The Green Table

The number of French speaking tourists in the desert southwest was astonishing. I think I heard more French than English in our stay at the Kayenta inn.

Kayenta is in the heart of Navajo country, and the scenery is straight out of roadrunner, with mesas, standing columns of rock, and red dirt and stone everywhere.

So this is the third day of rain in the desert. I've come to conclude that it's not that we've had good luck with the weather, but opposite luck. Sunny in the rainforest of Glacier. Sunny and cool on a Chicago summer day. Sunny and warm on a San Francisco summer day. And of course rainy in the southwest. We drove from the inn to four corners, where we were all able to stand in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona at one time. There's a plaque at the spot where the four corners join, and that got me wondering how precisely they could place that plaque, and then how much the ground is moving due to plate tectonics. Do they have to move the plaque by millimeters a year? Then, how are the boundaries of the states determined? Are we all dependent on the location of Greenwich, England?

We made the drive to Mesa Verde, in southwest Colorado, and took a tour of Balcony House, one of many dwellings discovered in the cliffs surrounding the mesas here. The mesas are there because there's a cap of hard rock over layers of sandstone, which allows erosion to act to create the mesas. It turns out that some meters down in the mesas there a layer of shale which stops water intrusion, which in turn causes little springs to appear in the edge of the mesas. These springs gradually erode these alcoves out, and the Pueblan people, starting at about 500AD, settled down out of their hunter/gatherer lifestyle to a domesticated existence of farming the mesa tops and hunting the surrounding areas, while living in a child's dreamhouse, where climbing opportunites abound. Apparently they eventually hunted out all the game, and were reduced to eating corn and hunting chipmunks. Interestingly, they only lived to about thirty years old because the corn was ground with sandstone, which left sand in the meal and ground down their teeth to tiny nubs in that span.

We're staying the night in Mesa Verde on their campground, looking at beautiful stars.

A Big Hole

We awoke in Needles, CA, the heart of the desert, to a driving thunderstorm. Fortunately we were not caught in our leaking tent in this thunderstorm, having been scared off from the Mojave National Preserve by poisonous creates and threat of being driven over. This is the second day of rain in the desert. We were hoping that the desert would be, you know, a desert.

The van has rarely been below two thirds of a tank of gas. This is certainly not due to my obsessiveness, as I always take the gas light coming on as my cue to get gas. Instead, the tiny bladders of my offspring render it impossible to go more than 100 miles without a stop. They could write a travel journal about all the bathrooms they've seen. From the palaces of the Wisconsin Capitol in Madison to the pit toilets of Kankakee state park to the infinite variety of gas station toilets. They have seen it all. But that is their story.

We had bought some mangoes in the Bay area to munch along the way. I cut them up in the standard way, halving them, criss crossing them with knife cuts, turning them inside out, and eating them out of the skin. It was at this point I became certain that facial hair would never be for me. Ew. However, the pathetic excuse for a beard remains until the bitter end of this trip.

On the way out of Needles, we made a quick detour to "get" Nevada for the kids. We passed about ten large casinos during this trip, none of them terribly glamorous.

The Grand Canyon is a really big hole in the ground.

We finished the day camping in a motel in Kayenta, due to a lack of campsites and the continuing threat of rain in the desert.

I have to drive BACK?!?!

We made it to the Bay area in 19 days of travel, which even by my quickly atrophying calculational ability gives me only nine days of travel to make it back. OMG. Also, Lynn left for DC this morning, so I'm on my own with my three daughters again. Nice, but I'm in for it. The question is how to make the trip endurable.

My three girls have fortunately taken the road warrior ethos to heart. I tell them that we have three hours left to get somewhere, and the response is, "oh, that's nothing!"

You hear that the west is defined by water, but I found it hard to wrap my head around that until I drove through it. Our drive started out going through the San Luis reservoir, which is an enourmous facility devoted to watering the Central Valley. We then drove through field after field of almond and pistachio trees. We saw trailer trucks laden with apricots. We saw signs decrying Barbara Boxer for taking water from the Central Valley. Next to green groves of trees is a harsh treeless, almost brushless desert.

On the way from the Bay Area to the Grand Canyon is Visalia, California, which happens to be the location for one of Logos Technologies' biorefining plants. So I asked for a visit, and was met at the door by Rahul Mirani, who kindly showed me around. Essentially what the plant is doing is converting corn stover, which has cellulose and lignin combined, into ethanol. There's some cooking in vats, mechanical separation in blenders, and of course brewing and distilling. All very interesting, and especially the hints of the secret sauce that goes into it. If this plant goes well, it will cause a huge upset in the production of ethanol. Looking forward to success.

The day was capped by our nighttime investigation of a potential campsite at Mojave National Preserve. The website billed the roadside campsites as being just 6.1 miles off the highway and you could just go in and pick one. All we saw were scary dirt access roads littered with snake holes and ant colonies. In one of my best decisions of the trip, we abandoned the attemped and landed in a motel in Needles, California, hard on the Arizona border.

The Jelly Belly Factory

Somehow a trip to the Jelly Belly factory became one of the destinations for our trip. Going in to today, my kids thought the day would be great. I thought the day would be a terrible disappointment. We ended up meeting somewhere in between, closer to the good side, actually.

The truly shocking thing about the trip (other than the revolting chocolate covered jelly beans) was the quantity of sugar in the building. Giant pallets with a ton of sugar, to be transferred into hoppers which pour into enourmous canisters to be made into substances which gradually overcome your insulin reception ability.

The coolest part of the trip was a giant robot arm which took trays of newly minted candy and arranged them neatly into pancreas killing stacks of sweetness. Not the same motion every time, it adjusted based on the stack to which the candy was delivered and the current height of the stack. Delightful to watch.

The one thing I cannot convey in this blog are the smells and the tastes of the trip. The piney and eggy smell of Yellowstone I won't forget. The smell of snow in July in Glacier is something so strange. The smell of a barf flavored jelly bean that my daughter spit out was enough to revolt me. Jelly Belly now makes a mix of jelly beans with horrible flavors (barf, mouldy cheese, etc) looking exactly the same as their good tasting counterparts. Count me out.

Tasty Salted Pig Parts

The day was devoted to a quick tour of San Francisco, with Lynn, my three daughters, and my niece. We drove from Mountain View up the peninsula to San Francisco, because public transportation would have cost about five times as much for the six of us. We drove past billboards that advertised outsourcing services for Silicon Valley companies. It reminds me of the gold rush days, where the money was not made by the miners, but by the merchants and shippers. Apparently San Franciscans are still up to their same tricks.

We all six rode the cable car, which was far less safe than you might imagine, for it being billed as a tourist attraction. You are free to hang out the car and get your head lopped off by oncoming traffic. Everyone fortunately kept their heads on the way.

The next stop was the piers, where they have an old ferry, an old tugboat, a very old sailing cargo vessel, and a rusting lumber boat. The most interesting by far was the cargo carrier, with some exhibits on how the cargo was stored away in the boat to keep it dry and stable. It seems that hogsheads and burlap sacks formed the standard container of those days, and for its time was as useful as our containers.

Lunch was at Boccalone in the Ferry Building, where the highlight was a "salumi cone", which is a bunch of delicious deli meats formed in the shape of an ice cream cone. Fatty, salty, porky, and delicious. Which reminds me that somehow camping is all about bacon. It turns out that if you want to season whatever you're eating, you should just add bacon to it. Rice, green beans, eggs, whatever. We've gone through about four pounds of bacon to date. We'll go through more in the coming couple of weeks, I'm sure.

Big...really big...big, big, big

We went to see the redwood trees at Lady Bird Johnson Grove off US 101. As you can imagine, they were big.

We finished the day with a drive over the Golden Gate Bridge to crash at my brother's house in Mountain View.

 

Animals

The day was filled with numerous sightings of the Yellowstone ground ape, at the campsite, along the black metamorphic rock formations, and in their primitive white rock marking sites where they ritually mark their territory, one after the other in long lines. Though the apes are voracious omnivores, they curiously only observe the numerous delicious creatures instead of hunting them with their steel conveyances along the black rock formations. Later, they exchange bits of green paper for extruded meatlike substances formed from the abattoirs of the center of the continent.

We started the day boarding a restored old style Yellowstone yellow bus, driven by our fearless guide Brandon, who looked like the character from 90210. We drove down the road a spell, stopped, and were greeted by the sight of a grizzly in the scope he set up. Of course, knowing very little about cameras, I had no lens with which to capture the foraging for roots and berries. It was like any nature show.

We then went on to view herds of grazing animals, the bison, mountain goats, mule deer, and pronghorn, the last of which I was surprised to learn are vastly overengineered for their current environment. The pronghorn run faster than an extinct North American cheetah. Waste.

We finished the animal tour by stopping at a "bear jam", to see a mother black bear nursing her cub. We were fortunately not attacked and eviscerated for intruding on this intimate act.

We finished the day going to Old Faithful, which you will not be surprised to learn erupts to on a precise schedule to an audience seated in an amphitheater surrounding the accidental rock formation. The steam happened to look like Audrey's favorite stuffed llama.

By this point we were through with the Disney like atmosphere of Yellowstone, and exited the west side of the park to go to Bozeman, Montana. There we ate a a restaurant that would have felt like home in Bethesda, with the standard brew pub fare.