Cravings. Pepperjax and Jimmy John's. Yup. Lunch and Dinner. I was thinking about both of those places this week and so, that's what we had yesterday. We ate a lot of steak on the road - because that's what they have in open range ranch country - and though the meals were awesome, we were done with that by Friday night.
Pictures. Max is getting a bunch of his stuff converted and processed. It's up on his Flickr page. It's been really quiet around here (like it's ever a rabble-rousing rally). He's been pretty concentrated on the photography.
My brother used to tell me that he loved his mountains. When he and his family lived in Denver, he could see them nearly every day. He moved to Nebraska and saw no more mountains. After a week among the gorgeous red rocks, I can understand (minutely) how that happened to him. My mind still sees those beautiful locations. And sunsets in the west? Wow ...
I've actually been wandering around Google Maps with the Satellite imagery turned on and gotten close up so that I can look at all that we experienced from a bird's-eye view. Pretty darned cool.
After 10 days on a laptop, when I first put my hands on a full-size keyboard, a full-size mouse and looked at my 20" screen, I felt like a very little person with very big tools. It was awesome to see everything at full-size again!
I had complete freedom to talk to my friends again. I wasn't trying to keep an eye on the map (or the Garmin), I wasn't looking at immense vistas ... I could just chat. I discovered after being gone a week that lots of things changed in their lives - it isn't a big deal to them, but rather than hearing about the process, I heard about the change. And it happened to several of you, though you may not even realize it.
So, since we weren't supposed to be back until this evening, I'm continuing to consider this a vacation day. Max took 2 weeks off, so he'll be home all week with me. That should be fun.
I want to spend some time this week reading more about the geography and geology of the land we just spent days traveling through. I probably should have done more of that before we left, but I had no idea that we were going to be experiencing all that we did. We're ready to go back.
Max asked me on Saturday what I would have changed about the trip. We chose to do Santa Fe instead of the Petrified Forest. I would have made a different choice. But, even still ... it was amazing to see the change in the colors and landscape as we trekked north off of Highway 66. Santa Fe made a deliberate decision to have a unified look as they were building structures - everything is in the Spanish Pueblo style. You don't see that very often ... it was cool.
I might have chosen to stay in Moab, UT rather than in Monticello. It's larger, with more amenities for tourists and is closer to the parks. But, even still ... we had a wonderful place to sleep. It was very quiet. It allowed us a different access into the Needles District and the opportunity to go through state parks to get there.
I'm glad I didn't make reservations for the last two nights of the trip. That way I didn't have to cancel anything when we decided to head home in the middle of the night. Max and I used the reservations as 'goals' for our days. We knew that we had to be at a certain point by the end of the day and we just did it. After I watched the way we handled eating (we just chose not to eat rather than stop shooting pictures or traveling in beautiful areas), I'm a littled concerned that without the reservations, we would have wandered all night and never stopped to sleep! Or, we would have been sleeping in the Jeep.
So ... it's lunchtime. Wonder what we're doing today!
No comments:
Post a Comment