The Grand Canyon

We're not big vacationers. We do take trips - mostly local camping or visiting our children. Last December we decided to do it up. We saw some of Arizona and New Mexico, a little Colorado and a tiny bit of Utah (about 10 inches).

We drove almost directly to 4 Corners.

It was super-fun talking to all the local artisans encircling this monument. Since it was December, it was COLD and windy, but these hardy folks still brought out their silver, copper, beaded, painted, carved, and home baked crafts and foodstuffs and laid them out on tables in their little three sided huts and shivered and shot the breeze (ha ha) with us.

We decided to forgo Chaco Canyon and went to Mesa Verde instead.

I so recommend this place. There're several cliff dwellings along this route, from about ten rooms on up. Fantastic building style - they made all these bricks and everything is so SQUARE - or round - and perfect. We were the only people there at that moment. I could imagine myself living here several hundred years ago - maybe calling down from the canyon top and waving my woven yucca bag of pinyon nuts, "Hey, Sissy, get the fire started!".

It's also a great place for hikers or mountain goats. We did NOT take the trail down there. I saw all I needed to see from the canyon rim.

Then we headed over to the Grand Canyon. It was snowing. It was crazy c-c-c-cold. Our truck was one of three vehicles full of fools checking out the different canyon vistas that day.

Ok, I know this is one of the seven wonders of the world and everything, but Hubby and I would get out of the truck, trudge through the snow to the canyon edge, look out over it, then glance sideways at each other as if to say, "Huh. Big ditch.". Maybe because it was overcast and snowing periodically. Maybe because we've seen a lot of ditches in our time - some of 'em pretty big. For us, Grand Canyon was just Alright Canyon.

There were two fun parts of our Grand Canyon visit:

1. Mr. Begay (pronounced "Big A" he instructed us). There are lots of Navaho Begays. This one has a handicraft shack outside the Grand Canyon entrance. Hubby bought me a copper bracelet and a beaded hair clip while we huddled around his tiny wood stove and talked Navaho culture. Really nice guy. Wish we could remember his first name.

2. The little brown birds. As we drove the canyon rim road, these little brown birds would periodically fly ahead of us and drop stuff in the road and fly off. Then they'd settle back down in the road after we'd driven by. It took us a while to figure out what they were doing. They were dropping pinyon cones into the roadway for us to run over! Then they'd check out the cones we'd hit and munch on the nuts we'd crushed under our tires. Ingenious little suckers. We hadn't noticed them for the longest time, but once we did, they were highly entertaining.

There were some other fun and not-so-fun things both going and coming back. Tree ripened oranges in Bakersfield. Star thistle in True's paws wherever we stopped. Yummy sausage in that one restaurant. Small motels that were dog friendly. Gorgeous countryside. Having a good traveling companion. And one traveling companion I'll never take on a long trip again (True, you suck on the road). Meeting friendly and not-so-friendly people. All in all a really good trip.

So I guess there is a moral to this story. It's not the destination. It's the fun you can find along the way. Wait, haven't I heard that somewhere before?