CPUnk I write right. Right? Aye.

Rollercoasters for Breakfast

We all went to King’s Domin­ion Amuse­ment Park in Ash­land (totally a good idea if you’re ever in the area).
I had slept in because I was sick, so Kathy and the kids headed out first. By the time I got there, Angie wanted to go off and do the big roller­coast­ers and rides — so, since I was a lit­tle weak, I headed off with Nate.
Nate was really fond of the Fly­ing Eagle, which is basi­cally just a ride where you swing around gen­tly on chains, the thing you’re sit­ting in has a big metal “sail” and you fly up and down.
This is what it looked like (opens a popup)
…now, hav­ing had such a grand suc­cess — Nate really thought it’d be a great idea to get on the Roller­coaster — you know, the one I men­tion in the video — the Hurler
(I promise you, though this may dis­ap­point a few peo­ple, I do not hurl).
We head to the thing — and get into the all-metal cars. Please remem­ber that — they’re all metal cars, no cush­ions, no pro­tec­tion — and well, it shakes you around a lit­tle. (opens a popup)

Virginia Beach, Williamsburg, and Yorktown

Wow — we’ve done a LOT since the last post — we’ve been busy hav­ing fun, learn­ing things, trav­el­ing less … now THIS is a trip across Amer­ica
Before we move on…
Here’s a few pic­tures of what we did before we got to Williams­burg.
The best part was get­ting to the beach!!!! Angie and Nate played in the sand and swam a lot, which was awe­some — I swam with them in the ocean, but you’re not gonna get to see that, it’s ugly.



We all had an amaz­ing time!!!

---

Williams­burg (cont’d)
We entered the city by foot in the morn­ing, because the buses took some­where between a mil­lion years and for­ever. But before we headed out, we rented Nate a most excel­lent cos­tume:

…and we entered Williams­burg in time for Gen. George Washington’s address to the peo­ple about the war (we were embroiled in the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War that first day, accursed Brits seek­ing to destroy our free­dom!)

We took a moment to visit the work­ing Epis­co­pal Church (home to Wash­ing­ton, Jef­fer­son, and all the Burgesses of the era (w00t for my denom­i­na­tion))…

…and then we had lunch or some­thing.
Now, one of the ben­e­fits of rent­ing the cos­tume for Nate is that he got spe­cial­ized mil­i­tary train­ing!
So, at 2pm on the dot (and in the heat), we headed for the Guard House right next to the Bat­tery in town — and Nate received his spe­cial­ized Mili­tia Train­ing with all the other young sol­diers who had signed up for a rented cos­tume:

Young Man Await­ing His Mil­i­tary Duty

Here’s the Mot­ley Crew that joined up that day

Now tell me — which of these kids is stand­ing at atten­tion?

You bring it, King George, we’re ready

---

York­town Bat­tle­field
On the way out of Williams­burg, we headed to York­town. For those of you with­out a his­tory bone in your brain, York­town is where we effec­tively won the war and gained our func­tional Inde­pen­dence. Wash­ing­ton lead the allied troops (Amer­ica and France) against Gen. Corn­wal­lis (aka Darth Vader to the kids and me), trapped him in York­town and extracted sur­ren­der, thus break­ing the back of the British Army occu­pa­tion and gain­ing us our Lib­erty (huz­zah!)
Here are Nate and Angie star­ing over a bunker at the bat­tle­field:

Nate then marched the bat­tle­ment for good mea­sure and we were done:

Sea to Shining Sea

So, we’ve trav­eled quite a bit, taken a LOT of pic­tures, and are now in Vir­ginia. We just swam in the Atlantic Ocean, so oper­a­tionally, we’ve crossed the coun­try.
So we got to North Car­olina and vis­ited old fam­ily friends in Hen­der­son­ville. I was really ambiva­lent about stay­ing with ANYBODY at their home, but get­ting there, I learned how wrong I was. It was a really nice break from the hotel mad­ness, and we had a really sweet time get­ting caught up (last time Nate and their youngest son, Jasper, saw each other, they were both 1.
We got a chance to go to Church on Sun­day, and heard a very valu­able mes­sage about “Don’t Worry” (and yes, it even had the Bobby McFar­rin music). I real­ized that one of the rea­sons that I was get­ting tweaked was because I was wor­ry­ing about a lot of stu­pid stuff (my phone, the past, the future, etc.) — so that’s actu­ally helped a lot.
Then we headed off to Chapel Hill, NC, saw one of my old­est friends, Linda, and her hus­band — who’s also a dear close friend (but not as far back). We had a nice time, stayed in their won­der­ful house (wow, beau­ti­ful), vis­ited the busi­ness they owned (a print­ing com­pany) — it was really cool. Linda’s also Nate’s God­mother. It was SO WONDERFUL see­ing them!!!
They sug­gested we vis­ited Hills­boro, NC, which is FILLED with his­tory. We got there, but sadly, many of the places were closed. But no wor­ries — dad’s a nut! So we vis­ited the visitor’s cen­ter, which was the head­quar­ters for Gen­eral Hamp­ton dur­ing the Civil War, and started talk­ing about that. Then the peo­ple there pointed out that the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary his­tory of Hills­boro was richer — with Gen­eral Corn­wal­lis of the red­coats actu­ally occu­py­ing the town and using those build­ings over there (closed) as his head­quar­ters.
So, the nutty part is that I then shifted gears and started explain­ing to Angie and Nate about how it would be if we were alive then. It’d start with me, my father-in-law, his brother and a few other fam­ily mem­bers com­plain­ing about this tax that the king was impos­ing on us. Then we decide to do some­thing about it — and go burn the tax-collector’s barn. So they retal­i­ate with sol­diers, and before you know it, we’re bat­tling REAL sol­diers! Nate was cap­ti­vated and wanted to learn more about the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary war (see below for more (we headed to Williams­burg)).
Today, we headed to Vir­ginia Beach, Vir­ginia, and saw Angie’s God­mother, Christie. She’s a won­der­ful per­son — but I didn’t get much chance to visit — I was fight­ing a minor cold and was a lit­tle worn out, sadly.
It was really great to have a chance to get to the beach, the kids loved it and I spent a lot of time with them in the water teach­ing Angie how to catch a wave for body-surfing. Nate wasn’t really into body surf­ing, but he enjoyed “fight­ing” the waves, com­plete with argu­ing with the sea, throw­ing sand, and beat­ing the waves over and over — it was awe­some and lots of fun. It was a kind of bat­tle … I think he won.
We all agreed with Christie that we want to come back again, we love beaches on the Atlantic!!!
We then headed to Colo­nial Williams­burg!!!
We signed up for our first event this evening — it was actual TRAINING to be a SOLDIER!!! Nate thought it was awe­some, Angie thought it was cool — we thought it was great — they shot mus­kets, they taught us to march, taught us some more stuff and there were huge fires for light — and wow, it was awe­some.
What a great tran­si­tion for the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War stuff!!! So Nate’s stoked, we’re all excited, and tomor­row is the day that focuses on the time between 1776 to 1781 (that would be the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War, you dolt )
We’re stoked — Williams­burg seems cool. The kids love that peo­ple stay in char­ac­ter. We bumped into a friendly (and prob­a­bly tired) man walk­ing down the street at about 9:30pm on the way home — and while chat­ting with him, Nate tested the “in char­ac­ter” the­ory by ask­ing if there was a vend­ing machine nearby (with a HUGE grin on his face).
“Machine? What sort of machine are you speak­ing of?“
“A vend­ing machine…“
“What does it do, this machine? Is it big­ger than you? What do you do with it?“
I nudged Nate and told him to say that he put money in it…
The man replied, “YOU have money?“
The kids thought this was great — we’re going back in time!
One other thing hap­pened dur­ing our train­ing. We all lined up in two rows, there were prob­a­bly about 100 peo­ple. The First Sargeant com­manded some other Sargeants to split the com­pany into two pla­toons. They hap­pened to split our line right between me and Nate; so Kathy, Angie and I were in one pla­toon and Nate was in the other.
I qui­etly raised my hand, stayed in char­ac­ter and asked, “Sargeant, our seven year old son is in the other pla­toon.“
He cracked a grin, and said of course my son could join our pla­toon.
Later, he told me that in the ten years he’d been there — he’d never had some­one ask a ques­tion from the ranks. So we’re a FIRST! Huz­zah! Tomor­row we enter the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War.

All the Suffering

Ok,
As we’ve accu­mu­lated suf­fer­ing trav­el­ing through Ari­zona, Wyoming, and Utah, I’ve looked down the bar­rel of SO MUCH blog­ging that I’ve put it all off. So in order to get caught up, this sin­gle post is a med­ley of all the suf­fer­ing.
Grand Canyon
So as we left off — the hotel had attempted to rip us off, but through a lit­tle “bluff call­ing” we avoided $300+ in over­charges. Huz­zah. So, the next day, we signed up for a “Jeep Tour” of the Grand Canyon. We thought about doing the heli­copter ride, but it was incred­i­bly expen­sive for the whole fam­ily, so we opted out and went with the Jeep tour, which sounded pretty cool.
Since we were ahead on our hotel thiev­ery, we opted for the “Deluxe” tour, which included not ONLY the Indian Cave tour, but also the SUNSET TOUR — now tell me, would you not want to sign up for that? Of COURSE YOU WOULD! So we did!
First, on a pos­i­tive note, I’d like to say that our tour guide, Buzz (same name as our rooster), was a very nice man. He put us all in the jeep, which was really just a big pickup truck with benches welded on the back and a cheesy canopy over the seats to make it look all “safari.“
We headed off, and I fig­ured we’d be lead to some amaz­ingly remote loca­tion, deep in the Canyon. Nope, we drove about two miles out of town, then down a pub­lic road, then onto an access road behind the air­port (yes, they have a pretty active air­port there), then down a lit­tle more dirt road, into a lit­tle gully and we got out. Total dis­tance, prob­a­bly about 3–4 miles from town, no more than half a mile from the air­port.
We walked down a trail, and Buzz told us all that just recently some hunters had run into a moun­tain lion there that had attacked one of their dogs — but moun­tain lions won’t bother us now. Cue Nate wor­ry­ing about moun­tain lions for the rest of the tour, thanks Buzz. I spent a large part of the time explain­ing to Nate that I would throw him over my shoul­der and run if we saw a moun­tain lion, and he was also reas­sured by the fact that I would fight the moun­tain lion while he and mom ran away — because that’s what I’m here for — to get eaten by moun­tain lions.
So we got to the cave, and yes, it was cool (I’ll post pic­tures of all these things under sep­a­rate cover, this is my uni­ver­sal com­plaint post, suck it up). The fam­ily that trav­eled with us had a few boys older than Angie who needed to point out through their behav­ior how happy we are that our kids are good kids. They were touch­ing the paint­ings (please don’t touch the paint­ings, they’re thou­sands of years old), and con­stantly tak­ing the “chal­leng­ing route” and mak­ing Nate ner­vous (well, there’s this way that’s a lit­tle tricky, or we can all go down here and back up which is eas­ier — there go the boys, so Nate’s gonna want to go too — and now we’re ner­vous).
But all in all, while only five feet from down­town Tusayan, the cave was cool — then I fig­ured we’d go on a longer walk, or see more caves. Nope — that part of the tour is over. That’s it — one cave, some paint­ings, we’re done, back to the car, the back roads of the air­port — town, and McDonald’s (we met and left from the exotic McDonald’s park­ing lot).
Oh well — that’s ok, we’re hav­ing fun — let’s get ready for the “Sun­set Tour”!!! Sounds excit­ing — I’m sure we’ll go to some remote loca­tion that will get us awe­some views.
So, after about an hour break, we head back to the jeep (btw, Buzz dri­ves like a psy­cho — which the kids loved — thought it was like a ride), and head to the Grand View (home of the for­mer Grand View Hotel, which has a patchy his­tory that I might men­tion another time).
Now THIS time, the tour goes by way of 18 miles (MILES) of for­est road. If you’ve every dri­ven on for­est road, the dirt and bumpy kind — suf­fice to say, it’s well — long. We stopped a few times to learn about trees and things — that was great. We got to a look­out tower that we went up (pic­tures else­where maybe). Then we headed off — to make it in time for the SUNSET!!!!
Excit­ing, we’ve paid $100 per per­son for this oppor­tu­nity — this is the game saver for the whole Grand Canyon tour — the rea­son we came — to get awe­some pic­tures of the Canyon at sun­set from some over­look that the tour guides knew.
That would be the Grand View… you know the Grand View? The one with all the park­ing for the few hun­dred peo­ple who came by way of the road instead of by way of the for­est in a canopied pickup truck? We paid $400 total to basi­cally be chauf­feured to a pub­lic loca­tion filled with tourists. We took our pic­tures, I did my best to get some­thing of value with our lit­tle dig­i­tal cam­era, and then we drove home.
I was tak­ing as many shots as I could, but I think maybe Buzz’s favorite show was on at 8pm or some­thing, because once we were done with pic­tures, he raced down the high­way (no more hour on the woods road for us) back to town in about 20 min­utes.
I’m not sure about other areas, but if you ever go to the Grand Canyon:

1. Don’t go to Tusayan
2. If you can at ALL afford it, take the helicopters
3. If you plan ahead enough, you should book a hotel in the canyon itself, I hear that’s where the real vaca­tion is — this was just dirty, greedy, and grotesque

Cof­fee
Ok, this isn’t so much a kick on Amer­ica as it is an expla­na­tion of the added fea­tures that made this all so won­der­ful. Caf­feine needs to be man­aged and dis­trib­uted cor­rectly, not by peo­ple who haven’t been trained!
I tend to like to avoid caf­feine, because I thought it made me irri­ta­ble — but after care­ful exam­i­na­tion, I’ve learned that it’s the absence of caf­feine when you’re on it that makes you irri­ta­ble!!! Give me a freak­ing cof­fee already!
Going back­wards a bit, we got to Yel­low­stone (this would be after our near dis­as­ter with the brakes), and baby, I needs me a cof­fee. So we head up to Yel­low­stone Vil­lage, which is really just the lodges with cafe­te­rias and such. We’re hop­ing to find some steak, meat, or other low-carb food for me, and a cof­fee. Espresso would be nice — but cof­fee will do.
Now one thing you may not know is that Yel­low­stone con­ces­sions are the sum­mer job des­ti­na­tion of Europe and Asia — so all the jobs are being run by peo­ple still work­ing on well … their Eng­lish.
After wait­ing on line while a girl chat­ted up her boyfriend instead of serv­ing the meat (you’re serv­ing MEAT, don’t you under­stand that involves feed­ing blood eaters? Stop chat­ting and give me my food!) — I skipped that and we all left to find cof­fee. Shortly there­after, we found an Espresso stand — wow! How won­der­ful, how stu­pen­dous — an actual Espresso stand!!!
So I walk up and ask for a Breve Latte, and so my new friend won’t get lost, I explain, “that’s with half and half.“
“Half and half?”, she says, “OK!”, and turns around to start mak­ing it … and says to me as she turns, “I know that one — half decaf, half not decaf.“
“Umm … no, it’s made with half-and-half.“
“Oh!”, she smiles know­ingly, “we have half-and-half over here.” … and points to the lit­tle half-and-half con­tain­ers on the counter.
To save her life and my san­ity, I just said, “Nev­er­mind.” and walked away.
Ok — now fast for­ward 48 hours to my favorite town, Tusayan. At this point, I’m all whacked out on nasty caf­feine deliv­ery sys­tems like Coca Cola Zero and “com­pli­men­tary cof­fee” from the faux­tel we were attend­ing. Then we dis­cover that there’s a STARBUCKS in the nice hotel across the road (!!!)
After head­ing over there the first day, we found out that it was only open from 6-11am. So the sec­ond day, pan­icked for cof­fee, I headed over at 10:30 to the basi­cally empty hotel lobby of the “nice hotel” in town.
I go up to the lit­tle stand and the girl is chat­ting up some guy (there’s a lot of that going around, I guess). So I stand there and she walks over. This is not a Star­bucks, it’s a “proud to serve Star­bucks” — a fake. But well, I’m ok with that — let’s just get down to busi­ness. I look at the board behind the stand and it says, “Breve” and offers a price (I’m doing the Breve because I can’t have a reg­u­lar latte on low carb, yes I sound like Euro trash, I know).
So I order the Breve latte — she bills me, I give her like a 50% tip for my joy that I’m going to have a real fake Star­bucks… and she starts mak­ing my latte.
She pours out some milk into the steam bucket — I ask, “is that half-and-half”? She says, “We don’t have any half-and-half.“
I would like to point out that at no time dur­ing any of my cof­fee expe­ri­ences, did I yell.
At this point the shots are pour­ing, the milk is steamed — we’re through. So I just tell her, “you owe me $3.” and turn to leave.
Then her boyfriend makes a crack. “What, no tip?“
Well, again, I’d like to point out that, hav­ing had no cof­fee, hav­ing had my dreams of a cof­fee dashed, I didn’t yell. I turned on him though…
“What’s your name?“
“Nev­er­mind, it’s ok.“
Look­ing down, I see that he’s fill­ing out a W-9, he’s either just got­ten a job, or is apply­ing for a job at this very estab­lish­ment, and is already crack­ing wise with the cus­tomers.
“No, really. What is your name?“
“Nev­er­mind, really, it’s all good.“
No it’s not.” (not yelling) “I could ruin your whole day, prob­a­bly your whole job, genius. You need to learn to keep your mouth shut.“
Then I turned and left. Hope that helped in some way to teach him not to crack wise with cus­tomers — maybe he’ll keep his job.
Onward — at this point, we dis­cov­ered that I can stom­ach the McDonald’s non-sweetened ice cof­fee — so that became our backup solu­tion. Now, as we enter every town in the more civ­i­lized states of Texas, Okla­homa, and to date Arkansas — we locate a real Star­bucks for me and Kathy.
The Navajo Nation
So we left Grand Theft Canyon and headed into Ari­zona.
There, we saw signs indi­cat­ing that we’d entered the Navajo Nation. Nate found that very inter­est­ing — that there could be a sov­er­eign nation inside our coun­try. He turned that around in his head for some time, talk­ing about how he wished it was a full coun­try, and ask­ing why it wasn’t. I explained that the Navajo Nation was able to do most things of a sov­er­eign nation, but there were things we couldn’t let them do for our own well-being. Like they couldn’t make deals with bad guys to put nuclear war­heads inside our coun­try.
That some­how or other lead to dis­cus­sions of the Navajo Code Talk­ers — which excited us a lot. Nate’s into WWII some­what, and when he learned that these very peo­ple helped win the war with their unbreak­able code, he was stoked. Then we told him that we’d planned to go to the Code Talker’s Museum!!!
That was awe­some, how excit­ing — woohoo.
More on that in a sec­ond.
On the way, we saw a sign indi­cat­ing “dinosaur foot­prints” with an arrow point­ing off the road. This stop, while seem­ingly “home made” (lots of hand painted signs, etc.) was estab­lished enough that it was in one of Kathy’s guide books. The book said we’d have to give a small tip to the locals, who would then gladly guide us to the foot­prints.
We rolled up, and a nice enough guy met us, only a few sheets to the wind.
They were all work­ing out of shacks by the side of the road, and some were sell­ing jew­elry. We felt it was nice that they’d had a chance to set this all up, and wasn’t it too bad that it had to be so run down:

Our guy showed us some cool stuff that I will share under another head­ing. Real tracks, they were neat. He would pour water on them from a beat up old 7-Up bot­tle to make them eas­ier to see — it was hot enough that the water would dis­ap­pear after about 5–10 min­utes.
I asked him if he had always lived here, and he pointed off in the dis­tance to the “rez” that they lived in, said he was 5th gen­er­a­tion, that they’d been show­ing these for a long time and most of the peo­ple in the rez farmed.
As we were headed back, he began to sug­gest that most peo­ple pay $10–15 per per­son to see the tracks. I’m like, “ok, sure” — I mean, these are pretty down-trodden peo­ple, right? We have almost an oblig­a­tion right? Look at their shacks — feel this heat.
I pay him $40 and thank him — then Kathy and Angie go to look at the jew­elry. He mut­ters some­thing I couldn’t under­stand about how his fam­ily shows up later to sell jew­elry — and goes off to hang out with his bud­dies, who are all eat­ing sno-cones from some mys­ti­cal cooler and pos­si­bly drink­ing beer or some­thing (he was a lit­tle ripe).
Then I start doing the math. With the jew­elry, we’re into this lit­tle stop for $50. That’s fine, not too much money for see­ing real fos­sil foot­prints. We’re a fam­ily of four. We see at least two other fam­i­lies dur­ing our 20 minute stay. That’s $120 at least, if not more, in about 40 min­utes maybe.
Extrap­o­lat­ing a bit, I fig­ure they’re aver­ag­ing at least 20 fam­i­lies a day, they have about 8 guys there, no less than 5 shacks of jew­elry, all run down, all hand-painted, all falling over.
Our guide told me no less than 5 times that they get busses stop­ping there, filled with peo­ple.
So I’m guess­ing they’re mak­ing at least $1000 per day, if not more.
Ok, so if this was the traf­fic all year round, that’d be $365k per year. Now, for easy math, let’s cut off 30% for slower sea­sons, now you’re down to $250k.
Let’s say you sub­tract another 20% for just slow days — now you’re look­ing at a TAX FREE (Navajo Nation) racket that’s tak­ing in $200k per year con­ser­v­a­tively.
So all of the sud­den, I’m real­iz­ing that either:
A: I’m stand­ing inside a racket that’s “hand painted” and run­down because folks pay more to the “locals” because it’s authen­tic.
or
B: These folks are tak­ing in this kind of money and nobody’s got the thought to build a bet­ter shack.
Either way, it made me a lit­tle sick. I want to feel com­pas­sion for these folks because they’re down­trod­den — but either they’re trick­ing me for more money, or they’re keep­ing them­selves down. That’s a lit­tle nuts.
But that doesn’t really make me all freaked out — just gets me think­ing — but then, we leave and after about an hour, reach the “Code Talk­ers Museum.“
This is the great­est pride of the Navajo Peo­ple in some quar­ters. The recog­ni­tion of the Code Talk­ers has cre­ated a new­found inter­est in the lan­guage, and has caused many Navajo to return to their roots and reclaim their iden­ti­ties.
The Code Talk­ers are a SERIOUS mat­ter in the Navajo Nation.
Now, Kathy’s guide­book warned us that the “museum” was in a Burger King. It was in an area pro­vided by the owner. We’re think­ing, “Ok. That’s fine. He’s show­ing pride him­self… we can work with that.“
We get there — fig­ur­ing it’s a room off in the back. Nope, it’s a short wall between two rows of booths.
Behold, the Pride of the Navajo Peo­ple:


The guy at the “museum” is actu­ally just try­ing to make the com­puter work — I tried too — it was stuck at the win­dows desk­top.
What you can’t see is that, off to my right, is the two story “play place” for this Burger King, com­plete with giant tube slides and bouncy plat­forms. The ded­i­cated Navajo owner was able to lay out the few hun­dred thou­sand in cash for the game room, but couldn’t buy a tuff-shed to house the Code Talker’s Museum.
But hey, while you’re here — want a burger?
At that point, I’m seething. The “museum” was mainly filled with Japan­ese para­pher­na­lia that I could see (Yen bank notes, a few guns), and there wasn’t much else there. There were a few peo­ple walk­ing around as dumb­founded as we were.
So, I take my kids for miles and miles and days and days and what do I learn? If there’s a nat­ural resource around, someone’s going to sur­round it and charge you money to see it. If there’s any­thing that could lift up the Navajo peo­ple, it’ll either cost me money in a racket, or make one of them rich while the oth­ers stand around.
What, I won­der out loud to Kathy, is a Navajo teenager going to think of this “her­itage museum?” You think this is going to make them feel bet­ter? Want fries with that?
So we left. No, we didn’t buy any food.
Well — let’s head on to Four Cor­ners. By this point, we’re also real­iz­ing, coin­ci­den­tally, that we haven’t seen a church or heard ref­er­ence to Christ in about 4 days and almost 1,000 miles.
All of Grand Canyon is filled with ani­mism and ref­er­ences to Vishnu (the low­est layer of the canyon is called the Vishnu layer) — and there’s not a sin­gle Chris­t­ian any­where. Just waste­land, greed, and sor­row.
So, we get to Four Cor­ners — Nate and Angie’s first really antic­i­pated loca­tion.
As we roll up, in per­fect pre­dictabil­ity — the Nava­jos have set up a shack requir­ing money for this mon­u­ment that was built by the Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment.

See that lit­tle sign at the bot­tom? Well, Eagle Scouts get a lit­tle card, it’s call an Eagle Card. It lets them get dis­counts and free entry to National Parks, Trails and other Boy Scouty kind of things. The Navajo want to make sure you real­ize that’s not hap­pen­ing here — so they have care­fully painted a pic­ture of it with a cir­cle through it.
Oh, they don’t take credit cards — that would incur a tax. All cash please.
So, four cor­ners is where four states meet. The mon­u­ment looks like this:

Clearly a National Mon­u­ment — blocked off by the Navajo, sur­rounded by shacks… sell­ing t-shirts and gad­gets.
Once again — some­thing free, sur­rounded by greed and blocked off unless you pay a fee. Makes me sick.
Well, after those hor­rors, we finally got out of that god­less area, arrived in Texas and reached a Giant Cross — one of the largest in North Amer­ica. That’s my next post.

Oh! klahoma

This is just a quick post from the car, so no pic­tures. It’s been a lit­tle tough to get pic­tures up recently; by the time we get to the hotel/motel to do any­thing online, we’re kinda tired, and the process of pick­ing pic­tures, mod­i­fy­ing them, upload­ing them, and then com­ment­ing on them tends to slow the blog process.
But mean­while, some of the things we’re see­ing thus far.
Once we entered Texas, things got a lit­tle more godly again. No more peo­ple stand­ing around billing us $3.00 to take pic­tures of free national parks, and more Chris­t­ian para­pher­na­lia and open dis­cus­sion about Chris­t­ian stuff (per­son­ally, I’m enjoy­ing the Bible Belt).
It’s kinda fun to see the local Elk City Gazette be filled with arti­cles about help­ing oth­ers as Chris­tians, and every­where we turn, nice peo­ple tend to reveal them­selves as Chris­tians after a lit­tle while.
We’re headed to Bris­tow and the out­ly­ing area right now to see Kathy’s Aunt Mar­ion, have din­ner, and go to a rodeo. We went to the National Cow­boy Museum (a pretty impres­sive “real” museum in Okla­homa City) and it was pretty cool.
I’ve been try­ing to add posts in date-sensitive order, so if you’re mon­i­tor­ing the blog, you might go back through older posts, which I put in after the fact and back-dated. That’s one of the rea­sons it may seem like I’m not post­ing much.
Hope­fully, tonight, we’ll have good Inter­net, I’ll not feel exhausted, and I can put up some fun pho­tos of var­i­ous locales we’ve vis­ited and adven­tures we’ve had.
God Bless, y’all!

Fear and Loathing in Utah

Here’s a pic­ture of our happy fam­ily in front of Zion Val­ley:

See us? We’re happy, we look like we’re at Peace, don’t we? So nice.
This pic­ture was taken about 10 min­utes after a won­der­ful moment of ter­ror.
So, I got out of the car to take a pic­ture of this for­get­table view:

… and Kathy got out from the pas­sen­ger side (nearer the edge) to stretch her legs. Since the view was nice enough, we decided to let the kids get out of the car too so we could all take a break.
So, I reached in from the pas­sen­ger side (the door was still open), turned the car off and –
The car started rolling back­wards. Kind of aggres­sively. Down a hill. Towards either the road where cars would be fly­ing by any sec­ond, or over the edge to a 20-foot drop into the trees.
Yes, the kids were still in the back, obliv­i­ous to the dan­ger… tralala.
The proper phrase at this point is, “Oh God, ohgodohgodohgodohGod!”, which I am happy to say is exactly what I uttered.
I then learned that, while tall, slightly creaky, and even tired — I can still jump into a mov­ing car like Bat­man.
I leapt from the curb, up over the tran­som, into the driver’s seat and stood on the brake. It took me about 5 min­utes to let my foot off the brake after that — even with the hand­brake on, etc.
Seems this Suzuki SR7, unlike all mod­ern cars, lets you pull the key out while in gear, at which point, it releases. Nice.
So, thank you Jesus (!) that everything’s ok. Of course it hap­pened within the first hour of being in Utah :p

Long Haul Truckin’

We owe you all notes about the Grand Canyon, Four Cor­ners, and all the fun and suf­fer­ing we had dur­ing those trips — but right now, we need a lit­tle prayer.
See… we decided we’d head to Four Cor­ners (which we did, and got a cute video), and then go for dis­tance on Routes 64, 550, and 40 — stay­ing in the near­est hotel we could find once we’d hit the wall. We fig­ured that would be at least at Shiprock, NM, but poten­tially we’d make it to Farm­ing­ton, NM — and if we were REALLY adven­ture­some, we’d head all the way to Bloom­field, NM and *phew* … stay the night.
Well, since these are all rel­a­tively small cities, we fig­ured we’d be fine for find­ing some sort of hotel, I mean what ever hap­pens in Farm­ing­ton?
The National High­school Rodeo, that’s what hap­pens in Farm­ing­ton, NM! The whole area is booked. Every­thing.
Ok, well, what’s fur­ther down the road on 550 … well, aside from the occa­sional Chain­saw Mas­sacre Motel, or Deliv­er­ance Lodges, noth­ing until Albu­querque, NM! So we’ve booked a room at the Albu­querque Mar­riott, and we’re on our way…

Ugly America and the Grand Canyon

I’m gonna start this entry with a lit­tle writ­ing — we’ll have Grand Canyon pic­tures later on.
So we rolled into Tusayan, near the Grand Canyon. We opted to stay at the Hol­i­day Inn Express in town, which Kathy had booked weeks in advance.
When we arrived, they had our mini-suite reg­is­tered — and “oh, by the way”, here’s your OTHER mini-suite, since we learned that you have two kids.
“Umm… what?“
“Our Suites are only for two peo­ple (here in this fam­ily des­ti­na­tion), so you’ll need to pay us another $370 for the two nights you’re going to stay here. Wel­come to the Grand Canyon.“
“Ummm… what?“
“Would you like to see your rooms?“
At this point, there’s that won­der­ful blend of ire and fatigue splashed together in my skull, and Kathy gave me that look of “now what?“
“Sure,”, I said, “We’d love to look at the rooms.“
So we headed off to the suites in a build­ing on the other side of the com­plex, each of which was about 500–700 square feet of space, includ­ing bath­room sit­ting room, kitch­enette and king size bed. The sit­ting room was a real sep­a­rate room, com­plete with sofa, desk, and sec­ond tele­vi­sion.
We headed into the sec­ond Suite, and con­firmed with our 7-year old that he would prob­a­bly be ok sleep­ing in there alone with his 10-year old sis­ter, and wasn’t it great that we could bang on the wall if we needed any­thing? Mean­while, I’m ready to call their bluff.
We get back to the desk.
“So our kids can’t stay in the same Suite with us?“
“Oh no, we have no roll­away beds, and no fold­out sofas. I’m so sorry.“
“What if they sleep on the floor?“
(ha! In your face you goug­ing creep!)
”…oh. Well, umm… oh…“
“I mean, it’s ok with us, would that be ok with you?“
Then Mrs. Charm­ing behind the desk opts to go mag­nan­i­mous with us…
“Well, I’m a mother… [you sure are] … I under­stand. If you want to let your chil­dren sleep on the floor, I’m not sup­posed to let you, there are fire codes and so forth — but I’ll let you.“
“Oh, thank you SO much. We’ll take only one Suite. Thanks. Buh-bye!“
Then, we put my 4-foot tall son on the loveseat in the sit­ting room, went to the camp­ing store, bought a foam pad, and Angie slept hap­pily on the floor in the sit­ting room.
On the manda­tory sign on the door, there were the rates listed for the room, which included 1-person, 2-people, 3-people, and 4-people. Suf­fice to say, there were no “fire codes” at play here.
What’s that you say? Won­der­ful sav­ings? Well, we weren’t out of Tusayan yet!

Yellowstone

So, hav­ing spent the night in Gar­diner (home of Roman­ian served Bison), we entered Yel­low­stone National Park.

Our first stop was Mam­moth Hot Springs, which is a nat­ural gath­er­ing of bub­bling steamy min­eral water at an ele­va­tion of about 8 mil­lion feet above sea level. There are stairs in the trail, filled with Amer­i­can and Euro­pean fam­i­lies talk­ing to each other in a panoply of lan­guages about why we can’t breath.
Before head­ing up, Nate checked out the map, and the warn­ing sign:

…and then I made the mis­take of read­ing, with great drama, this warn­ing sign:

…which essen­tially said that the ground was a chang­ing expe­ri­ence, and if you walked on the springs, you might step through a thin crust and get scalded. It also told us that a dozen peo­ple (in some 150 years) had been scalded to death!
Well, at that point, Nate was not hav­ing any of it, became very con­cerned, and even though we were walk­ing on board­walks the entire time, was pretty cer­tain that we could acci­den­tally fall off the them to our sure demise.
So Mam­moth Hot­springs was a no-air, full-fear, non-event of watch­ing bub­bling water.

---

Mov­ing right along, we saw a bunch of crit­ters:

A sleep­ing bison

A bison in the woods

A Buf­falo Butt (got a lot of mos­quito bites get­ting this shot)

A Deer

…and even a Mar­mot (woohoo)

---

After cross­ing the 45th Par­al­lel

We made it to Old Faith­ful:

Where we took a video. Now this is worth watch­ing. Here’s the setup. It was cold (not freez­ing, but nippy) as you can see by how Nate is hug­ging him­self in the video. We’ve been stand­ing for about 10–15 min­utes wait­ing for Ol’ Faith­ful to go, and the chilly wind is mak­ing the kids grumbly.
Remem­ber: (It’s cold (opens a popup))

There’s so much Montana

So, after eat­ing a deli­cious meal of Wal­mart shrimp and cock­tail sauce,

I finally passed out and slept long enough to leave mighty Mis­soula, Mon­tana.
We headed out, with me dri­ving, and spent the major­ity of the day telling peo­ple “I’m in Mon­tana, the hills really make cell cov­erag–” and then redi­al­ing. It’s a very wavy wob­bly state.
In our quest to see more of Amer­ica, we’ve opted a few times to pull off the main road and visit “Small­town, USA” to see what they have to offer. Our win­nings today were quite spe­cial.
Hav­ing wan­dered into Deer Lodge, MT — we began wan­der­ing about in what was def­i­nitely a SMALL TOWN. We rolled down the main street, which looked like a circa 1960s scene with mod­ern fix­tures (and the occa­sional wall mural or bill­board telling you (quite graph­i­cally) that Meth kills (which promptly would trig­ger me and Kathy to shout out things like “hey kids, look at that cloud!”)).
Dri­ving around for a while, pon­der­ing what it means to live in Deer Lodge, MT — we turned a cor­ner and saw a cas­tle:

…which turned out to be the local PRISON MUSEUM!!! Awe­some. We had to stop.
While the girls hung around the car, Nate and I checked it out, and got suck­ered into buy­ing tick­ets to go in. It’s actu­ally the old State Pen­i­ten­tiary for all of Mon­tana, and it was an abysmal place towards the end. The place had been built in the 1860s, and was used ever after to house more and more pris­on­ers, cre­at­ing greater and greater over­crowd­ing issues. The over­crowd­ing resulted in a riot in the 1960s (I think that’s the date), which had some pris­on­ers get­ting their hands on a rifle, tak­ing a build­ing and hav­ing to be blown out with a bazooka (the bazooka is still there, in a case).
Suf­fice to say, Nate was pretty wide-eyed about the whole thing. He was espe­cially cap­ti­vated by the “Out of Bounds” line, a painted line on the ground that, if you crossed it with­out per­mis­sion as a pris­oner, could get you shot on sight:

I read that expla­na­tion to him from the guide­book, and then headed for­ward to the next area. He thought I’d lost my mind until I explained that there weren’t any guards any­more.
We also saw the stan­dard cells and yards — and it was a good oppor­tu­nity to talk about how sucky prison is, which is a valu­able les­son, I think. Coin­ci­den­tally, we’re read­ing about Joseph in Gen­e­sis right now.
Well, we got back on the great Amer­i­can high­way, com­plete with inter­mit­tent phone calls and even a few detours — and then we saw a won­der­ful sign for a Griz­zly Encounter. We thought, since it was so close to the detour any­way, WHY NOT?!!
So we rolled into the great pre­serve:

and paid our $24 to see this:

This would be Bru­tus the Bear — he’s a movie star in some National Geo­graphic films, it would seem. Basi­cally, not only was I suck­ered for $24, but I’ve just had all my “that’s an amaz­ing image” illu­sions shat­tered. I guess when National Geo­graphic films some of those bear and wild ani­mal films, it’s too dif­fi­cult or dan­ger­ous to film the wild ani­mals doing the close up things like dig­ging or fish­ing — so they bring in bears like Bru­tus, the won­der sleeper. I can’t tell you how glad I am that I expe­ri­enced this Griz­zly encounter.
So, we rat­tled along in Mon­tana, saw Jesus:

…and headed into the mighty town of Gar­diner:

Where we are stay­ing at the Yel­low­stone Vil­lage Inn, in the lux­u­ri­ous John Wayne room:

…where I grap­pled with the Inter­net wire­less for about an hour until I finally was able to hack my way out to the pri­mary router and get online.
We went to a pretty cool restau­rant that was styled after a gold mine for din­ner, and I had the buf­falo rib­eye and Kathy had the buf­falo burger. They were deli­cious — tasted just like chi– beef.
We noticed that our servers had accents, so at the end of the meal, we asked, and, as you would have guessed, they were from Roma­nia and Colum­bia. The Roman­ian server we had is now liv­ing here and mar­ried, but the rest are still sum­mer exchange stu­dents.
Gotta love that, if we went off to France as stu­dents, for exam­ple, we’d think it was cool and quaint and Euro­pean to stay in some rural set­ting and work for the sum­mer. They’re doing exactly the same thing, Roman­ian style. They came to Amer­ica, headed to the “real West” and are work­ing in Gar­diner, MT; home of about 50 motels and this restau­rant. Buf­falo in Mon­tana served by Roma­ni­ans. Amer­ica.
Tomor­row, Yellowstone!