Cordertrip the third is up!

Come on. Like you have anything better to do. Seriously. 

Go to the Spring Break Extravaganza blog.

S-P-O-K-A-N-E

Contrary to popular belief, we didn't fall off the face of the planet. I'm hoping to get pictures up tonight or tomorrow, the problem being that since we got back to Portland (and now Spokane/St. John) we've been so inundated with people we know that the catching-up has gobbled all of our time. Oh, and there's also that part about trying to find a place to live. And since this place didn't work out, we settled for its little brother. Or at least a fourth of it. 

And, to be honest, we haven't been approved yet. We turned in our application, and since neither of us is a felon or has a bankruptcy, we fully expect to be allowed to move in. Of course we still need to recollect all of our worldly possessions and cram them into the apartment, then take care of the sixteen thousand other trivialities that accompany a move (especially cross-country), but hey, that's how we roll. 

My sincere thanks go out to all of your who've followed this blog for the last few weeks. My sincere apologies to you as well for all of the ill-timed or totally forgotten updates. I'm kicking around the idea of starting a blog to chronicle life in Spokane, but I have zero interest in it being totally about me. I don't like the whole iNarcissism thing. The whole concept of blogging, it seems, has become less about real-time information transfer and more about putting oneself on display. I don't want to waste your time with that. 

In any case this blog is not complete. I have a few more pictures to go through, then all the California pics will go up, along with some of the details of my custom bear-repellent and why babies scare me. 

Cheers!

Slow going

That goes for the Internet access as well as our travels today. My gracious aunt & uncle in Sacramento are letting us crash at their house tonight, which means I finally have access to the blog again after two nights at a ranch outside of San Diego. We'd originally planned only a one-night stay there, but when free tickets to the San Diego Zoo were offered, we couldn't say no. Anna especially can't pass up the chance to see animals up close. In order to keep our schedule we've pushed back our travel to Portland and eliminated Seattle from our schedule on the basis of it being relatively close to Spokane and therefore easily traveled to.

Tomorrow morning we head for the California coast, and hopefully the drive will be better that today's. We left S.D. at about 4:30 in the morning in an attempt to beat the commuter traffic to both S.D. and L.A. It worked, but because we're always suckers for sightseeing we decided to take highway 1 up the coast. Bad plan. A nine hour trip to Sacramento became a sixteen hour smack in the face. But we don't need to dwell on that; point is, we're safe and sound after a couple days away from updating, so don't worry. And I apologize for the lack of external links and additional pictures, but I'm working via dial-up, and, well, thinking about uploading pictures to Picasa's web albums at 36 kbps makes me want to chew on a power cable. So maybe later.

Oh, and tomorrow it's unlikely you'll see an update, as we're planning to rough it in one of California's seven bazillion state parks. After two failed attempts at camping earlier in our travels, do pray this one works out a little better.

Cheers,

Marcus

A Canyon of Great Grandeur

It took three hours of driving along bumpy roads, three bathroom stops for the three-year-old in the backseat, some very expensive gasoline, and almost two hours of hiking in 96-degree heat, but when we came over the top of a little rise and could finally see the big hole in the ground we'd come to see, we were lucky-all of us- to be able to keep breathing.

Trevor (who's not genetically related to the Hansen family; it's a very loving pseudo-adoption thing) convinced us to stay another night in Kingman because he recently found out about a place along the southern rim of the Grand Canyon where you can walk out onto a narrow jutting of rock and see the canyon for about 350 degrees of your view. This is not your average tourist trap. This is a four-wheel-drive, hiking boots and three gallons of water trip. (Three-year-olds optional.) And despite the fact that it took about three hours longer than we expected for the round trip, and though we didn't think to bring any food with us, it might have been the most worthwhile day of our trip yet.

I took pictures until my camera batteries ran out, but I haven't gotten them on the computer yet. Not that it matters. Pictures simply can't do the place justice. Standing on the edge of a sheer cliff (or, if you're Anna, sitting with your legs swinging over the edge) with a two thousand foot drop on either side and in front of you is a terrifying and awesome experience. Not awesome in the did-you-see-that-snowboard-trick kind of way, but in a literal sense. Sometimes it's the absence of things which inspires that kind of wonder.

We stood at the edge of this completely isolated thing listening to the absolute nothing around us, and it was very serene, almost meditative. Really makes you feel small, as cheesy as that might sound. There's just no other way to put it. It also really impresses on you just what kind of a scale God works on, seeing as this massive, farther-than-the-eye-can-see geological feature is little more than a pinprick on the globe.

I'm going to get an MFA in creative writing and yet I have no way of coming up with a description that justifies the magnitude and beauty of the place. So I'm going to bed.

Desert-ed

Six hours of driving will get you from L.A. to San Francisco, or from New Orleans to Houston, or maybe from Jacksonville to Miami if traffic is good. Or, if you're as adventurous as us, six hours of driving will get you from this to this. Scenic, no?

To be fair, the scenery from Albuquerque to Kingman, AZ today was tremendous. I went into the day with the expectation of dryland shrubbery and sand as far as the eye can see, but the vegetation varies widely from pale sagebrush to dense forest to fields packed with bright yellow and orange flowers. There are hills, flatlands, mesas, panoramic vistas, sunshine, thunderstorms (both at once, occasionally), etc. The only thing missing was wildlife. Through our entire trip across New Mexico the only wildlife we saw was a pair of black birds resting on a power line south of Albuquerque. It's some kind of beautiful desolation.

At any rate we're now in Arizona at Trevor's place, and aside from the possibility of rattlesnakes in the garage and the low-maintenance landscaping, the high desert is a pretty nice place. We've elected to stay an extra night here, in fact, so there should be a significant update to the blog tomorrow detailing how we got from Virginia Beach to New Orleans on the first leg of our trip. Sorry about that.

Also, I have two corrections to make. First, I mistakenly misused the name of Fort Stockton, TX a couple of days ago, calling it Fort Stevens by mistake. The second is that I only have one correction to make. Oops.

Goodnight for now, and I do hope that the new layout is satisfactory. Feedback, commentary, prayers for safe travels, and other wishings (preferably well-) are appreciated. Cheers!

Of New Mexico?

So when the border patrol stops your car at a checkpoint sixty miles north of the Mexican border because the paint's falling off, the backseat is obviously full of contraband, you have Oregon plates but are traveling from Virginia to Washington (via Texas, of course), and your driver's window won't roll down, here's a tip: he's not going to ask you if you're a citizen of New Mexico. Nobody cares, frankly. He wants to know if you're USA material. So rather than staring at your own reflection in his sunglasses for a few seconds and trying to remember when the last time you shaved was, just say yes when he asks if you're "a citizen." Because if instead of giving the quick and useful answer you say, "Uh, you mean of New Mexico?" he's going to smirk as if he knows you're joking, but the smirk will fade quickly when he realizes you're actually a complete idiot. Then have fun trying to explain the whole Oregon-Virginia-Washington thing. But don't worry, it's not as if the drivers of the seven hundred cars backed up behind you are all rolling their eyes in unison. At least one of them's bound not to be paying attention. 

Aside from the border patrol (why their checkpoint is an hour north of the border we still haven't figured out), the drive across the rest of Texas was swell, in part because this is what you see on the side of the road in Texas. Nice, eh? Supposedly there was a fantastic burger joint right on the border between Texas and New Mexico, but we lost the name of it and couldn't get ahold of the people who told us about it. so we had to drive through. We did drive past a town called Truth or Consequences, however. Does Bob know about this? We spent about ten hours driving today in an attempt to make up some distance, and as it sits right now we're at roughly the halfway point, distance-wise, of our trip. Wish us and our car well. 

So tonight we reside in Albuquerque at our friend's house. She's making a movie and I'm jealous. On the plus side, I have managed to convince her that it's a good idea for me to take her laptop with me under the guise of fixing it. You remember the scene from How the Grinch Stole Christmas where he gets caught by the little Who girl while trying to stuff a tree up a chimney? He says something to the extent of one of the lights is out and he has to take it back to his workshop to fix it on account of not having the proper equipment with him. (I may have aggrandized the last bit.) Same sort of deal. Maybe. 

We had dinner tonight at a place called Frontier, which was recommended to us by a librarian at a Baptist Seminary in New Orleans. Naturally. Not bad, though as far as I can tell there was nothing "New" Mexican about it. 

Unfortunately there'll be no pictures posted tonight because I can't get my laptop to connect to the house's wireless network, so I'm using a sibling of my former computer (a lovely Intel-based iMac) to post this and I don't particularly feel like swapping all the pictures to a thumb drive and transferring them over, etc. So tomorrow. Maybe. In the morning we're off to Arizona to see Anna's brother Trevor and his family and deliver some miniscule upholstered furniture to their young daughter. 

Oh, and to all our friends with Oregon plates, I'm very sorry that the border patrol will automatically assume you're a moron. Oops. 

Go, Fievel, go!

Here's a thirty-second update:

Spent Wednesday night at a hotel in Clear Lake, Texas. Hotel's address didn't exist and the stay was very disappointing. Thursday we went to Johnson Space Center outside of Houston, touched a moon rock, and Marcus got all delightfully dizzy with excitement. (Spaceships and moonrocks and high fidelity shuttle control training systems, oh my!) Thursday night we rolled into our campground for the night only to find it totally deserted (except by Texas-sized bugs), and decided to drive on. Fortunately we found a delightfully clean hotel off the interstate somewhere between San Antonio and Fort Stevens. Good night's sleep. 

And now it's close to checkout time and I have to run. Pictures are cropped and ready to be posted; expect a flurry of those tonight. 

On the road again...