It is a six and a half hour drive from Kayenta, AZ, to Santa Fe, NM, and so after a quick breakfast we set out.

I am here to tell you that after a couple of hours of driving through northern Arizona and New Mexico, I was ready to try that crystal meth just to see if it would help matters any.

Mainly it’s the poverty that gets to you.   We were accosted several times in Kayenta by unemployed men, begging for money.  The first was after dinner last night, a Sioux gentleman who needed gas money, of course.  We gave him less than he asked for, and then he offered to pray for us, holding our hands and mumbling over us in Sioux. Generous of him and it was touching, but the bedrock poverty of the area is horrific, and it’s evident with every mile you drive.

Yes, the amazing landscape was still there, but there is so much of it.  When we finally got to Shiprock, NM, and there was a river and moisture and green, we rejoiced.  We got to an intersection where a maintenance man was weed-eating the first leafy green plants we’d seen in over a thousand miles, and all I could think was, “Don’t do that!  Don’t kill those weeds!  Leave them—they’ll make you  happy and you won’t need the crystal meth, so much.”

Before Shiprock, we had passed an intersection which led off to Four Corners, but the last sign I had seen had said 32 miles to Four Corners and so we passed it by.  Miles later my lovely first wife realized that the famed location was just two or three miles from that intersection.  And that’s how we missed setting foot in Colorado.  Such short lives we live.

Farmington was even greener with even bigger rivers than Shiprock, and then we ascended to a plateau that was actually blanketed with crops of corn. But then the whole thing devolved back into endless eroded landscapes.

The problem with endless eroded landscapes is not that they are endless or eroded.  It is that they are empty.  There’s nothing.  And so when we spotted a tiny pit stop with one unsheltered gas pump and perhaps some snacks inside, we pulled over.

It indeed had snacks, which I needed for some kind of lunch, and it also had a restroom. One restroom.  While waiting in line with others, I struck up a conversation with a lovely lady who looked even more out of place than we did.  She turned out to be an artist from Santa Fe heading up to Monument Valley, and we chatted.  My lovely first wife got a couple of restaurant recommendations from her and her card.

Finally, Santa Fe appeared over a ridge.  We arrived at our hotel, the Las Palomas, a collective of adobe buildings on West San Francisco St.

Look:

That’s in the tiny parking lot, my dears.  So is this:

The place is lousy with commissioned sculpture.

Our room was in a little compound across the street, called Pueblo.  Another tiny parking lot, and then the path to our room.

Around the corner…

Down the path…

Around another corner to our door…

Notice the wood.  We need it for our bedroom.

It’s the lovely little establishment, no?  I took the photos after we got back from our walk, so they have the further mystique of dusk, but it’s undeniably engaging.

After dumping our stuff, we elected to walk to the Georgia O’Keefe Museum a couple of blocks away.

This is a small place, and most of O’Keefe’s really iconic works are elsewhere, like MOMA.  But it was nice to see what they had.  I was most amazed and intrigued by her working method: very wet brushes, laid down in supremely confident strokes.  I saw no evidence of exploration or correction in her thin layers of paint.  Of course she sketched and made studies before she tackled the final work, but it was still impressive.

From there we walked over the the Plaza, the center of  town surrounded by lovely shops, most of which sell stuff that was of no interest to the likes of you and me.  There were some items of interest, but since I’m going back tomorrow to purchase them, I’ll wait till then to discuss them.

This is the Cathedral of Saint Francis of Assisi.

I’m embarrassed to say I know nothing about it.  We arrived at 4:28 and it closes at 4:30, so we didn’t get to linger.   It is, however, beautiful.

If I have time tomorrow, I’ll go back and get details.

Here she is, for those who are still keeping track.

After we left the cathedral, we wandered down some side streets where more interesting vendors were.  I found actual sage smudge bundles:

 

I bought a goodly supply for use in the labyrinth.  All I’ve ever seen for sale in Atlanta is white sage, which is a broader leaf.  It’s fine, but this is special.

We went to eat at Del Charro, recommended by our artist friend, and it was good.  A simple bar/bistro, the food was good and the drinks were solid.

Afterwards, guided by my trusty iPhone, we walked to a World Market and bought two or three tiny bottles of Prosecco, then walked back to the hotel and now I’m caught up on our travels.

So after we were overwhelmed by the Grand Canyon yesterday, we decided that we needed to see more of it.  Our first plan was to cancel our hotel in Kayenta, our stopping point for Monument Valley, skip that altogether, and go on to Santa Fe and spend an extra day there.

But the hotel, the Best Western in Kayenta, had a 48-hour cancellation policy and we had already passed that deadline.

Then we decided to push on through, like the troupers we are.  My lovely first wife arose early, walked down to the Best Western there in GC where we had eaten the night before, to talk to their concierge about booking a 45-minute helicopter ride for the morning.  I awoke to find her gone, and when she got back, I had a brief moment to shower, get dressed, and pack.  (You see why I’m two days behind on blogging…)

One cup of coffee later, we were at the Grand Canyon airport, watching a safety video about where to wear our PFDs in case of a water landing.  No really.  There were also some tips about not getting sucked into the tail rotor.

Allow me to say at this point that my slight acrophobia has gotten worse with age, but I’m determined to be game all across this great land of ours, and so when they came in and called our names, I bravely stood and lined up.

There were six of us: an American who seemed as if he might be capable of throwing himself out of the chopper, and three attractive young German friends, about whom I wondered how they could afford a trip to the middle of the U.S., much less this sehr teuer excursion.  I finally decided they were some of the 30,000 Oracle folk who had recently clogged San Francisco.  Rich techies.  Check.

Here we are boarding the tiny, fragile little helicopter:

And up we went.  Here are two obligatory “in a helicopter” shots, presented without comment.

Cameras clicked and whirred.  We cordially ducked out of each other’s way.  A herd of small buffalo-shaped lumps napped beneath us.

We were wearing headsets, partly to drown out the roar of the blades but also to provide narration and communication from the pilot.  When we lifted off, the first track of music was Sinatra crooning “Fly Me to the Moon.”  Cute.

It’s an amazing fact about the Canyon that it really isn’t very visible until you’re right at the rim, even from the air.  We were flying parallel to the rim, as in the photo above, and I figured early on how this was going to play out.  So I had my camera set to video:

http://dalelyles.com/crosscountry/cc7_canyon4.mov

Those of you who guessed that they played the opening fanfare from Also Sprach Zarathustra can give yourself a smug pat on the back.

And now, more pictures of interminable grandeur.

Our pilot, Kara, played narration for us, first in English then in German, accompanied by soaring music. That was completely unnecessary.  I would have cried anyway.  It was that magnificent.

(Yes, the narration referred to the mächtig Colorado.)

This is the elusive North Rim.  It is hours away by car, and the only road to get there is actually closed right about now.  It’s much higher than the South Rim: last year it got 150 inches of snow to the South’s 75.  Ew.

It was an  incredible experience and I was never bothered by the fact that we might have crashed at any moment.  It’s very expensive, of course, but protip: save the money you were going to give to the mob in Vegas and spend it here.  It’s a much better way to throw your money away.

And here is my lovely first wife buying something nice I’m sure in the gift shop at El Tovar, the very nice first lodge built on the South Rim over a hundred years ago.  You have to book it more than a year in advance.  I bought a shot glass.

This is most people’s first view of the Grand Canyon, there at El Tovar on the South Rim.  It was almost our last.

You can see my lovely first wife’s hands there at the right side of the panorama.  I’m thinking the whole betting pool has run its course, you cynical asshats.  You’ll just have to start a new one.

—————

From the Canyon, we drove north to Kayenta.  We checked into the Best Western but got back into the car and drove another 25 miles to Monument Valley.

Monument Valley is not a national park.  Straddling Utah and Arizona, it belongs to the Navajo Nation.  You can sign up for tours, but you’re also allowed to drive the park yourself.  Protip: if the car rental place does not offer you a four-wheel drive vehicle, ask for it.  You will need it.  (We discovered only the next day that one of our fog lights was smashed out, clearly from rocks bouncing off the unpaved, rutted road.)

We arrived about 6:00, about an hour before the sun set.  The drive takes two hours.  Off we went!

The landscape is littered with these buttes, strewn across the landscape like so many Trump Towers.  This is one of two Mitten buttes.  There is a left and a right.

Another butte.

This one and the two mittens are the first that greet you as you grind and toil down the road.

If you’re from Georgia, you may be forgiven for thinking you’ve never seen so much red clay in your life, but it’s not clay.  It’s silt, eroded from the sandstone, and it’s very very fine.  It’s hard to see in this photo, but I’ve crunched into the crust from the last time it rained:

It brought back memories of my one summer in outdoor drama at The McIntosh Trail in the amphitheatre in Peachtree City.  There is a powder makeup called Texas Dirt, and as Mehron puts it in their catalog, it’s “an inexpensive way to make up a large cast as Indians.”  I’m pretty sure it was made from this stuff:

We’d wet it and smear it all over our bodies.  One of the female cast had a photo of a previous outdoor drama’s male Indian cast, who had the photo made when the female cast did not believe that they smeared it all over their bodies.  The photo proved that they did.

The McIntosh Trail (which we renamed The Mac ‘n’ Trish Trials after our two leads) was written by Kermit Hunter (whose name we Spoonerized into a much ruder but appropriate name for the man), more famous for Unto These Hills and other such summer fare.  This was the grand opening for McIntosh Trail, and it was going to run a long and prosperous time.  In the middle of the summer, Hunter gave an interview with the Macon Telegraph, in which he said—and I paraphrase—the best thing that ever happened to the red man was the arrival of the white man, which to be honest was the thesis of McIntosh Trail.

The actual Cherokees in the cast immediately quit and went home to Oklahoma, including the dancers, and so Glenn Rainey and I were promoted from the Creek Injuns who muttered  rutabaga/watermelon support for William McIntosh, to the fierce warrior dancer Injuns who were all up in his face about how nuhUH were they going to move west and get civilized before the white man caught up to them.  Good times.

This was also the first time, as I reminisced to my lovely first wife, that I was ever completely naked with other men, not having played sports in school, but certainly now needing to shower before heading home after the show.  Good times.

Anyway.

You see my lengthening shadow.

Here’s another hoodoo for you.

The whole place was magnificently serene—the play of light and shadow across the faces of the buttes and mesas was endlessly fascinating.

These three hoodoos were called The Three Sisters, supposedly because they looked like a nun instructing two others.

See this butte?

If you look hard enough…

If you don’t get that joke, good for you.

This is a great photo, with the first real clouds we’ve seen since San Francisco:

We were bumping along when I suddenly saw this:

It was a little stone stack.  It’s a thing in some circles.  I added the top one you see here.

And all the time, the sun was setting.

Yes, that’s a domicile you see there.  This is not a national park, it’s tribal lands, and people live out here.  Why, I’ll never know, because it would take you an extra forty minutes to an hour to get home after you got off the highway and turned onto the road.

You can also apply to camp overnight, and my lovely first wife said although she hates the very concept of camping, she’d do it.  That’s how powerful the beauty and energy of this place is, folks.

She also succumbed to the stone stacking thing.

Mine’s on the left, hers is on the right.  I grabbed all the big stones first.

The sun fades even further.

And finally…

There is no way to overstate the staggering power of this place.  It makes an incredible sequel to the Grand Canyon, and together they leave your mind reeling.

The feeling of sacred/spiritual energy in these places (and in Muir Woods) is palpable, and goes a long way to explaining why Vegas feels so very wrong.

As we were leaving, after exiting through the gift shop of course, I took one last shot.

Afterglow, with Venus.

More driving, also through unrelenting desert.

It wasn’t a long trip, only 4.5 hours this time, and it had some fun stuff.

This was the Last Stop (it was not the last stop), and it also had Area 51 cutouts, but we did not disport ourselves with photos.

More tempting was the offer to shoot a machine gun, one presumes out over the vast and unpopulated desert.

Most tempting were the rest rooms inside, where there were multiple signs saying you had to purchase before you peed, but so off the wall was the mise-en-scène that I did not mind buying an ice cream sandwich.

It had all kinds of really wonderfully tacky crap, the real stuff, not the mass-manufactured detritus of Las Vegas.  And in the middle of all of it, I found this:

I have recently discovered that I have an affinity for lizards, and this one was actually compelling, despite its prolish status.

Eventually we arrived at our destination, the Red Feather Lodge.  How delightful, as we approached, to discover that the Grand Canyon was on fire.

Not really, of course.  Signs everywhere announced that this was a controlled burn in Kaibab National Forest.  But it was exciting for a moment.

We headed to the National Geographic center, where my lovely first wife’s books had told her we could most conveniently purchase park passes.  However, and we knew this before we started out, today is National Park Day, and there are no fees at any of the national parks.  Huzzah!

Rather than fumble our way through our only afternoon at probably the biggest part of the trip, we elected to sign up for a Pink Jeep Tour, the Sunset Tour.  As the jovial dude in the pink shirt behind the counter pointed out, being guided around the park is better than trying to see the sights while not plunging over the rim.  It sounded like a very good opportunity to avoid frazzled nerves and/or disgruntledness.

So woot and all that: it looks as if we will probably both be alive at the end of the day.  Again.

—————

The Grand Canyon.

I’m not even going to try, guys, except to say that Congress should fund a trip for every citizen of this country to see it. (When Congress was asked by Teddy Roosevelt to confirm his designation of the area as a national park, it is said that some were not going to vote for it until they saw a painting of the place hanging in the Capitol—whereupon, overcome by the stunning beauty of the place, they voted yes. Can you imagine a Congress that was swayed by aesthetic considerations?)

First view, on our Pink Jeep Tour.

I once did a lesson with third graders on using the thesaurus. I showed them a video on the Grand Canyon, and they looked up synonyms for “big.” We went out to my oversized bulletin board in the hall, where I had posted pictures of the Canyon, and the kids got to draw their synonyms directly onto the bulletin board paper.

The place is huge.

Gargantuan.

Enormous.

As we drove from one viewing spot to the next, we encountered an “elkjam,” traffic slowed to a standstill:

These are just punk teenager elk, but later that evening, we went back out to the first viewpoint to look at the stars—you can only imagine—and on the way back I spotted a fully growed big-ass elk grazing on the median.  I whipped around because some of our party had not seen it, whereupon the animal became annoyed and stalked slowly back into the woods, mooing his displeasure.

This is a hoodoo.  No really.  Look it up; I can’t seem to make a link to the Wikipedia article.

Colossal.

Monumental.

Humongous.

Immense.  A view of the mighty Colorado River. (You have to call it the “mighty” Colorado, or they look askance at you as if you’re not entering into the proper spirit of the thing.)

Mary Colter was one of the U.S.’s first prominent female architects. She designed the two lodges in the Village, and the Watchtower at Desert View point. It was part of the original tourist spots in the new park.

This photo only hints at its mystic beauty. Colter and her crew did three years of research of Native American motifs, both architectural and decorative, and while you think a place referencing Indian stuff would be kitschy at best, you would be wrong. It’s powerful stuff.

Looking down from the third tier.

Looking down onto the second tier observation deck.

The entire interior is covered by patterns, figures, and motifs painted in the traditional manner(s) by native artists.

Peeping down onto the first floor.

The ceiling on the fourth tier.

A carved bird figure with the setting sun casting my shadow.

The first floor in panorama.

Tremendous.

Stupendous. We’re getting ready to watch the sun set.

My lovely first wife at sunset.  How close she is to the edge!

This is the promontory out onto which I clambered to watch the sun go down.

And here I am, courtesy of our tour guide. I have about nine of these, since Amy didn’t know the phone was not making a click noise and so kept shooting.

The sun setting.

Sunset!

Here I must pause and tell of how my fellow Lichtenbergians and I went on our Annual Retreat last year to the California coast. Driving up Highway 1, which is as beautiful as every commercial makes it seem, we pulled over to watch the sun set. Incredible. So the next day, on the beach, we decided we would come down to the beach the following night to watch the sun do its thing.

And so, as I began to prepare dinner that evening, I looked out the window and realized that the sun had begun plummeting into the Pacific. We all leapt into the car and drive pell-mell down the street to the highway, where from thence we would cross and drive down the twisty access road to the private beach.

Every second, the sun dropped lower and lower, touching the rim of the horizon, and finally sinking beneath the ocean with a faint plop just as we reached the highway. We were all laughing hysterically, and there was nothing to do but turn right onto the highway and drive down to the nearby lookout point, where everyone else was leaving. We pulled in and enjoyed the afterglow. As one does.

Afterglow.

Awesome.

In which a Woman fulfills her Dream of Driving across This Great Land of Ours, accompanied by her Husband, who Hates to Drive

Our original plan was to wander round Vegas today, see a show tonight, then head out to Hoover Dam tomorrow and thence to the Grand Canyon, but it was decided by some in our party to go ahead and do the dam today.  Fine with me.

It’s been a breathtaking day, it truly has, so far, but further reports will have to wait until after my 105 MINUTE LOMI LOMI MASSAGE YOU GUYS.

One reason I hate to drive is that my legs turn into planks of wood, and it’s just not a comfortable feeling.  So by my calculations, if I have a great massage today and another one when we get to Santa Fe, I may just survive this without a wheelchair.

Lomi lomi is a massage method rooted in Hawaiian spirituality.  I encountered it completely by accident in Newnan (!) when I went in for a massage at my then-current place.  I was given James Leipold and told that I’d probably find him a good fit.  James—young, fit and gentle—did not disappoint.  He explained briefly what lomi lomi was and then set to work.

By the time he finished, I was hallucinating. It was amazing, and I was hooked.  I worked up to a massage twice a month and probably would still be doing it if he hadn’t moved away to become a chiropractor.  Whenever he came home to visit family, he’d call and I’d drop everything to take a session with him.  (He and I recently reconnected; he’s now practicing in Asheville.  Time to visit North Carolina!)

So, when I decided to get a massage here, I figured such a sybaritic place ought to be crawling with lomi lomi specialists.  I was not wrong.  I’m pretty sure the booking was a scam (“The only lomi lomi session we have is 105 minutes…”) but I’m okay with that.

More later, starting with Hoover Dam…

————

Hoover Dam.  It is everything that has ever been said about it.

The postcards just take themselves.

For those of you with bets in the pool:

She’s still alive.  This is only Day 4, however, not even halfway through.

The most amazing thing to me, other than the sheer chutzpah of the engineering, is that they made it pretty, and deliberately so.  A focus of national pride during the Depression, it was designed as a tourist destination from the very beginning, an Art Deco masterpiece.

That, my dears, is the original men’s room, which is housed in the first turret on the top of the dam.  The floors everywhere are inlaid with terazzo, based on Native American motifs.

That one is in the turbine room.  You will also find them in the tunnels throughout the dam: tours of the entire facility were always part of the plan.

And here is the turbine room:

The dam is self-supporting, still selling its electricity to various municipalities throughout the southwest.  However, it is not a major contributor to the grid.  All the videos, etc., told us that its output can support a Million people </dr_evil>.  That isn’t a lot.  In fact, they don’t sell anything to Las Vegas, which uses more electricity than any other city in the world.

In very good photos of the dam, you can see four little shield-shaped portals. These are air holes to provide fresh air for the miles of tunnels that honeycomb the dam.

And here we are at the upper left of those ports:

And here’s the view from that view:

All those tunnels were/are for engineers to go through and check on the cracks, necessitated by the settling of the dam.  In the old days, they got there by descending stairs.

Hundreds and hundreds of stairs.  Have I ever mentioned my acrophobia?

And speaking of acrophobia, other than the thrill of walking across the dam itself, there’s the new bridge to deal with.  It just opened in 2010, reducing the travel time across the Colorado River on US 93 from over an hour across the dam to a minute.

Like the dam, it was designed as a tourist attraction as well as a functional thing.  There’s a walkway across the bridge accessed by a lovely entrance pavilion. It has lots of informative panels to explain the hows and whys of the building of the bridge.

And as you can tell from the photo up top, it’s high.  So I hope you appreciate the panic I had to suppress in order to take this for you:

It’s very hard to capture the wild beauty of those mountains with an iPhone, but I think this last one does.

—————

I found the pretty people in Las Vegas: there was a herd of them at the Encore Resort’s Beach Club.  Young, toned, drunk, preening… I had to wade through them to get to the spa.

Inside, the resort is gaudy/New Orleans whorehouse.  The spa is a hysterical temple to sybarism: other than the entry lobby, there was on the men’s side a “den” check-in area, a locker room, a “serenity’ room to wait calmly for your therapist, bathroom with all the necessary toiletries, showers, steam bath, sauna, giant jacuzzi pools, heated lounge chairs, and surround showers.

These last require button pushing, and since I had left my glasses in my locker I was completely unable to make them work.  I figured out the power button, and that the screen demanded that you pick some kind of setting, and which button make water come out of the rainfall shower, but that only lasted a few seconds, and I never could get the side showers to come on at all.  It was pathetically laughable.

After indulging in some of the easier-to-manage pleasures of the place, I went to the serenity room to await my Experience.  I will spare you those details, except to say that the approach to the massage room was down a walkway, surrounded by river rocks, in an enormous salon.  Paths led  off to the side to the massage rooms, and at the end was a gilded Buddha.  Mercy.

—————

While I was indulging myself, my lovely first wife was at the TixTonight booth back at the hotel, selecting a show for the ultimate Vegas experience™.  She was hoping for Cirque du Soleil’s O, at the Bellagio, but it was not available, so she went with Cirque’s Zumanity, at New York New York.  This is Cirque’s racy “exploration of sensuality.”  Hey, best of all possible shows, right?  Hot, tight athletes doing unspeakable things in acts of exquisite beauty.

Meh.  It was a bawdy cabaret with few of Cirque’s trademark features.  When we were treated to actual acts, they were gorgeous, and the clowns/zanies were consistently amusing, and our drag hostess was polished, but overall it was pretty limp, if you know what I mean and I know you do.  The commercial for the show was far more sensuous than the show itself.

Beforehand, we had strolled along the Strip, looking for something to intrigue or amuse us.  Alors, we found it not.  I did buy a new earring, having left the hotel in the morning without one and feeling naked without one.

You know how sometimes you get all excited about the debauchery you can get up to—getting thoroughly intoxicated, seeing a naughty show, getting married by Elvis, having to take a cab back to the hotel and the coming to retrieve your car in the morning—you know how much fun that is?  I’m sure it would be something really interesting to blog about. If we had done any of it.  Which we did not.

So either we’re old and boring, or Las Vegas is just an ultimately uninteresting place, awash in faux-Dionysism designed to titillate the unsophisticated.  I’m going with the latter.

Major change of plans today: after double-checking drive times to Yosemite and thence to Las Vegas, we realized that even if we hurtled past El Capitan at 80+ mph, we still would not pull into Sin City until the wee hours of the morning.  Blergh.

So we are regretfully bagging Yosemite until our next trip out here.

—————

The driving. The driving. Sweet Cthulhu, the driving.

It’s a good thing that the 9.5 hour drive is through ungodly beautiful terrain.  Otherwise, I would have pulled a Reggie Perrin and walked into the Mojave River, never to be seen again.  If the river had actually had any water in it. Which it didn’t.

<photos later>

—————

Las Vegas is not where the pretty people come, not even those who are paid to be pretty.  Of course, we’re staying on the “old” end of Vegas, at the Four Queens.  Completely adequate, although it’s nearing midnight and our room is directly over one of the two stages of the Freemont Experience, occupied by quite capable rock musicians who are covering some other musician I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to know.

Anyway, for starters, the man who checked us in has a nephew who is the theatre teacher at East Coweta High School.  Damn.  Just damn.

Free meal at one of the restaurants in the casino, but of course we opted instead for the nice restaurant.  Very good food, and not as expensive as meals we’ve had in Newnan.

Here’s the first problem for me:  if you want me to toss money into your system, don’t you want to make at least the part where I say, “OK, I’ll give you money,” easy for me to understand how to do?  They do not.

I couldn’t figure out at any of the slot machines how to do that.  I finally found one that allowed me to insert an actual dollar bill, and then I just pushed buttons until it told me I couldn’t do that any more.

This is not a formula to addict Dale Lyles, just so you know.

—————

A couple of Christmases ago I “gave” my lovely first wife a trip to Las Vegas, which because of scheduling issues I was never able to deliver on.  This was completely a gift of love and adoration, because I have never had a desire to see this place. I feared in fact that I would find it tawdry to the point of revolting.

I do.

I am as able to enjoy a place ironically as much as the next callous sophisticate, but Vegas kind of pegs the meter on that measure.

Perhaps it’s the effects of driving through the desert without an unnamed horse for 10 hours.  Perhaps today, it will all look delightfully trashy and not as if America’s sad and pitiful had tried to dazzle themselves with freakishness.

In which a Woman fulfills her Dream of Driving across This Great Land of Ours, accompanied by her Husband, who Hates to Drive

For those who have laid bets, my lovely first wife is still alive.

Note from the future: This photo has vanished and I have no memory of what it was supposed to be, nor can I find it on the server.

—————

The cable cars of San Francisco are a wonder, to be sure, but if you had to choose between riding them and going to Muir Woods, go to the woods.

Here’s our car being turned around:

One is not really sure whether the turntable is powered or not, because the cable car guys make a big show of pushing it around.  However, since one has electricity, why not use it while simultaneously making the grandmothers squeal for the children to watch the strong men?

On board, the view is half parts riding a bus and riding a roller coaster:

We never did get to ride on the outside benches, or to hold on outside.  And this is the closest we ever got to the TransAmerica building:

I discovered later in the day that getting off at one of the stops would have put us at the doorstep of the flagship Apple Store, but that’s the kind of thing that one plans in advance.  Which we have largely not done.

So we rode from the Fisherman’s Wharf station all the way to the other end, on Powell Street.  I have spared you the early part of the morning where we drove all over that area trying to find that terminus.  It was nowhere near parking that I could see, so it’s just as well that we gave up and went back down to the piers.

Then we rode back.

The next thing on our checklist for the day was to eat at The Codmother:

My lovely first wife has developed a taste for the Top 10 series of travel books, and this little food truck was in the San Francisco volume.  (Yes, we have volumes for every stop on the way.)  She even went up and got the lady/owner to autograph her page, which made the lady’s day, since no one had ever done that before.

I pointed out that this officially made her a crazy person, but that did not seem to bother her.

The fish and chips were indeed very good, so that was worth it.

Finally, we had to trek over to Ghirardelli Square, which is simply, only, merely a shopping complex.  You may avoid it in its entirety, no matter what your travel volume tells you.  Remember, those writers take bribes.

In case you doubt me, here’s a nice place to buy art there:

This is where you are all very grateful I did not win the lottery, because if I had zillions to burn, you’d all now be proud owners of a big-eyed waif paintin’.

There is a shuttle between Ghirardelli and Pier 39, another clue that the locale is more shopping than special.  It runs every 20 minutes, and so since it’s just a 15-minute walk, we hoofed it.  On the way, we stopped to buy some tacky postcards, and on an impulse went into Frank’s Fisherman, a gentleman’s clothing store.  Much to be admired, and I came out with a couple of lovely things.

SIDE ESSAY: It is interesting that this new job has presented me with yet another wardrobe change, and it’s a change that is emblematic of the differences between my previous and upcoming work environments.

This new shirt, for example, is a faded corduroy plaid, grays and yellows and blues, and the tie I bought to go with it is mirrored mermaids on a yellow background.  With a nice pair of jeans and my TOMS shoes, I’ll be appropriately dressed for the office.

Whereas at the DOE, I was always in a dress shirt and tie, even on “jeans and sneakers” days.  When the Board met, or when the circus was in town (I’m looking at you, Gold Dome), it was full business attire, i.e., suits and ties.

Remember, I didn’t mind this attire at all.  GHP was my dream job, and them’s the rules; also, I’m quite comfortable in a formal setting anyway, so I liked dressing for work every morning.  Now, I get more leeway in what I wear on a daily basis, and that’s fine too.

Also while we were walking back, the winner of the America’s Cup race—which we had just missed seeing earlier in the afternoon—came gliding by, its sails furled, but now trailing an impressive U.S. flag:

Traffic was beginning to be heavy on the way back to the hotel, so I turned off the path on which my phone had set us.  This annoyed Siri, and so she deliberately took us on a fabulous zig-zag path back to Stanyan St., the steeper, the better.  Eventually we arrived, ordered a cab for the opera tonight, and went to the room to crash.  There will be a separate post about the opera, which is the San Francisco Opera’s world premiere production of Tobias Pickett’s Delores Claiborne.  Yes, that Delores Claiborne.

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In the meantime, here are the photos of our hotel and room.

Here is the Stanyan Street Hotel in all its Victorian splendor.  It was built before the fire, but it’s over near the Golden Gate so missed destruction.

Those of you who are of a certain age are now puzzling over why the name is so familiar.  Here. You’re welcome.

My lovely first wife booked a two-bedroom suite, because it was the only room in the city unoccupied by sunburnt men wearing Under Armor shirts or by Cheetohs-stained geeks.  However, when we opened the door in the wee hours of Monday night, we found an apartment.

A full dining room with Craftsman china cabinet, with a full kitchen beyond.  (I just discovered full ice trays in the freezer.)

The view from the master bedroom: the second bedroom, and a full sitting room with bay window.  All the windows are counter-balanced and work.  In fact, all of the windows were half open when we arrived.

Bathroom and closets, and we’re set.

We drove by the hotel we were originally booked in till we read the reviews—generally a gross place, managed by surly staff—and boy, did we luck out!

In which a Woman fulfills her Dream of Driving across this Great Land of Ours, accompanied by her Husband, who Hates to Drive

A note about last night’s flight: I joked that there would be nothing to blog about because it was night and there would be nothing to see out of my window.

But there was always something to see out of my window. No matter when I looked out over this continent, there were always lights out there somewhere.

I noticed this last year when the Lichtenbergians flew out here for our Annual Retreat. That flight was during the day, and the landscapes were stunning, phantasmagorical—but they were almost never without the footprint of humans. Roads, power lines, hiking trails, small tracks carved into the hills, all proclaimed the presence of humans.

And last night, even in the pitch black of a transcontinental night flight, we were there. It might be only a couple of specks, widely separated, but our presence was unmistakable and inescapable.

When we finally began our descent into SFO, then, the display was dazzling: huge quilts of light, spiderwebbed across the entire landscape, and in constant motion. It was sobering.

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It’s morning now, and we’re slowly moving out of the door.  I have photos of our hotel, the Stanyan Park Hotel, but I have to wait until I download iPhoto for the iPad so I can rename photos before uploading them.  I don’t have to; I could simply let WordPress upload them for me, but then they disappear into WordPress’s filing system.

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LATER (LIKE THE NEXT MORNING)

Incredible day, folks.  We started out by driving to Fisherman’s Wharf, via Lombard Street.    I had driven down it last fall with the Lichtenbergians, but my lovely first wife was completely unprepared for the exhilaration of twisting our way down those hairpin curves.  What neither of us can get over is that people live on that street.  Is it more expensive or less to live in the most photographed place in the city?

I noted that, like last year, I was the only one driving down it.  One’s paranoia kicks in: is it bad form to do so and everyone but me understands this?

And so we get to Fisherman’s Wharf.  It is amazingly touristy, of course, so we plunged right in.

One must-see is the Musée Mechanique, a fabulous collection of old coin-operated automatons: fortune tellers, dancing minstrels, scenes from farms and fairs, and an amazing number of executions.  There are also a number of old peep-show “movies” which were very tempting, although only one of us succumbed to their allure.

Here is the lovely first wife sitting in a device called The Passion Factor.  (Hush Jobie.)  The glow behind her head is the light of the heart labeled “Uncontrollable.”

You might very well think that, but I could not possibly comment.

Obligatory shot of Alcatraz:

Since this was a spur-of-the-moment trip, we were unable to get tickets to go out, but I think next time we must do this.  Do they let you walk naked down the block, I wonder?

We moved on, as good tourists do, to Pier 39, where one of us fell in love with the sea lions.

I think we would have stood looking at these animals all day.  They were incredibly amusing: basking, lolling, flopping, barking, chest-bumping.

http://http://dalelyles.com/crosscountry/cc2_wharf6.mov (I don’t know why this isn’t embedding.  Click it anyway.)

Eventually we tore ourselves away and spent some money as we were required to do.  It is interesting that both of us seem to have reached a point in our lives where the lure of more stuff is simply not there. The fact that most of the stuff being offered was not gorgeous also helped.

But then we entered the Spice & Tea store.  Oh my.  Salts, teas, spices, sugars, and accoutrements.  I spent lavishly, including a bamboo salt cellar with four compartments.  Also, salts to go in them.  And sugars, mostly to rim cocktails, naturally.

Lunched at Fog Harbor.  Good food, but the cocktail list was unadventurous and the bar didn’t look well-stocked.  I stuck to wine.

http://dalelyles.com/crosscountry/cc2_wharf5.mov

Outside our window, the U.S. and New Zealand were preparing for the next two heats of the America’s Cup race.  The U.S. yacht was being skippered by the CEO of Oracle, who clearly decided that since he was going to be in town, his company needed to have their international get-together the week following.  Which is why we found it so difficult to find a place to stay in San Francisco: 30,000 geeks have clogged up the place.

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Everyone said, “You’ve got to go to Muir Woods!”  Literally everyone who had been to San Francisco said that.  It’s about an hour north of the city, and since it would take us over the Golden  Gate Bridge, we began to plan getting there.

You would think in a city swarming with National Recreation Areas, most of which are named Golden Gate, it would be easy to get a National Parks annual pass.  You would be wrong.

The store at Pier 39 had closed.  We spent the better part of an hour driving around the Presidio—impressive, so not time wasted—trying to find the office there, only to discover that it was open Thu-Sat only.  Feh.

Finally I checked the list online, and it seemed that Muir Woods itself could sell us the pass.  So off we went.

Here’s the deal: if you are ever in San Francisco, YOU HAVE TO GO TO MUIR WOODS.  Forget the trolley cars.  GO TO THE WOOD!

It is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.  Even the usually empirical lovely first wife was overcome by spirituality.

Silence—lush, lush silence—chaotic green—and those giant gods, the redwoods…

There were Others there.

Go to the wood.

—————

On the way back, we stopped at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area so we could go watch the setting sun light up that beautiful bridge.  That was our second mistake.

Our first mistake was not packing a USB cable to charge the phones with.  Mine died as we approached the bridge.  The lovely first wife’s phone was at 20%.

So when—as we set out past the old fortifications on our way to the top of the headlands—we were stopped by a vaguely Scandinavian gentlemen who asked us to assist a Chinese couple who had locked their keys in their rental car, we were limited in our abilities.

Oh, and they spoke no English.  The Scandinavian disappeared, leaving us trying to figure out how to do this.  We called 911, but they don’t do that, of course.

We called Avis and got through to their roadside assistance, but since I was not the renter, they found it difficult to respond.  Finally they offered to get a translator on the line if I could hold, but of course I couldn’t.

The Chinese couple had a phone, but it kept dropping calls.

I finally called my AAA and explained the situation (after I was transferred from our own Club South to someone closer to the situation).  They could send someone to unlock the car, but it would take 45 minutes, and we would have to be there to accept the help.  I explained that in 45 minutes, we would not have a phone for them to contact us through.

But there we were.  I drew little pictures to indicate that help was on the way, and we gestured that we would go ahead and walk up to the view while we waited.

Up we went, and when I saw a quartet of Chinese college students, I hailed them.  Did they speak English?  Yes.  Did they speak Chinese?  Yes.  I explained the situation to them and asked if they would see if they could help the couple at the bottom of the hill.  Sure…

<long story snipped>

It took only 15 minutes, and after clearing up some confusion with the roadside guy (Calvin, also of Chinese extraction though not a speaker) about where we were—no one to whom I spoke seemed to know there was a park/overlook on top of the headlands on the north side of the bridge—he arrived in his bright yellow truck and unlocked the hapless couple’s car.

Hotel, dinner at Cha Cha Cha, right around the corner on Haight Street, and yes, some hippie kid offered me drugs (I think: his exact words were, “Are you looking for something?”  I think he was having the straight people on; I wish I had turned and said, “Yeah, how about two eighths of shrooms?” just to see his face.)

Great tapas, and then further down Haight to Alembic, a noted bar whose stock was awe-inspiring.  Bottles I didn’t even recognize, you guys!  I had their Mexican Radio: tequila, pineapple gum syrup, lime and their special combination of sherry, kahlua, and Fernet Branca.  Tasty, but not one I’ll add to my list.  I followed that with a Sazerac, and that was awesome.

The lovely first wife, who had been nursing a simple bourbon, decided we’d close out by sharing a Cinnamon Twist, a yummy little dessert drink that is nonetheless a sorority girl drink.  So I pretended to be embarrassed in ordering it.  Then I pretended not to be embarrassed when our bartender said he couldn’t make it because he didn’t have a single ingredient.

That’s how cool this bar was: it did not have on its shelves butterscotch schnapps, Goldschläger, or Bailey’s Irish Cream.  Mercy.

We’re waiting for our flight—I have surprised my lovely first wife with an upgrade to first class, so there’s that to be excited about.

We ate at trendy little place on E Concourse called One Flew South. Nice food, and I got a cocktail called Rise of the Phoenix: mezcal, yellow chartreuse, lime, strawberry, and black pepper scattered across the top. Wonderful musty flavor with the layers of fruit, nothing overpowering, and the scent of the fresh cracked pepper added another assault on the nose with each sip.

I neglected to take a photo, but I’m still developing my workflow here.

The flight is already late on its ETD. We’ll be pulling into San Francisco closer to midnight than previously thought. That is of course 3:00 in the morning our time. There will be some adjustment.

By the way, there are some in our party who are worried that by blogging about our Great Cross Country Caper, I am revealing our absence from home to the scores of my readers who monitor my blog in order to rob me. To those people, I say NUH-UH: we have a hireling living in our home while we are away YES WE DO TOO SO DON’T EVEN TRY IT I’M NOT EVEN KIDDING.

They have started loudspeaking at us about boarding. I would promise to blog more as we fly, but what on earth would I be blogging about? I have a window seat, but it has been pointed out to me that it’s going to be night-time. We’ll see.

Here we go.

LATER:  It is 9:00, CDT, and some thoughts have occurred to me.

First of all, we are not seated in first class.  We are in business class.

There’s a distinction, I’m sure, but I am not far up enough the food chain to know it already, and I doubt it would be worth my while to research the difference.  I thought first class was extinct, but somewhere up here in the stratosphere it must still exist.

I thought maybe they had killed it off because of the associations with this old Southern Airlines ad:

Because no matter what you call it, those seats up front are better than those behind us.  We have wider seats, more legroom, free beverages, not to mention the dancing girls and lobster.  (There is no lobster.)

I am tempted to go full-bore Marxist here and say that of course first class morphed into business class:  they are still our lords and masters, are they not?  I feel like an interloper, although I daresay I am as well-educated and/or employed as most of my fellow overlords up here.

On the one hand, it’s a comfort to know that I’m seated in business class with my free gin and tonics simply because when I went to choose our seats last night, these were available and I felt comfortable (economically speaking) to splurge on the upgrade.  (Full disclosure: the upgrades cost almost as much as the flight itself—deep discounts on the flight.)

On the other hand, that’s what it all boils down to: the ability to pay.  Those who have the cash (or in my case, the credit limit)  can move up to the Empyrean of business class.  The rest of you have to suck it.

I think it’s worth pondering, too, that there are only twelve of these seats. Even if everyone on this flight could afford the upgrade, they couldn’t get it.  Selective scarcity.  Perfect Marxist metaphor.

Do not get me wrong: if you’ve got the money, spend it.  There’s no point in being ashamed of having earned it, even if you’re the shameless overpaid CEO of some company that’s giving you an 8-figure income just to go away.  Okay, in that case you should probably be ashamed.  But on the whole, go for it.  Have multiple homes on several coasts; fly to NYC to catch the opening night at the Met; fly business class.

However, it is a sad truth that, as Anouilh put it in Ring Round the Moon, “Money is magic.”  Because I can afford it, I can stretch my legs on this five-hour flight.  I can afford health insurance.  I can afford tickets to the San Francisco Opera.

Here’s another implication of the Marxist metaphor:  recently, we spent a lovely very long weekend in a friend’s second home in Beaufort, SC.  It was a gorgeous home in a very nice neighborhood on a practically private island.  I noticed when we drove out onto the island that the end of the county-maintained road was clearly announced—and that the road immediately improved.

I mused at the time that our friends at FOX News or The National Review  or The Heritage Foundation would lecture us that of course the road was better when it was maintained by the private sector, but the truth was somewhat the inverse: when we don’t pull together as a society, taxing ourselves enough to maintain our infrastructure, then only the wealthy will  have nice roads.

Business class, baby, business class.

In which a Woman fulfills her Dream of Driving across this Great Land of Ours, accompanied by her Husband, who Hates to Drive

In another three and a half hours, my lovely first wife and I will be driven to Hartsfield International Airport, and at approximately 9:00 p.m., we will board a flight to San Francisco. Here’s how this happened.

About two weeks ago we were dining on a lovely dinner of grilled salmon, and I asked again what she truly wanted for her 60th birthday. I had struck out previously, so much so that rather than taking her out to a very nice restaurant, we just all gathered at Taco Mac for a meal and then came back to the house for cake and ice cream.

Also previously, she had decided that we would go visit friends in Florida and with them we would go to Harry Potter World in Orlando sometime in October.  Kind of odd, I thought at the time, since I’m the Harry Potter fan, but she was intent on saving money by staying with our friends.  (We were both retired/unemployed at the time.)

So as we were dining on our salmon (balsamic raspberry glazed) she said something that led me to believe that she was not as excited about HP as she had led people, i.e., me, to believe.

I asked again what she truly wanted for her birthday, and she said, “All I’ve ever wanted to do…”

…at which point I found myself thinking, “I wonder if I’ve ever heard this one”…

“…is to fly to San Francisco and then just take our time and drive back across the country.”

…No.  I had not…

All righty then, I said, and before this decision could dissipate in ifs, buts, and we coulds—which sometimes maybe could happen sometimes in our married life—I booked a one way flight to SFO right there at the table, followed by a rental car due in New Orleans on October 4, and train tickets back to Atlanta.

There.  We were committed.  The last two weeks have kept us, i.e., her, busy finding hotel rooms and mapping an itinerary that includes every single national park between SF and NOLA, plus Vegas.  And maybe Austin.

So here I am, packed and ready to do this.  Let’s do this!  Follow along here on my blog; it will be very exciting, like a reality show only with side bets on where I dump her body in the desert.