Behind the postcards

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The beach at Sauteurs

Steve and I wanted to visit the spot where — almost 400 years ago — some of Grenada’s last indigenous people leaped off a cliff, rather than live as French slaves. This flamboyant act of resistance took place on Grenada’s northern coast. Since our arrival here Tuesday afternoon, we’ve been staying in a villa near the island’s southernmost reaches (a place we obtained using our HomeExchange.com Guest Points.) Google Maps told us we could make the 28-mile drive to “Leaper’s Hill” in about 80 minutes. It was our first lesson in the folly of blindly trusting in Internet-based guidance in the Caribbean.

What Google Maps didn’t (couldn’t?) take into account was how much more slowly Steve drove than all the folks with whom we shared the roads. Some of them beeped their horns at us, but I understood Steve’s caution. The surfaces were not a problem; you can find more potholes in La Jolla than we saw from our bright-red Toyota Passo (smaller than a Tercel). But carved out of the sides of a vertiginous landscape, the Grenadian roads are narrow, and instead of shoulders, deep drainage ditches line the vast majority of them.

I would hate to know how many times I yelped or shrieked at the proximity of our left tires to the trenches below my passenger window as Steve veered away from the concrete mixers and Coke trucks and minivans and other vehicles barreling at us from the right-hand side of the road. Then you get people PARKING on the streets! This often forces everyone to stop and play chicken to get through the remaining single lane. On top of all that, most folks drive fast. If any tourist here gets tired of lazing on the beach and downing rum punch, taking a rental car for a spin can provide an alternative form of entertainment — immediate immersion in a real-life version of some video game like Need for Speed Unbound.

The drive north took us almost two hours. If nerve-wracking, it provided countless interesting sights. We passed humble shelters…

…but also plenty of impressively sturdy ones

…and I loved how many homeowners choose paint colors that echo the local fruits — mango and plantain green and cocoa-pod yellows — or the azures and turquoise shades of the sea. We passed through stands of sugar cane.

Today it’s used exclusively to make rum.

Around 10:30 am we reached the town of Sauteurs (literally, “jumpers” in French).

We didn’t miss a turn following Google’s directions to “Leaper’s Hill.” But instead of finding the monument whose image I had seen online, the road ended at a cluster of abandoned buildings on the edge of a cliff where there was just enough room to park.

Next to where we left the car, we could make out the beach at the base of the drop off.

A vague path led along it, past a few creepy abandoned structures but it seemed to end at a ledge below an old cemetery.

We scrambled up the ledge, squeezed into the graveyard, and there in the distance, I spotted the monument.

Whether the Caribs committed suicide or were driven off the cliff by their French conquerors (accounts vary), it was a beautiful place to die. Eventually, we realized there was a front entrance to the cemetery. We strolled to it and introduced ourselves to the guard, whose 53rd birthday, we learned, was that very day. Beverly (a Sauteurs native) filled us in on her village, where life is slow and pretty much crime-free. She said most residents survive either by fishing or farming on the nearby little Grenadian islands. Or they take minibuses to work in the capital, St. George’s, about an hour away.

The cemetery also, weirdly, is the final resting place of the first person ever to be diagnosed with sickle-cell anemia. We felt more than satisfied, touristically, as we headed south again.

Along the way, we stopped at the Belmont Estate, a former slave plantation dating back to the 1600s. For $6 each, we got a two-hour tour of the 400-acre operation.

Today they produce an eye-popping assortment of tropical fruit and other agricultural goods.
Today cocoa beans and nutmeg are the biggest moneymakers. Our guide showed us the whole process, from the extraction of the beans from the cocoa pods, through their fermentation, drying, sorting, grinding, aging and turning into smooth, shiny bars.
Farm workers like this one used to shuffle through the drying beans to mix them up.
I was most delighted to learn that chocolate starts its life cycle as a tiny delicate flower that sprouts directly from the plant’s trunk.

After a decent lunch that included the first nutmeg ice cream I’ve ever tasted (an island speciality,) we climbed into the Passo again, thinking our next stop would be in the Grand Etang National Park. There we wanted to hike to the famed Seven Sisters Waterfalls. But Google Maps let us down again. Although the waterfalls were clearly listed as a destination, we saw no turn-off to them as we whizzed through the high dense jungle. It began pouring rain so we gave up and returned to our villa for a pre-dinner nap.

Staying at this villa is a different kind of home-exchanging experience than we’ve had before. The classic model is a direct trade, where you go and stay in the home of folks who simultaneously take over your house. We’ve done dozens of those over the years, including our recent trade in Austin. But another option nowadays is to use “Guest Points.” These give you a lot more options. For example, if you’re like Jennifer and Mark Solomon and you own a little resort off the beaten Grenadian path and it’s the off-season and most of your units are empty, you can list one of them on homeexchange.com, get points for it, and use them to secure lodging when you visit your relatives in London.

Steve and I have amassed bunches of Guest Points over the years, and for this Caribbean trip we’ve used them to secure a variety of accommodations, including the villa within the Solomons’ 473 Grenada Boutique Resort. The complex has an in-house chef whose services we’ve mostly been using for dinners, since in this part of the island there are almost no restaurant services. We did hear about a restaurant at another resort just 10 minutes away, however, and Thursday night we decided to dine there.

On the way, we made another off-beat stop. We wanted to see what was left of the old Army camp where Maurice Bishop’s body was dumped 40 years ago. Bishop was the charismatic young socialist who became prime minister in 1979 — six years after Grenada gained its independence from Britain. On October 18, 1983, he and six of his top lieutenants were executed in a bloody coup led by more-hardcore-Marxist Grenadians, and the assassination triggered Ronald Reagan’s decision to invade the island (remember “Operation Urgent Fury”?)

Here I have to say: last Sunday morning when I published my first post about this trip, neither Steve nor I knew almost anything about this (fairly recent ) history. That afternoon a friend who read my post alerted me we should check out a recent 7-part Washington Post podcast, “The Empty Grave of Comrade Bishop,” that focused on that tempestuous chapter of Grenadian history. I started listening as we flew east Monday, and I finished up the last two episodes between Miami and here, spellbound throughout. If mystery still surrounds exactly what happened to the bodies of Bishop and his team, I came away feeling like at least I had learned what had caused all the bloodshed.

Today there’s still no gravesite or memorial for Bishop, but Steve did some research and realized one of the bloodiest sites of the coup and subsequent invasion was just 5 minutes from La Phare Bleu (where we had decided to dine). We told Google Maps we wanted to make a stop there, and this time the app led us directly to a road that climbed to the top of the Calavigny peninsula. At the coordinates, we found a wildly overgrown lot surrounded on all sides by a very new, obviously upper crust housing development.

The heart of the Grenadian army compound was in that bushy patch on the right.
This is the house across the street from it.
We think some of the most gruesome scenes from the podcast probably took place in there.

Foreboding and ominous, the former Army property didn’t inspire either of us to tromp around in it (filled as it could be still with unexploded ordinance.) So we just snapped a few photos and went on to the restaurant, where we sat at a dockside table, drank ruby-red rum punch, and shared a whole roasted lionfish.

My chair faced Calavigny’s brown hillside. The scene was postcard-lovely. But I imagined that night 40 years ago, when the US military was bombing it to smithereens, dropping 500-pound bombs and cluster munitions and thousands upon thousands of rounds of other ammunition, aiming for anywhere enemy fighters might be hiding. For me, knowing about the hellish brutality unleashed by the United States didn’t make it any less pretty. I do appreciate prettiness. But it’s also satisfying to get a peek at the backside of the postcard.

Islands ahoy

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Back in 1977, Steve and his friend Roy Wysack wrote the science-fictional Handbook for Space Pioneers. It described 9 planets open for human settlement in the year 2376. Among the choices open to aspiring immigrants, the place that most appealed to me was Poseidous, a watery world with no major land masses – just hundreds of thousands of islands on which wildly diverse human cultures were taking shape.

As Steve and I approached our trip last year to Indonesia, it struck me that the Asian island nation might be more like Poseidous than anywhere I’d been on Earth. But now we’re about to travel to a region where that’s even truer. We leave tomorrow for Miami, then fly the next day to Grenada, the first of six Caribbean islands we’ll be exploring.

Our only prior Caribbean experience was our 2012 trip to Cuba. (Although I had created this blog by then, I didn’t post anything about that adventure because Americans weren’t supposed to be traveling there.) We had a great time, but the Communist stronghold’s neighbors didn’t much interest us. Steve and I both thought of most Caribbean islands only as magnets for beach and resort-lovers. While we live just 5 minutes from a nice beach, neither of us ever go there to lie on it.

Only recently did it dawn on me there could be other reasons to visit the region. Its cultures might not be as manifold as those of Poseidous, but more than a dozen sovereign nations and almost as many dependent territories occupy the balmy water adjoining the Gulf of Mexico. Chris Columbus discovered the New World here, and the anguished cries of African slaves filled the Caribbean breezes before they became commonplace in America. Big Sugar got its start in the islands, and pirates spiced up the scene for decades. Maybe it wouldn’t be boring, after all.

I quickly figured out we couldn’t go everywhere. My early dreams of getting from one Caribbean country to another via ferries also didn’t take long to evaporate. If you’re not cruising or sailing your own boat, it can be weirdly challenging to get around, I learned.

I wound up with an itinerary that will take us from Miami to Grenada, followed by stays in St. Lucia, Dominica, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and finally Jamaica. If we wind up doing a lot of sunbathing and snorkeling, I may not post much. But if we have any interesting experiences, I’ll do my best to report on them here.

The hitchhiker we picked up on the way back

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The idea for this road trip was to see the great sights of the Southwest we’d somehow missed. To make our drive to Austin for the eclipse a kind of mop-up tour. We might undertake other road trips elsewhere sometime, but we could close the atlas on at least this quadrant of America.

Nice try. Spending time in the ruins of Chaco Canyon (above) and among Sedona’s red rocks; jouncing through Canyon de Chelly and ogling fake aliens in Roswell all rewarded us richly (as I recorded in my earlier posts.) We also fared well on the drive back, even if White Sands National Park somewhat underwhelmed me.

Hiking in the blinding white landscape made me want to dig out the eclipse glasses.
Still, it was interesting to see all that snow-white powdered quartzite even if the dunes’ size didn’t match others Steve and i have visited in the Sahara or Colorado or even just west of Yuma.

In contrast, our morning in Carlsbad Canyon far exceeded my expectations.

We hiked in through the cave’s original opening, following a path that went down 75 stories.
It may not be as colorful as some caverns, but the vast size and baroque variety of its decorations dazzled me.

What wrecked our “Adios, Southwest!” Plan was listening to the audio version of House of Rain, a kind of detective story written by a naturalist/adventurer/desert ecologist named Craig Childs. Driving east through the Indian reservations, we’d consumed a more classic mystery – one of the Hillerman stories starring Navajo tribal police officers. But I had also downloaded House of Rain hoping finally to learn about the Anasazi people (aka Ancient Puebloans). I knew vaguely they had lived in cliff dwellings in the area where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah come together. The subject of House of Rain was who they were and what became of them – just what I wanted to know.

Visiting the Heard Museum in Phoenix and Flagstaff’s Museum of Northern Arizona and Canyon de Chelly and Chaco gave us droplets of the answer. But listening to Childs on the drive home was like jumping into a roaring flood.

He starts with Chaco. We’d just been there – barely a week before, and yeah, the scale and the height of its elaborate complexes had impressed us. But Childs is as familiar with the place as if he’d grown up there, and he made it come alive, explaining what it must have been like when under construction, more than a thousand years ago. He communicates the wonderment of what these folks accomplished, chopping down trees from forests more than 50 miles away and erecting buildings that remained the tallest in North America until skyscrapers began to sprout in Chicago. Then they built a dazzling network of roads radiating out from the heart of it, and they communicated over long distances with a complex signaling system. All these things happened at a time and place that in my mind had always been just…. blank. Childs filled it.

The Anasazi disappeared from Chaco around 1200 A.D., and what happened to them is the mystery explored by the book. It’s a dense, complex story I’m glad I listened to for all those hours – reading it on paper would have been daunting. I won’t try to summarize, just say that what Steve and I heard made us marvel at our ignorance and stoked a curiosity to see more: Mesa Verde or Aztec Ruins or the pueblos where the Anasazis’ descendants still live today.

Will we get there? Not soon. In less than a month, we’ll fly to Miami, a launching point for a visit to a region Steve has begun referring to as Ground Zero for Where All the Trouble in North America Began: the Caribbean. Our plan is to spend time staying mostly in exchange houses and Airbnbs on Grenada, St. Lucia, Dominica, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica. Stay tuned for details of how that one works out.

Adios, Austin

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Day 17. Austin to Carlsbad, New Mexico. 454 miles, 8 hours, 55 minutes (including stops).

Our Austin stay lasted almost a week, and we packed in a lot, enough to get a real feel for the place. Not counting the eclipse, which seemed more celestial than tied to any spot on earth, my favorite Austin experiences were…

1) the barbecue (see above). It was a shock to realized I’d never had Texas barbecue before. And a bigger shock to learn how delicious it is. How did it take me so long to discover this?

2) Catching a performance at Esther’s Follies, an institution on the ultra-lively Sixth Street. Mixing fast-paced extremely topical comedy skits, music, and big-stage magic, it felt like a weird combination of vaudeville and Saturday Night Live. We laughed a lot.

3) On Sunday morning, we visited the wildflower reserve established by Lady Bird Johnson. Its big vistas…

… dazzling close-ups…

… and everything in between filled me with happiness.

But now we’ve left Texas behind and will tackle two national parks in the next two days. Up tomorrow: a visit to the largest underground chamber in North America.

Our lucky star

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Chasing eclipses is dangerous. The risks aren’t physical but emotional. Traveling anywhere to experience this particular outdoor activity — brief as it is — requires planning and making commitments months or even years ahead of the actual event. If after all that the weather doesn’t cooperate, you can wind up seeing only a fraction of what you’d dreamed about. You could feel devastated.

Steve and I chose to chase Monday’s big American eclipse in Austin mainly because this part of Texas is reputed to have something like 300 days of annual sunshine. (Also, neither of us had ever been to Austin before.) When my iPhone weather app began forecasting Austin’s eclipse-day conditions 10 days ago, my heart sank to see all the clouds. I told myself conditions could change and did my best to put it all out of my mind.

The forecasts got harder to ignore once we arrived here. We’d decided to view the eclipse at a big organized site in Waco (about an hour and a half away, on the centerline, with a consequently long span of total darkness.) But rain had appeared in Waco’s forecasts for Monday and Tuesdays, and by Sunday afternoon, it looked like violent weather — thunder and lightning, huge hail, maybe even a tornado or two — could rip through the area some time Monday afternoon. (Totality would begin at 1:38.) The thought of getting stuck on a freeway in post-eclipse traffic with a Texas tornado spinning toward us was scary enough to make us all consider staying in Austin, even though the moon would cover the sun for only a minute or so (versus more than 4 minutes in Waco). We finally resolved to wait and see what Monday morning brought.

By then, the weather predictors seemed to be suggesting any violent storms would not take shape until late afternoon. So we piled into our van and headed north, under skies that still looked unfriendly.

The outlook began to brighten about a half hour later. Tiny patches of blue sky appeared, illuminated by glimpses of sun.

By the time we reached the parking lot at Baylor University, site of our Eclipse Over Texas tickets, it almost felt like a sunny day.

With four hours to go until totality, we walked a little over a mile to the Dr. Pepper Museum in the center of town, where we learned that too many other eclipse-chasers had had the same idea.

The sun was blazing by then, but the line crawled. After a while, we gave up and returned to Baylor’s eclipse-viewing area. The crowd was growing.

We found our friends Donna and Mike, who had driven in from Colorado.
The sky still held promise.

I didn’t mind the two-hour wait for totality. Steve and our friend Leigh braved horrendous lines to buy some of the overpriced food-truck offerings. (Event organizers had forbidden bringing in any picnic fare.) I chatted with Donna and Mike; the people-watching also was amusing.

Like so many others in the crowd, I kept an anxious eye on the sky.

The moon sliced its first thin piece out of the sun around 12:20. You could see this marvel through your eclipse glasses, but as I’ve learned from previous total eclipses, no immediate impact on the earthscape is detectable. On Monday, it took at least another 30 minutes for the light to strike my eye as colder, somehow deader than normal. This sense intensified as more and more of the sun was lost.

The scene went from looking like this…
…to this.

In those last few minutes, I felt a surge of pure joy. Forecasts be damned! The fragile crescent of remaining sun faced no threat of obliteration from mere clouds. We would see everything as it slipped behind the moon and the world chilled and dimmed, abruptly. Thousands of us simultaneously dropped our cardboard glasses, tilted our heads back, and gaped. People cheered. Some of us screamed.

I noticed different things, this fourth time of viewing a total eclipse. Dark as the sky became, I saw no stars, only Venus and Jupiter. (I have no idea why it would have appeared less dark in Texas than in some of my previous total eclipses.) Even without a telescope or fancy camera and lens, we all could see a glowing orange protuberance at about the 4 o’clock position of the orb: solar flares that someone later said were likely the size of a couple of Earths and more than 10 million degrees.

Something about that perfect alignment — the sun, the moon, my brain, surrounding by the cold gloom of space — electrified me. Then the burst of the first bit of sun re-emerging, more dazzling than anything on earth.

En mass, the crowd scrambled to gather our possessions and begin streaming to the parking lot and shuttle buses. Even though the sun would continue to be uncovered for another hour, mundanity was fully restored.

We tore back to Austin at 70 miles an hour; no traffic ever materialized. It was just one more miracle, one more thing to add to the deep sense of wonder and gratitude.

Trent slept through totality. He didn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

The end of the road (outbound)

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Day 7: Chinle to Chaco Canyon to Gallup. 265 miles; 8.5 hours.

The Navajo Nation can be wintry in early April. We worried that more rain Monday morning might close the roads to Chaco Canyon, which we really wanted to visit.
Although it was almost 12:30 by the time we reached the 20-mile dirt track leading in to the park, we decided to chance it, and reached the visitor center a little after 1.
I couldn’t resist visiting “our” campsite — where we would have slept Monday night were it not for the frigid forecast.
Visitors access most of the park’s trails and major sites by driving on a paved loop road. Then you park and walk to sites like Pueblo Bonito, the largest building site in the broad shallow canyon.
People started living here and building complex free-standing brick structures almost 1200 years ago.
The Pueblo Bonito complex covered three acres and contained around 600 rooms four stories tall.
Archaeologists think much of this site was ceremonial. The Chaco residents also built an impressive network of wide roads, and people trekked here from afar to trade all manner of goods.
We saw enough to get a sense of what’s here, then made it out over the dirt road to head for the section of the old Route 66 that passes through Gallup.

Day 8: Gallup to Zuni Pueblo to Albuquerque. 199 miles, 7 hours, 10 minutes.

We were sad to miss the Hopi Pueblo in Arizona, but decided we could pop into the ancestral lands of another tribe: the Zuni, whose primary village is just 45 minutes south of Gallup. We visited a private museum, a trading post, and the visitor center there but were not supposed to take any photos. All very interesting, but with nothing to share in the way of images.

The other highlight of our day was an afternoon stop at the Albuquerque home of the couple who are raising one of Trent’s litter mates, Tex. They have a huge, fenced pasture behind their home, where the brothers romped ecstatically.

Equally thrilling to Trent was his discovery of the muddy drainage ditch coming off the irrigation channel at the back of the property. In it, he transformed himself from a lab/golden mix into something more closely resembling a chocolate lab. (Or a pig?)

We hosed some of the mud off but still needed to take him to a nearby doggy self-wash facility to make him presentable again.

Day 9: Albuquerque to Roswell to Lamesa, Texas. 170 miles, 8 hours, 45 minutes, including stops.

Roswell, New Mexico is the town that many people believe was the site of an alien spaceship crash in 1947. The incident and subsequent theories about the US government’s attempts to cover it up have created a substantial tourist industry in Roswell, a town that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.

We had expected the UFO Museum to be cheesy, but it surprised us by how large and complex it was.
Trent seems to be sneering — but is it because of the alien presence… or the hype

To break up the journey, we spent the night in the small but friendly town of Lamesa, Texas.

Day 10: Lamesa to Austin. 348.8 miles, 6 hours 10 minutes.

Almost immediately after crossing into Texas, the landscape changed. I’d never seen that combination or enormous fields, dotted with oil wells.
Even more impressive was the bloom of bluebonnets and Indian Paintbrush and other wildflowers once we hit the hill country west of Austin.
The bluebonnet is the official state flower of Texas.

We arrived at our home-exchange base in Austin a little after 2, having covered 2,034 since leaving our garage. Our son and his family from Reno landed at the airport a few hours later. Now the next phase of this adventure has begun.

Lots of eating,
A bit of sightseeing.
Mounting anxiety over the question hovering over Monday’s big event: will the building clouds obscure it?

Canyon del Muerto

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A few days before we set off on this road trip, my friend Kris told me a story about how she almost died in Canyon de Chelly. On their first visit to the renowned Navajo landmark, she and her husband had journeyed to the tourist office and hired an official guide, then had a marvelous experience being driven by him through both Canyon de Chelly and its extension, Canyon del Muerto (Canyon of Death), a name dating back to when the Navajos endured great suffering as the US government seized their lands.

On a return trip to the canyon, Kris and Rich found the tourist office closed. So they hired a freelance guide who picked them up in a battered Suburban and drove them into the canyon, where the vehicle promptly stalled in a river crossing. Its reverse gears appeared to be broken, and the driver/guide eventually shouted that everyone had to abandon ship through the few doors that functioned. Kris said it wasn’t difficult to slog through the water to dry land, where they watched the Suburban sink — and disappear — into the quicksand in which it had bogged down.

The moral of her story, Kris told me, was that we should only hire a trustworthy guide. But because Steve and I had arrived in Chinle so late Saturday afternoon, we settled for arranging a four-hour tour through our hotel. I reflected that we might be doing what Kris had warned us against. But we’d had little choice.

Sunday (Easter) morning, I’d felt reassured by the sight of our vehicle, a 10-passenger Pinzgauer army troop carrier built in Austria with 6WD and three locking axles. With only one other passenger besides us in the vehicle, there was plenty of room for Trent (garbed in his cape, of course.) The driver/guide, Fernando, had grown up in his grandparents’ hogan, deep within the canyon, so that also reassured me. Scattered clouds hinted that rain might be coming, but as we entered the canyon, it was still dry and bright.

Canyon de Chelly isn’t as overwhelming as the Grand Canyon (what is?), but it quickly became clear its sandstone walls present an extraordinary mixture of color and form. Near the entrance, they start out low…

…but they soon rise to a thousand feet in height.

Moreover, this is very much a living landscape. Fernando told us only one family lives in it year-round.

This is their home.

But members of another 70-80 households return each spring to their properties. Somehow they coax crops of corn, beans, squash, melons, stone fruit, and more from the riverbed.

Here’s another homestead. But nobody was there on Easter Sunday morning.

Beyond the current inhabitants, the canyon also holds fascinating evidence of the Old Puebloan peoples who lived here until roughly a thousand years ago. Fernando stopped at at least a half-dozen spots to point out the remnants of dwellings and paintings and other rock art left by the Anasazi ancestors.

We penetrated deeper into the rough terrain, and around noon the sprinkles started. The temperature dropped and the wind intensified, so soon the sprinkles turned into sleet. Or was it snow? It was hard to tell. Most of my attention was focused on staying as warm as possible. Fernando handed out blankets, and I tried to get Trent to snuggle up to me under one. He looked pretty miserable.

On a nice day, we all might have hiked more, taking time to savor the fantastic landscape and all the history that had unfolded within it. But as we headed back, all I could focus on was how little feeling I had left in my fingers or toes.

Fernando dropped us off at the hotel a little after 1, and I staggered to our room on what felt like lifeless stumps. Stripping off my boots and socks and gloves, I remember puffing out little breaths and doing a fair amount of moaning as I soaked my feet and warmed my hands in the tub. I shivered hard for an extraordinarily long time.

When the shivering had mostly subsided, Steve and I downed hot pozole and coffee in the lodge’s cafeteria and agreed we wouldn’t have missed seeing the canyon. I wouldn’t say the price was almost dying of hypothermia. But I’d come closer to that than I ever hope to get again.

Change of plans

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Road trips have their drawbacks. You assume all the work of moving yourself through the world, work that you would otherwise delegate to taxi or Lyft or Uber or bus or private drivers. Or tour companies. Or airline pilots. Or train engineers. Doing it all yourself is tiring.

The greatest allure of road trips, however, is that it frees you up to shape your itinerary, literally moment by moment. Need a bathroom break? Stop for the next one down the road. Want to check out that funky museum? Put on the brakes and pull over.

In the last few days, I’ve had several reminders of how valuable this flexibility can be. First, it enabled us to wimp out on our plan to camp in Chaco Canyon. In order to have more time in the canyon, I really had wanted to camp in it because there are no hotels within a couple of hours of the canyon floor. But by this past Wednesday afternoon, our Weather apps were telling us that heavy winds would be howling through Chaco Canyon Monday night, and the temperature would plummet to 30 F. Nightmarish visions troubled both Steve and me. He saw us dying of hypothermia. I didn’t think that was likely, but a miserable evening and night seemed certain. In the morning, we agreed we should make alternative plans, as bad as we felt about hauling all that camping gear with us FOR NOTHING! Our only other fixed investment was the $10 fee for our spot at the Gallo Campground. I could cancel that reservation online, and it was easy to develop an alternative plan: Monday we could drive to Chaco, see as much as possible, then spend the night at a hotel on Route 66 in Gallup, New Mexico.

Saturday morning gave me another reminder. We spent Friday night in the breathtaking Flagstaff second home of friends from San Diego. Sadly, they weren’t there, but staying in their place was a wonderful base for visiting the Museum of Northern Arizona (impressive!) and then taking a quick tour of the 128-year-old Lowell Observatory.

Yesterday morning we didn’t pull out of our friends’ Flagstaff driveway until 9 am. And once on the highway, it quickly became clear my plans for the day were…. naive.

Months ago, sitting at my desktop computer, looking at maps of places I’d never been, I’d imagined it would be reasonable to drive from Flagstaff onto the Navajo reservation (bigger than all of West Virginia), then take a detour onto the 2,532-square-mile Hopi reservation contained within the Navajo lands before continuing on to Monument Valley, then finishing up the day in Chinle, located within the reputedly magical Canyon de Chelly.

But this is staggering country: huge skies; huge stretches of open scrubby land. Once we were rolling, it quickly became clear no one could squeeze all that activity into a day. We made a quick decision to abandon the Hopi side trip and head straight for Monument Valley. We arrived at its visitor center around 1 pm, gobbled down the sandwiches we’d brought with us, then set off on the driving tour through one of the world’s most famous landscapes.

Had we never seen it before? Of course we had! In countless Westerns! But never before in person, we realized, incredulous. In fact, Steve and I struggled to accept we’d never been in this Indian nation before. How had we overlooked it? Even if you’d never seen one of those Westerns, the sight of Monument Valley’s weird monoliths sculpted by time from the red rock, was commanding. The unpaved road on the touristic loop drive made the 15-mph speed limit seem aspirational, still after jouncing over it for an hour and a half, all I felt was gratitude.

But once again we’d miscalculated. We had planned to drive from Monument Valley to the Canyon de Chelly visitor’s center and there book a tour of the canyon for tomorrow. We’d forgotten, however, about the one-hour time-zone diference between Arizona and the Navajo Nation. The wind was also whipping the dust into a frothy curtain that at times forced us to drive as if we were in a heavy fog.

By the time I walked up to the reception desk of our hotel, the Thunderbird Resort, it was already after 5 pm.

To my relief, I was still able to book a 9 am tour through the canyon for today — Easter Sunday! More crazy wind is scheduled, and my phone says there’s a 20% chance we’ll get rain. But a trained Navajo guide will be behind the wheel. That should be a nice change of pace.

In the vortex

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Day 2: Phoenix to Sedona. 118 miles; 2 hours, 12 minutes (including a stop for gas).

“This red earth is tantalizing, with a hint of mystery,” Trent seemed to think.

Day 3: Sedona. Not a lot of miles but 16,851 steps.

Sometime after 8 pm last night I tried to draft a blog post about our second day on the road. Exhausted and cranky, I churned out a couple of tedious paragraphs, but when I showed them to Steve, he enjoined me, “Don’t publish that.” Too tired to argue, I yielded to his judgment.

I awoke at 5:20 this morning and had a flash of insight. If we got up then and made it out the door quickly, we would have a shot at getting a parking spot at the trailhead for the Boynton Canyon Trail, which a close friend had recommended most strongly for a hike. Steve went along, and we whizzed from our lodge through central Sedona on streets that had been choked with traffic upon our arrival Wednesday.

The tacky Uptown areas, with its overpriced restaurants, had helped to sour my mood Wednesday night.

But everything went splendidly this morning. We arrived at the trailhead at 7:06 am and got the last parking space. (Yesterday we’d learned that because of the Easter and spring break combo, this is the busiest week of the year, and the cause of the agonizing traffic jams that contributed substantially to my crankiness yesterday.) Getting out the car, I found the extra room key I thought I’d lost. (Bracing myself for a hefty key-replacement fee also had upset me.) The morning was chilly, but the skies were crystal clear and sunny, and the landscape (which neither Steve nor I had seen before) explained why so many of our friends are wild about Sedona.

Sedona’s soaring red rock, so architecturally monumental, lies at the heart of their devotion. But guidebooks and other hypesters also talk about this area harboring mysterious vortexes, “swirling centers of energy that are conducive to healing, meditation and self-exploration….places where the earth seems especially alive with energy.” Boynton Canyon is supposedly a vortex hotbed, one of the reasons I’d wanted to hike there. The visitsedona.com website had promised, “It is virtually guaranteed that you will leave feeling better than when you arrived.”

I wouldn’t have bet money that would prove true. But it did.

On the road again

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Day 1. San Diego to Phoenix. 357.7 miles; 6 hours, 55 min (including all our stops along the way.)

I’ve done a lot of reporting from Abroad in recent years, but it’s always been my intention to include adventures At Home too, and today we set off on a big one. Steve and I hope to see the upcoming total eclipse that will slice across a big part of North America April 8. Because of its perennial sunniness, northern Mexico is probably the best place to chase it, but we figured the logistics of traveling there might be too complex. So we opted instead to head to Austin, Texas, a city neither of us has ever visited, and a reasonably sunny place most of the time.

We could have flown. But we wanted to include Trent, the 16-month-old pup we’re raising for Canine Companions for Independence. We’ll have to send him off to CCI’s professional trainers on May 10, and we’re already dreading saying goodbye to him. Emboldened by our recent driving/camping experience in Zimbabwe, we decided to reach Austin by driving (and even camping one night, in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico). That would allow us to visit American wonders we’ve heretofore missed — and take Trent along for the ride.

Preparing for three weeks on the road was more complicated than I initially expected. Steve and I got our clothes into the carry-on suitcases we take everywhere. But we have also crammed a duffel full of canine gear — NOT including Trent’s portable kennel. Or his 20-pound bag of dogfood. Or the dog bed on which Trent is napping at the moment in the back of our Ford Escape, as I write this in the front passenger seat. We have another duffel full of gear for our camping night. That bag is much bigger than the doggy duffel, but it’s not big enough to hold our tent and two sleeping bags. They take up their own space.

Here’s most of the camping gear, laid out on our dining room table.

Being that it’s a road trip, I also filled a separate bag with shoes and knee braces and other miscellany. And another one packed with all our bathroom supplies (nice BIG containers of shampoo and conditioner and toothpaste instead of those measly 3-ounce TSA-approved ones.) We have not one but two picnic cooler bags AND a grocery bag full of essential food (ground coffee! food for Chaco Canyon!) AND a shopping bag full of our oranges. And a case of wine. (It could get pretty cold and windy in that canyon.) There’s more I can’t remember but hopefully won’t forget to reload along the way.

Here’s part of it this morning, ready for loading in the vehicle.
The view looking in one of the rear doors, after loading.

We keep reminding each other this is America. If we’ve forgotten something, there are Walmarts and CVSs and Family Dollar stores where we can get whatever we need. I’m a little more worried I may not acquire as many stories as I have found in more exotic locales. Today’s a good example. We’ve covered this ground many times before, and it wasn’t exciting on our maiden drive many years ago.

Lots of freight trains and pretty clouds.
Mostly road views like this.

My posts in the upcoming three weeks may be terser than normal. I’ve resolved to write more only when we run into something extraordinary. How often will that happen? Finding out is a big part of why we travel, both abroad and at home.