Road trip

Our Grand Adventure, Part II

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Debora

The South Rim of the Grand Canyon is at 7000ft elevation. The weather was as perfect as it possibly could have been for hiking, but the thinner atmosphere meant that temps dropped below freezing at night and then warmed back up when the sun rose. It was strong, high-altitude sunshine, so even though the official high said 60º in the shade, it felt like 75º in direct sunlight. Wearing layers was key. That first day at the Canyon was when I realized that early October is a much better time time to visit than December: we would have been freezing our behinds off if we’d stuck to the original plan!

Sunday afternoon we met up with the other group members that wanted to hike along the Rim Trail east of the Village. Despite the altitude and not having slept much for the past two nights, the kids and I were bouncy with energy and eager to keep moving.

Once Elizabeth got past her initial amazement at the sheer enormity of the thing, she quickly transitioned to finding places where there was no railing or barrier between the trail and the abyss, and then finding a rocky outcropping to stand on where a fall would mean certain death, and then going out and standing on it, thusly:

I still haven’t decided whether I’m a bad parent for allowing this, or a good parent for encouraging her to live life to the fullest. Twenty years from now I’ll know which one it was, I suppose.

Luke found the Canyon actively intimidating. He was fine as long as there was a nice sturdy railing or wall between himself and the drop, but he wanted nothing to do with the unshielded outcroppings. I actually have very few pictures of Luke near the rim, and in the ones I do have he’s either on the safe side of a railing or wall (and if the wall is too low he still looks uncomfortable)…

…or there’s no barrier and I have a casual death grip on him to keep him in the photo.

Anyway. After the hike on Sunday we checked into our rooms to clean up for dinner. The group had reservations in the Arizona Room at Bright Angel Lodge, but it (and every other restaurant in the Village) was so crowded that we ended up waiting for an hour in the bitterly cold dark before our table was ready. The food was good though, and the portions were so huge that the kids and I took half our meals back to our room with us and had them for breakfast the next morning. And as we walked back to Maswik Lodge that night a small herd of deer walked fearlessly past us to graze on the Bright Angel lawns. I wish I’d had my camera with me, but I hadn’t brought it to the restaurant.

Again, some of us were ready for bed earlier than others. The kids and I were sound asleep by the time our roommate returned. This time I was so tired that I woke up briefly when she came in and immediately went back to sleep. But at some point after that she actually woke me up on purpose to ask me something. I was so groggy I barely remember it, but (as I learned the next morning) apparently she had become separated from the people she was walking back to the Lodge with, and while she was alone she had come across an elk, and the experience had unnerved her, and she felt the need to recenter herself with some Buddhist chants, and APPARENTLY I told her that would be fine. So, yeah. Chanting. In the wee hours of the morning. Even Elizabeth couldn’t sleep through that. It seemed to go on for hours, although it was probably more like thirty minutes. When she finally stopped and went to bed I fell asleep so fast that I never even heard the snoring, but apparently Luke wasn’t so fortunate: once again he didn’t get much sleep.

To describe Luke as “surly” the next morning would be a considerable understatement. As ordered, he did not say anything to our roommate, but once we were away from her and out with the group members who were hiking with us that day he complained bitterly about every little thing, and the unfairness of life in general. For the first hour or so he was just not much fun to be around.

But. Monday’s hike turned out to be insanely fun. We were following the Rim Trail to the west this time, which was woodsier and less populated, and led to a series of breathtaking vistas. Even poor sleep-deprived Luke eventually recovered his good spirits in the evergreen-scented air, and he fell in with a younger boy from our group who also liked to keep a healthy distance from steep drops. They kept each other company, while Elizabeth and I spent the day terrifying each other by walking out onto increasing dangerous rocky outcroppings.

The West Rim Trail also offered wonderful views of the Village.

And this is getting pretty long, so I think I’ll stop here and continue tomorrow. Stay tuned!

Read Part III Here

Categories: Family, Friends, Humor, kids, Life, Love, Road trip, Travel, Wildlife | Tags: Grand Canyon, Grand Canyon Railroad | Leave a comment

Our Grand Adventure, Part I

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Debora

This week the kids and I got to cross two more items off our bucket list: traveling somewhere by train…

…and seeing the Grand Canyon.

When we first started talking about this trip, we’d planned to do it sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The kids would be out of school, the garden would be in low-maintenance mode, and it wouldn’t be too hot to hike the Rim. I mentioned the idea to another mom in my hiking group, and she must have mentioned it to others, because pretty soon it had become an official group outing. This was awesome, for several reasons. One, I’m realistic about the risks of a single mom and two kids traveling by themselves, and a group feels safer. Two, it’s more fun to hike with other people. And the biggest reason, the lady who organized the trip did such an amazing job of planning and finding discounts, that we ended up doing WAY more fun stuff than the kids and I had originally planned, for hundreds of dollars less than our basic plan would have cost! It was unbelievable how inexpensive and FUN this trip was. The only downside was that the trip was scheduled for October rather than December, which actually turned out to be an upside, as we realized later.

We left Anza on Saturday morning. Most of the group were carpooling from the Temecula or Hemet areas, or taking Amtrak from Riverside CA to Williams AZ, but it made more sense for the kids and I to drive straight from Anza to Williams via Palm Springs, rather than detouring in the opposite direction to follow the others.

The weather was autumn-brisk, and this was our holiday trip after all, so we blasted Christmas music the whole way there. Trans-Siberian Orchestra makes the miles fly past, and the drive felt shorter than the six or so hours it took. We arrived at the Grand Canyon Railway Hotel around 4pm, checked into our room, met our roommate (sharing rooms was part of the package) and then explored the grounds. We found a heated indoor swimming pool and a jacuzzi, and wished we’d brought our swimsuits. Then we found a gym, stocked with a dozen different kinds of workout and weightlifting equipment. We had it mostly to ourselves, so the kids had to try every single step-trainer, spinner, cross-trainer, weight press and treadmill in the place.

At 6:00 we met with the rest of the group for dinner. One of the really cool things about this outing was that nearly everything was covered by the incredibly low package price that we’d already paid, including dinner Saturday night and breakfast Sunday morning at the Railway Hotel Restaurant. It was buffet style, so no shortage of food. After dinner the whole group relaxed in front of the fire in the beautiful lobby, and discussed hiking plans for Sunday and Monday.

Brief tangent: the furniture in the hotel lobby was enormous. When I sat on one of the sofas there I felt like a child. Luke and Elizabeth looked like toddlers.

That fireplace in the photo is HUGE, but it looks normal-sized next to that giant furniture.

Anyway, so we planned our itineraries. Some of us really wanted to get out there and hike the trails, others preferred to make use of the shuttle tours, and some were looking forward to just relaxing and socializing in the Village. There were something like 23 of us altogether, so a bit of organizing was needed to make sure everyone had the experience they wanted.

Once all of that was settled, most of the group went out to enjoy the Williams nightlife. The kids and I headed back to our room, relaxed for a while and were asleep by ten, because we are party animals that way.

Alas, our roommate stumbled in very late (or early, really), puttered around noisily for what seemed like forever, and then finally went to sleep — and began snoring at such an impressive volume that all our hopes of sleep were shattered. Well, Elizabeth managed to doze off, but Luke and I buried our heads under pillows and blankets to no avail. I think I finally managed a fitful sleep sometime after four, because when the alarm went off at six it did wake me up. Luke apparently had the same thought, because he sat up and said in a surprised voice, “Wow, I DID fall asleep!”

One thing about Luke: if he feels that someone is in need of chastising, he ain’t shy. Until we’d gotten dressed and left the room I had to constantly shush him, because he fully intended to give our roommate a lengthy piece of his mind. Once we’d checked our luggage and were heading to breakfast, I was able to explain to him that some people stay up later than others, and some people snore, and it’s just the luck of the draw when it comes to matching up roommates, and she wasn’t trying to keep us awake on purpose, and under no circumstances was he allowed to scold her. He accepted that, though not particularly gracefully, and then we went to the restaurant and comforted ourselves with orange juice and eggs and sausage and fajitas and biscuits and gravy and muffins and pastries and yogurt and frittatas and toast.

After breakfast we gathered up our carry-on belongings and headed over to the train depot. Once there we were treated to the obligatory goofy Western shootout show.

Luke thought it was hilarious. Elizabeth thought it was amusing. I am a cantankerous old fart and was glad when it was over.

Then we boarded the train, and we were off to the Canyon! It took about two hours and 15 minutes to get there, and the scenery was wonderful.

We saw a herd of antelope in a meadow; there was wildlife everywhere. Near the end of the ride a guy came to our car with a fiddle and entertained us with corny jokes.

Being a cantankerous old fart, I enjoyed that about as much as I’d enjoyed the Old West show. Sorry Fiddle Guy, but your jokes are lame. Make funny jokes and I will like you.

Once we arrived at the Grand Canyon Depot on the South Rim, we caught a shuttle to Maswik Lodge, where we would be spending Sunday night. It was too early to check into our room, but our checked luggage had already arrived there and we were able to drop off some of our carry-on stuff for safekeeping. Then the kids and I walked up to the Rim to get our first look at the main attraction.

Technically, it wasn’t the first time I’d seen the Grand Canyon. My parents had taken me there a few times as a kid, so I had a vague memory of it. And to be honest, I was a little concerned that Luke and Elizabeth would be too jaded by the wonders of modern technology to be impressed by a canyon, however grand.

So we walked up to the Rim, and there it was, stark and colorful and impossibly vast.

It’s so big that you can only can only see parts of it at a time. As long as it took us to drive from Anza CA to Williams AZ, that’s how long it would take if you were to drive from the South Rim around to the North Rim.

I said, “Wow.”

The kids didn’t say anything for a long time.

We walked along the rim trail for a while, killing time until it was time to rejoin the group. I could see that the kids were not unimpressed — quite the opposite — but they seemed to be having trouble finding the right words to describe the sheer enormity of the thing.

Elizabeth finally found a comfortable context in technology. “It looks fake,” she decided. “Like a painted backdrop.”

“CGI maybe,” I nodded. “It’s gotta be special effects.”

“Yeah.”

Luke took longer to put his reaction into words. I think it was a couple of hours later; he’d been unusually quiet since his first glimpse into the abyss. “There is NO WAY,” he suddenly burst out, “that Paul Bunyon could have made that by dragging his axe along the ground. I don’t care HOW big he was.”

*****************************

Read Part II Here.

Categories: Christmas, Family, Friends, Humor, kids, Life, Love, Road trip, Travel, Wildlife | Tags: Grand Canyon, Grand Canyon Railway | 1 Comment

Travels With Charley

Posted on November 15, 2010 by Debora

Just finished John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley. About halfway through I started jotting down stuff that struck me as particularly insightful, to share here. I’m sure the first half of the book was equally quotable, but I’m too lazy to go back through it and look for particulars.

Actually, there was one early passage that I did search out:

American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash — all of them — surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index. Driving along I thought how in France or Italy every item of these throw-out things would have been saved and used for something. This is not said in criticism of one system or the other but I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness — chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in the sea. When an Indian village became too deep in its own filth, the inhabitants moved. And we have no place to which to move.”

That was written in 1961. We’ve gotten better at disposing of our waste, but we’re producing more of it than ever before. Makes you wonder where the tipping point will be.

On urban growth and lamenting lost beauty:

This sounds as though I bemoan an older time, which is the preoccupation of the old, or cultivate an opposition to change, which is the currency of the rich and stupid.”

It was that last bit that caught my interest, because somehow I’d missed the connection before. It’s true though: nearly all the people I’ve known who are steadfastly opposed to change — the “same = good, different = bad” philosophy — are people who’d been born into a certain level of wealth and exist in a state of determined stagnation. They cling to whatever cultural circumstance their ancestors accumulated their wealth in, instead of continuing to grow and thrive in a changing world. Most end up with less than they started with, or with nothing at all, because they won’t adapt, and they tend to blame their lost prosperity on the people who are adapting and thriving.

On creativity vs criticism:

In all ages, rich, energetic, and successful nations, when they have carved their place in the world, have felt hunger for art, for culture, even for learning and beauty. The Texas cities shoot upward and outward. The colleges are heavy with gifts and endowments. Theaters and symphony orchestras sprout overnight. In any huge and boisterous surge of energy and enthusiasm there must be errors and miscalculations, even breach of judgment and taste. And there is always the non-productive brotherhood of critics to disparage and to satirize, to view with horror and contempt.”

That passage was one of many that made me wish I’d read this book years ago, because it wasn’t until very recently that I began to realize that the people who are doing all the criticizing are the ones who aren’t creating anything of their own. “The non-productive brotherhood of critics,” what an apt description.

This was my favorite:

When people are engaged in something they are not proud of, they do not welcome witnesses. In fact, they come to believe the witness causes the trouble.”

This is stone cold truth. It’s pretty much the story of my life, but I only came to recognize and understand it in the past couple of years.

I think I’m going to have to reread the rest of Steinbeck’s books. Other than “Travels With Charley” I haven’t read anything of his since high school, and I think I’d enjoy them more now. He seemed like someone I’d love to spend an afternoon conversing with; he saw straight to the truth of things and wasn’t afraid to talk about it. And he seemed like someone who wouldn’t have considered it a waste of his time to spend an afternoon conversing with a stranger .

I think I want to be John Steinbeck when I grow up, but without all the drinking and violence and with more gardening.

Also I think there might be a few more road trips in the future for the kids and me. Their world has been much smaller, so far, than mine was at their age, and I don’t want them to fall into the small-minded thinking habits that little isolated towns tend to encourage. They need to see giant redwoods and the Grand Canyon and immense waterfalls and elegant, timeless architecture: creation on a grand scale. They need to experience the kind of awe and wonder that changes a person forever.

Guess it’s time to update the To Do list. That new mud room might have to wait.

Categories: books, Life, Road trip, Travel | Tags: John Steinbeck | 8 Comments

More Changes, Part 2

Posted on December 2, 2009 by Debora

Last week when the kids and I were up on Mt. Rubidoux, I chatted for a little while with an artist guy who was up there shooting video of the Friendship Tower. He was going to use it in a Christmas greeting on YouTube this year instead of mailing out cards. I thought it was a wonderful idea, and it brought into clearer focus a conviction that’s been forming in my heart over the past few weeks. (But that’s another post.) As he handed me his business card and we went our separate ways, I got to thinking about a series of Sunday night services Pastor Bill gave recently on the subject of how the modern church could be doing a better job of reaching out to post-modern cultures. I’ve never been able to attend the Sunday night services, but I like to download the mp3s online and listen to them at home, and this particular series was very enlightening for me.

It was intended to help church people who may have a hard time understanding post-modern perspectives, but as a fairly post-modern type myself (can one be a post-modern cave-dweller?) I found it to be a fascinating look into the social perspectives of church people.

In the first sermon of this series, the Pastor gave his listeners an assignment for the following week: to make friendly eye contact with strangers that they passed in public, and smile if they felt up to it. The second week’s assignment was to actually offer a hello or some other verbal greeting to at least one or two passing strangers. By the third week he’d given up on these kinds of assignments, because…hardly anyone in his Sunday evening congregation could bring themselves to even manage the eye contact part, much less SPEAK to people they didn’t know. It was simply beyond them.

I was astonished. This was a huge revelation to me, and the first real insight I had into the Church Person Perspective. I’ve always thought that smiling at folks in stores or wherever was a basic part of how people interact. They almost always smile back at me, and occasionally there are friendly greetings exchanged, or even a chat if we happen to be standing in the same space, so I can’t be the only one who thinks this way.

One of my warmest memories from the Road Trip Of ’07 is of an evening in Shreveport, Louisiana, in a little Creole café. We’d checked into our hotel very late and should have eaten quickly and gone straight to bed, but the waiter was so much fun to talk to that we ended up stretching the conversation out until the café closed for the night. We were the only customers in there that late, so the waiter and the hostess basically hung out at our table and regaled us with stories, observations, questions and Southern mythology. It was wonderful. (Weeks later when I was back home in Anza, I got a card in the mail from the chef there, discounting my next meal at Guillaumes’ if I should ever find myself back in Shreveport.)

These are the intersections that connect us to one another. I can’t imagine not seeking out these moments of genuine human contact wherever I find the opportunity. I may be solitary in my day-to-day habits, but that’s mostly because I haven’t found my tribe yet; these chance interactions with friendly strangers always leave me feeling energized and optimistic and connected to something much bigger than my own small life.

Pastor Bill’s “Post-Modern Man” series gave me my first big flash of insight into why the average church person doesn’t feel comfortable around someone of my personality type. I LIKE people. I treat strangers — Louisiana waiters, wandering artists, fellow grocery shoppers — the way I like to be treated: as if we were friends who just haven’t met yet. This is, I believe, a very basic tenet of the teachings of Jesus. And yet somewhere along the way the modern church culture has apparently become disconnected from the actual daily practice of social love for mankind in general.

Once I understood that, it didn’t take me long to figure out the rest of it.

More to come!

Categories: Christianity, Friends, Life, Road trip | 21 Comments