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Friday, August 22, 2003
[Monday] Hot day again. I bought the paper and was not surprised to find that Sunday had broken a 70 year heat record for that day. A sweltering 116. And I thought I was being wimpy. Monday was *only* to be 112. We checked in on Marie. She’d been admitted to a room now. Nothing eventful, which was a good thing, but the hospital had no way of knowing if something was going to happen until they had a sort of baseline on some blood work. This required more time in the hospital and it was becoming clear where she would be spending her vacation. She urged us to go ahead to Flagstaff and meet up with his brother. There really wasn’t much we could do anyway, so we did. First grabbed lunch and got her several books, the paper, and left her a deck of cards, said our goodbyes and headed out. The drive was one of those totally boring drives to anyone that has driven it before. Being a visitor, any difference from your own home is interesting. Already we’d observed the Phoenix area, full of stucco buildings, rock landscaping, heat tolerant plants, and bad signage. The drive to Flagstaff is literally a drive up several thousand feet in elevation through nowhere, and starts off with scattered cacti -- like the cacti you see in cartoons that are 8 feet tall and have “arms” sticking out the side. I noticed many of them had holes and I’d heard before cacti were in danger because people liked to shoot at them. Just like we have oak trees that are decades, well over a hundred years old, these big cacti are slow growing and pretty old. Given pop culture, I am not surprised at the bullet holes. Who hasn’t seen a cartoon where the good guy hides behind a cactus, only to have it shot out from in front of him and he’s left standing in the classic “cactus pose”? I even recall my old Atari 2600 game (Outlaw) where one of the objectives was to shoot away cacti. Soon the cacti were gone and it was mostly brush and rocks and hills. The elevation was too high. Boredom started setting in. We listened to “scan” on the radio, which was dominated by country music, Mexican music, and religious stations. Call it divine intervention, but the religious stations were mostly immune to the static. Another couple thousand feet and we started to see pine trees. The poor car was not meant for such a climb and we had to sweet talk it to get us there. The only relief was it was cooler at the higher elevation and we were finally able to turn off the air conditioner. In fact, it looked like rain... After what seemed like a long, long time, we pulled up to the hotel and found his brother & the family. It was good to see them and the kids (2 of them). We were starving and didn’t want to wait for dinner so we grabbed a snack at a nearby Wendy’s, drove around and got acclimated. Just as in Pheonix, we were made to feel right at home with all the chain stores and restaurants. Disappointing actually if you're trying to get away from your normal surroundings. Dinner, was at Black Bart’s. Sounds scary, but in fact, was totally benign and had local college students singing show tunes throughout dinner. Weird. Great piano player. The food was pretty good and it was nice to spend some quality time. Then it was off to the Lowell Observatory, home of one of the largest telescopes in the world, famous for discovering Pluto. Now it’s used for education. Sadly it threatened rain and they wouldn’t open the dome to look through the scope. But it was still cool to see. Too bad really, especially with Mars so close right now. Off to bed to rest up for the Grand Canyon.
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