Last of the Travel Photos

It already seems so long ago that I was out there on the open road. My trip from Memphis, through Nashville (had to settle for photos: no time to find the museum where they sell the postcards), and on to Chattanooga was uneventful. I enjoyed the Tennessee Aquarium immensely and was there early in the day so I almost had the place to myself. Unfortunately, I only had a couple of hours to spend so that I could get to Asheville before dark.

The main reason for going through Chattanooga was to detour around a HUGE rock slide on I-40 in the Pigeon River Gorge. They say it's 150 feet tall and will take 3-6 months to remove. It's not the first time this has happened in the Gorge and it probably won't be the last. I decided to take a southerly detour rather than the northern one that most of the 18-wheelers are taking. In fact, I recall having to take the northern route on my first trip to Asheville from Minneapolis in 1996, and for exactly the same reason. We followed a line of big trucks down a two-lane mountain road (now widened and hooked into I-26), with the smell and smoke of overheated brakes in the air. The southern detour was MUCH nicer (see sidebar photos) and as I drove eastward towards the mountains, the tree-covered, rolling hills beckoned me onward.

I returned to Asheville just in time to attend a little soiree at the home of friends Jan and Paula. Jan (whose photo will appear in the right sidebar presently) had heart surgery about a month ago to correct a previously undiagnosed congenital heart defect that had progressively disabled her for the past 7 years. It's an amazing tale, too long to go into here, and she definitely belongs on that cable TV show about medical mysteries. Suffice to say, she has been brought back from death's door and we are all very glad to have her with us.

Last week I emptied and flushed Michelle's black and gray water tanks, then gave her a thorough washing with help from grandson Austin. It was an all-day project and I was pooped, so I didn't get the fresh water tank drained, which I must do before the temps get below freezing; I will also need to run a special RV antifreeze into the lines.

This week I've been helping daughter Liz do some major re-organizing in her tiny apartment, and have enjoyed visiting with her family and helping out with the cooking. She works several 12- to 14-hour day shifts a week as a hospital RN; Sean works several 12-hour night shifts a week for the Sheriff's Dept. as a detention officer, so there've been some poor eating habits established, understandably. Besides, I do like to cook, especially in a real kitchen with a regular oven.

I'll be moving in with my friend Cathy when her house closes the day before T'giving, at which time Michelle will cease to be my primary abode and become my sole means of transportation. I look forward to settling in for the winter and helping Cathy decorate her new space. We also will be planning a really BIG new business venture that I'll say more about later.

That's all for now. Time to fix Austin some breakfast: doing the Nanny thing again...nice.

Catching Up Again...Again

It certainly is easy to get busy with other things: sleeping, eating, sight-seeing, helping my brother organize his photos, making earrings with the beads I bought in Sedona, organizing my own photos and sending them to friends and family, etc. It's not that I don't think of you often, you know, I just keep putting you down a bit farther on the To-Do List. Please don't be mad; I couldn't bear it. (Is anybody out there?)

The photos are up, so I'll try to give a bit of commentary to go along with them. BTW, another tip about viewing the slide show: when you open the blog page the slideshow begins a couple seconds later, and since I try to put them in the order that they were taken (usually), you might want to view them in the correct order for them to make the most sense. I've explained how to do this before, but here's a refresher if you need it:

Single click on any photo. It will enlarge and show in the upper left corner which slide it is (e.g., 3 of 42). You can either use the arrows above the photo to move back or forward to the beginning, or you can choose 'View All' and the entire gallery will open up. Then click on the slideshow icon, the farthest left one above the photo gallery, and the first photo will enlarge and the slideshow will run. A menu bar will appear at the bottom of the slide so that at any time you may increase the viewing time of the slides (e.g., in order to read the captions more easily) by increasing the seconds (click on the + sign). The default is 3 seconds but you can change it to any number. Or you can view the slides individually for as long as you like by NOT choosing the slideshow icon and just clicking on the arrows.

Anyway, here's what happened after I left Seligman (pronounced with the accent on the middle syllable, by the way). I drove to Flagstaff on I-40 where I met up with my brother Steve at his house,

and with my brother Larry who had arrived by car from Memphis the previous day with Steve's son Austin. They had taken the scenic route through Utah and Monument Valley, a trip that is definitely on my agenda for next year.

Larry appeared to be suffering from some unknown malady that was causing a hacking cough (Austin had some kind of crud, too) so he was feeling rather puny. The next day I stayed at the house with him (I was feeling a bit under the weather myself) while Steve and Austin drove to Phoenix (some two hours south) to pick up the rest of the Wellses at the airport: my youngest brother Jay and sister Marcia.

Next day all except Larry did some sight-seeing in Flagstaff, shopped a bit (ugh) and Steve grilled big ol' steaks for dinner. That night Larry was up with fever and lots of coughing, which I diagnosed as the flu (swine or otherwise, I couldn't say) so everyone became hyper-alert to germs and the correct procedure for coughing, etc.

Sunday we went to Sedona by way of Jerome. Since we are all rather large people, ranging in height from 5'8" to 6'4", with girths to match, we decided to take two cars. Steve and Jay were in the lead in Steve's pickup and he led us on the "scenic route" through the back country, much of the way on an unpaved road. We talked to each other on walkie-talkies ("Checkmate King Two, this is White Rook, over") and felt just like explorers in a new land, kinda-sorta. It was an extremely bumpy, dusty road and I thought it would never end. I was driving Larry's Saturn and he and I decided that there was no way we were going to be able to keep up with Steve at the pace he had set in the pickup, so, of course, the trip was even longer. But it was mighty pretty, and so was Sedona, with the late afternoon sun on the red rocks.

Monday was Grand Canyon day but we didn't have to hurry because Steve wanted us to be there at sunset. So we stopped off at Sunset Crater Volcano (the whole area is jumping with currently-dormant volcanic activity), two native pueblo ruins, and a roadside native crafts stand on the way.

Brother Steve traveled to Grand Canyon from Memphis with a group of friends (sometimes including brother Larry and son Austin) every year from about 1981 until he moved to Flagstaff permanently in 2001. He's probably traversed every known trail, and run the river twice, so he knew exactly where he wanted to take us for our first view. He had his spiel all worked out as well, about how Coronado and his men came to America in search of the Seven Cities of Gold, dispatching Garcia Lopez de Cardenas to find a large river they had heard about. De Cardenas led his men through the scrub pinion and juniper, right up to the edge of the biggest hole in the ground they had ever seen. They saw the river far below them, estimating from the rim of canyon that it was about 10-20 feet across (it is actually about 100 yards wide) but they couldn't find their way down to the river, possibly because their native guides were not anxious to show them the way, and so were forced to move on. It would be another 200 years before two Spanish priests explored the Canyon again, and another 100 years until Major John Wesley Powell led a Colorado River expedition through Grand Canyon, mapping and studying its geology as he went.

We ended the day at Mohave Point, next to last stop on the shuttle that runs westward along the south rim. Again, Steve led our little expedition through the scrub to the edge of the Canyon, this time far above what has become known in our family as Ryan's Peak. Ryan was Steve's younger son, who was killed in a car crash on Labor Day, 1999, at the age of 15. His ashes are mixed with the soil of Grand Canyon on top of the little peak. We stayed until the sun turned the rocks to gold and finally sank into the western sky. Rest in Peace, young Ryan.