tibetan Market in the lobby where vendors were selling prayer flags, Buddha statues, and tee-shirts, and then we took our nosebleed seats for the talk.

The first speaker was a Buddhist monk from Louisville who introduced the Dalai Lama. He wasn't the best speaker, he cleared his throat or coughed between nearly every word, but he must have been nervous: it was a huge crowd, after all. The DL was next. He took the podium, and the first thing he did in his talk on compassion was to mock the monk who proceeded him! He did it in very good humor, just kind of teasing the monk about his poor public speaking skills, but still! It cracked me up. It seems that the DL is just as human as the rest of us. Somehow, I found that sort of refreshing.

The talk was good, though I struggled some with the DL's accent. I loved the places where he'd crack himself up and giggle: he is a man who seems to laugh easily. The afternoon ended with several interfaith speakers who spoke about compassion, too, and I loved this part. It was so interesting and inspiring to hear the connections between the Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, and even atheist versions of compassion. Oh, and the music! That was wonderful, too: lots of Louisville musicians entertained us, including the fabulous St. Stephen Temple Choir. They brought the house down.

I had a great day with Cindy and then Dalai Lama. I'm not sure that the event made me grow in compassion, but it certainly made me think about how I practice compassion in my life. Like most of us, I could use some more practice!



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