Day Five: At the crush of veils and starlight

Listening: Wilco, "Via Chicago"

THE GRAND CANYON!

I recommend that everyone go see it even if you think it's just one big ditch. I have never been in so much awe of anything. We did a few little hikes to observation points. Breathing at 7000 ft wasn't too bad after being in higher elevation a couple of days earlier. It was at the canyon that I began playing with settings on my camera. (Aside: I bought a new camera just before this trip as my other digital bit the dust some months ago and I just recently decided to get a new one. It's pretty cool.)

I present to you, the Grand Canyon:





















































We checked out of our cabin and headed out as we had another full day of driving ahead. We were going to try our hardest to get to at least Albuquerque before dark.

Y'all know that didn't happen.

We decided to stop at Meteor Crater and see what all the fuss is about. Even the inner science nerd in me freaked out seeing this thing. About 50,000 years ago, a meteor fell from the sky and decided to land on Earth and made a super huge dent in it. Turns out, it's not really all that big when compared to some of the craters on Earth's moon. The museum also had this animation program where you could pick objects to crash into certain planets and you chose the velocity, diameter and density of the object, then run the simulation. Y'all, I picked something relatively small and I ended up splitting the Earth into pieces! I felt so sad and decided not to play with it anymore. Of course, there was a second one and then Judy and I played with it, seeing what we could make comets and asteroids do. Here's the crater (and another that makes you think you might be on the Moon):
































Then we drove many more hours and got to Albuquerque where we checked into the crappiest hotel ever. We decided to save some money and go to the Motel 6 advertising $39.99 bliss. The woman who checked us in looked like the Wicked Witch of the West of Oz fame and I tried desperately to park my car in a place where I could see it or hear breaking glass. I have been so anxious this whole trip in parking my car and worrying what windows might be broken out. If luck was on my side and someone did decide to steal the blanket closest the window, they'd hit the right passenger side so I could have matching tinted windows. Anyway, then I go to find the room and realize we're on the inner side of the motel and open the door. It's stuffy, so I turn on the a/c unit and blasting in my face is the smell of pee, human or animal does not matter at this point. So I got mad and stormed out into the parking lot and declared we weren't staying there. I got over it and we stayed.

I didn't want to deal with WWW again.

On to Santa Fe and then Amarillo, home of the Cadillacs!