Westward

Although I wasn't actually saying goodbye to my dad, my cat or my bird (since I will see them all again), I still had to take a deep breath as my mom and I pulled away from the house last Friday. I am traveling to a place I have never been and will be living and working with people I have never met. Home was comforting and the unknown is not.

Herd of Pronghorn spotted from the car in NM.

This past week I have been roadtripping with my mom, seeing new sights. We drove through Louisiana and our first night we stayed in Wichita Falls, TX where we deliriously fell into our rock hard beds and tossed and turned until we plopped back into the car for another long day on the road. In those two days we drove about 1500 miles--the majority of the ground we needed to cover--and then came the real exploring.

In Albuquerque, NM, we viewed paintings by artists who call New Mexico home, inspired by the desert landscape and the native populations. We wandered around the historic Old Town learning about early settlers who claimed land that wasn't theirs to take. We wandered around Nob Hill where the college kids hang out (and I can no longer call myself a "college kid") and watched an Israeli film at an old artsy theater. We inspected petroglyphs carved into vesilcular basalt by the indigenous population before the conquistadors arrived.

Rock carvings at Petroglyph National Monument

On our way to Flagstaff we spent an afternoon at the Petrified Forest National Park. We stared across the Painted Desert, able to see the San Fransisco Peaks about 120 miles away. But the Petrified wood was amazing, made from trees from the Late Triassic period when the western U.S. was in the tropics. Instead of decaying and forming rich soil and coal and oil, these trees fell in the right conditions so that their wood was replaced with silica--perminialized. Anyway, I love trees and these rocks that once were trees are beautiful.

At Crystal Forest in Petrified Forest National Park

In Flagstaff, AZ we ate delicious breakfasts at a local cafes right next to each other and wandered into the countless outdoor stores on the streets of Old Town. We went to Lowell Observatory, the place where Pluto (and I think Mars) was discovered and looked through a special telescope at the sun. We learned about arid and desert plants at the Arboretum. I could picture myself living in this little mountain town if only it didn't snow about 100 inches a year.

Today we drove to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and it is beautiful. Even using that word, "beautiful", seems to undermine the emotion of that place- one of the 7 natural wonder of the world (and rightly so). I won't get tired of looking over the beautiful vista from the North Rim--I don't think that is possible.

My arrival date is May 8, tomorrow, by 3:00 pm. It takes 5 hours to drive to the North Rim because although in a straight line from point A to point B it may only be about 10 miles, it takes over 220 miles by car to get around the canyon. I'm looking forward to it all, even if I am a bit nervous.

I had a great time with my mom this past week and wish all moms a happy mother's day!