Month: March 2024

Change of plans

jdewyze2 Comments

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

jdewyzeLeave a comment

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

jdewyzeLeave a comment

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.