albuquerque, aka austin here we come

after waking up horribly early this morning, dan and i realized that we had a full day ahead of us in one city, without any real driving to be done at all. we managed to run errands (dan bought the first fireworks of the trip) before we saw the petroglyphs on the west side of town (old carvings in rocks - rocks again) before the sun could bake us completely on the rocks, and saw our first rattlesnake, crawling slowly across the road in front of the car. dan tried to make it rattle but it didn't care about anything but getting to the shade of the bushes. we then headed for the world's longest aerial tramline which is just north of where rachel's house is. we took the tram up into the sandia mountains - way up, 4000 feet higher in elevation over the city. the view was absolutely gorgeous, even accounting for the smoggy air from the arizona wildfire. we ended up taking an unplanned nature walk/hike up a mile and a half to a little tiny stone house that was built in the 30s by the civilian conservation corps as a shelter for hikers. it was strange to find myself in the middle of temperate mountains again - the heat gone and all the cacti and things replaced by shaking aspens and new mexican maples and little wildflowers. that's my kind of mountain. i even enjoyed the unplanned hike. ha.

we then found our way to rachel's house, where we were going to stay the night. her neighborhood is seriously made up of about a million streets with the same names - cedar hill way, loop, boulevard, lane, etc., tramway lane, blvd, street, avenue, etc., etc., etc.. we definitely got lost for a while, but then we found it. it's a really gorgeous pueblo-style house, painted the same warm red-tan color as the surroundings. rachel's mom greeted us (so did her dogs, frida and whimsical mildred, who is blind and really sad but kind of cute as a result). we turned around pretty quick to get lunch in old town albuquerque and buy some turquoise jewelry and all that, and then gave into our sleepiness (6:30 am wake up time sucks) and went to a border's books where we got sucked in by air conditioning and chuck klosterman's new book about road trips. klosterman also has a problem thinking that states are like other states ("it does not look like the way i always imagined rhode island; it seems more like south dakota"), proving once again that he has prevented me from ever using my quirky takes on the world to make any sort of writing career.

post borders break, we got ready for our real new mexican food dinner at rachel's favorite restaurant. i should clarify of course that rachel was not there - i was sleeping in her bed and using her bathroom and it was very odd inhabiting someone's space when they weren't there to introduce it to you - but her parents took us out for dinner. very tasty.

tomorrow we're waking up early (not as early as today, thank god) and heading up to santa fe for a quick jaunt before starting the long, long, long drive to austin, texas. woo, sara, here we come!

tram lines

albuquerque below us (after a tram ride)... notice the air pollution from the wildfire in arizona...

rocks, rocks, and more rocks

yesterday morning we woke up late, tired from hours of blogging and AIMing. we left flagstaff for sedona, a town south of flagstaff that crops up among red mesas. all the architecture is blended into the surroundings - lots of red adobe pueblo style houses. everything is red and green, somehow. supposedly sedona is a place where the earth's energy congregates in an especially high concentration, in "vortexes" where you can commune with spirits or something like that. mostly it was just really cool looking. we grabbed lunch at a kind of funky cafe on the way to montezuma's castle, which was built into cliffs by native american communities a long time ago.

our plan was to get as far east as possible because there wasn't really anything to see or any place to stay between flagstaff and albuquerque (where we were supposed to be tomorrow by noon). oddly enough, we had a really busy day and saw lots of cool places - but just no places that we stayed at long.

after montezuma we looped up to see the Meteor Crater. see, somewhere in arizona, there's a meteor crater. it's an odd little landmark because it's privately owned and it's somewhere between a tourist trap and a natural phenomenon totally worth seeing. you turn off the main road, past very corny signs advertising "it's out of this world!" and after five miles, you reach an oddly military-looking complex of buildings surrounded by fences and barbed wire. after paying an entrance fee, you get to go up and see the crater's rim. the crater is a mile in diameter, and the displays point out that it's 3.14 miles around the rim. it's really quite bizarre.

unfortunately, there had been a wildfire in southern arizona that was polluting the air everywhere we went (and by polluting the air i mean polluting my lungs too). it also happened to do very odd things to the sunset, which happened at least an hour earlier than it should have. it was kind of a nuclear sunset, to be honest.

mostly what you need to know about wednesday is that we saw a lot of rocks - rocks in sedona, rocks that were houses, rocks that had been rearranged by a giant meteor into a crater, rocks that had once been trees, and then rocks that were pretty and "painted" looking. after the crater, we saw the petrified forest, which i still don't understand. when i was a kid, i imagined that the petrified forest was lots of trees still standing up with leaves and everything, only made out of rocks - a sort of fairy-tale with emeralds for leaves or something like that. but in reality (i say this in case you are idiotic like me), the petrified forest is just a lot of stumps that have crystallized into rocks, lying around on the ground in a very strange-looking alien desert. the park ranger in the gift shop looked strikingly like nels (if you know nels from stanford, aka "weird facial-hair guy"), which didn't help the alienness of it all.

the petrified forest is right next to the painted desert. what i've learned about driving across country is that you will be going through what is literally the middle of nowhere (dust, a few rocks of a boring color, and little scrubs and bushes) and then all of a sudden something gorgeous and odd will appear in front of you. hence the painted desert - another sort of martian landscape, and the last that we will see for a while, i suspect.

we kept driving as it got dark (since we were heading east, we were actually fleeing the sunshine for darker lands), stopping at a subway store in navajo, AZ for dinner. we entered new mexico at dark and saw absolutely nothing but a few stars and billboards until we hit albuquerque. since we really had nothing to do, we decided to find a place to camp. we drove around the cibola national forest looking for a campsite that our map claimed existed, but it kind of lied, and we almost decided to sleep in the parking lot of the ranger station but dan was driven by instinct and a sign we'd seen earlier to look for another option. ta-da! we ended up sleeping in the car in the turquoise trails RV park, planning on leaving in the morning to avoid having to pay the fee. that failed and the very crunchy camp owner stopped us as we pulled out of our parking spot at 6:30 in the morning (woken by the sun).

on a sort of random note, we just ate breakfast at my very first wafflehouse ever. i feel like only silvia really cares, but i realized sitting in the wafflehouse that we really are on our way east. when the wafflehouse waitress said to me at one point, "you don't want no more, sugar?" i knew i was headed into unfamiliar territory.

painted desert

early psuedo-sunset thanks to arizona wildfire (at petrified forest)

craterrrr

hmm, this seems to be a giant meteor crater. let's name it Meteor Crater.

red rocks near sedona... and maybe vortexes, you never know

look out

look out for new posts that have been back-dated. some of the posts/pictures are from previous days, but we're dating them appropriately even though they are all being posted at once.

losing scale

the past few days have been incredibly strange. we left LA sunday morning, did vegas sunday night, went to zion and bryce, utah, on monday, and then left utah today for the grand canyon. we're currently in flagstaff, arizona, in a travelodge motel where we get free wireless and mtv. we're pretty much obsessed with techmology right now. too much stimulus for people who slept in a car last night.

we're losing track of days - we realized that we had said we'd be in albuquerque on thursday, but schedule-wise it makes more sense to head there tomorrow. but we're just idiots, and now we just have to find something else to do - we're thinking santa fe. today, we were thrown off even more because the time zone changed. yesterday, we changed to mountain time when we hit utah. the only reason we knew was because our cell phones automatically changed. today, we drove into arizona, and the phones changed back. confusing, we thought. arizona is on mountain time too. it took us a good while to realize that arizona is NOT on daylight savings time (bizarre) and therefore while it is on mountain time, the time is the same as california. EXCEPT, the few times when we drove through navajo reservation land, which DOES use daylight savings time. so even time is not on our side today.

part of the confusion is simply that we have traveled across so much country since sunday morning. sunday morning we were in whittier. last night we were in utah, which felt like a foreign country. today we're in flagstaff, which is in arizona but since it's in the mountains, feels weird as well. (i think i might be more confused than dan, since i said that utah should be wyoming, and since as we drove through downtown flagstaff today, i said "this doesn't feel like arizona. i just can't get my states straight - even though i know what they are like intellectually, my visceral reaction to them is just bizarre.) and the land we've traveled is all totally different. it's like normal land, then CANYON/rocks of some unusual color, then gorgeous ranchland/field, then CANYON, desert, podunk town/gas station/motel "famous for homemade pie", different kind of canyon, town, more strange desert scrubland, normal land, HUGE CANYON, forest, giant mountain in middle of nowhere forest, city, cliffs, ad infinitum. it makes you feel like you've traveled much further than you actually have. (also, i've become an expert at taking pictures out of the car, both while in the passenger seat and while driving. while driving it's tricky because you have to point and shoot without actually looking away from the road, but i have figured it out. yesterday i actually was on the phone, driving, and shooting a picture while dan slept. booyakasha.)

not to mention some of what we've seen is just unreal. zion literally looks like god used to hang out there. it's like how you think of mars, only with trees. it's all uncanny colors, and since you actually drive THROUGH the canyon unlike the grand canyon, it really seems huge, big rocks hanging over your head in a little mini-valley. but just outside the actual park (once you drive through a mile-long tunnel carved through the rocks around 1930) is an even weirder looking area with all these rocks that look feathered and crosshatched and patterned - god knows how. but immediately outside that, there are fields and ranches and valleys that seem low although it's actually at like 7000 elevation. then bryce canyon, which looks like a few buttes in the distance next to fields. you can't actually see it - all you see is ruby's diner/trading post/campsite/RV park/hotel/rodeo/post office/ice cream store/liquor store/you get the picture, which is an odd little slice of semi-civilization in the middle of nowhere. there were lots of people speaking various asian languages, french, italian and english with british and australian accents, which further confused me as to where the hell we were in the world. ruby's holds a monopoly on the bryce canyon area, and somehow i spent $18 on ribs and $4 on "provo girl pilsner" in the steakhouse before we drove up to the bryce area. it looks like forest (plus a herd of about 35 deer right next to the highway) until all of a sudden you look out on a crazy red and/or white chalky canyon. it kind of looks like a gaudi painting.

we camped in the car (this might also have something to do with our brain freezes) in ruby's campground, and when we woke up in the morning it was to a thunderstorm so we got the hell out of utah - sort of. the road we took actually had to go around the grand canyon area so we drove past 60 miles of the "escalante" - more strange rock formations that look like god was just using them as material for other, more rational geology. lunch was at an italian restaurant in page, arizona that advertised calzones "as BIG as your head" and didn't lie, and then it was more driving through rocks and deserts and scrubland before finally getting to the grand canyon.

the grand canyon was perhaps the place i was most well-prepared for. everyone's heard of it. but what i found strangest was that it is actually SO big that i couldn't really wrap my head around it - and it actually came off as less impressive than the brighter rocks in zion or bryce, even though it's infinitely huger. it all has to do with perspective and presentation. the grand canyon is like a theme park on the edges - very well-maintained trails, information points, shuttle buses, and you don't even know you're next to the hugest canyon ever until all of a sudden it's there. and you can't even tell how deep it is because it's SO far that you can't actually comprehend it. your brain just sort of gives up trying and you end up saying something like "it's big," or as i heard one kid say, "it would really suck if you fell in there." in other words, you state the obvious. hence the name - grand canyon. humans aren't capable of truly understanding that size, especially from that vantage point i think. if we hiked down into the canyon and across all 10 miles of it, i think we'd get it more. but my brain just sort of refused to acknowledge that anything that big is actually on earth.

after the grand canyon, which we sort of sleepily appreciated and then left quickly to avoid other people (large crowds of people are intimidating to us. dan mumbles a lot and i don't understand him, and i say stupid things and he laughs at me and we do nothing with it, and all our conversations are continuations of every other conversation since we are continuously together, so we just can't quite function on the level of normal human beings at the moment. not to mention there is no one our age anywhere. only familys, high schoolers and couples in mid 20s who don't understand why we are not like them). we drove down to flagstaff, which incidentally is a road that goes through normal, boring old forests and past the tallest peak in arizona until you hit a normal little college town/railroad town on route 66. ANOTHER mind trip.

since we've driven so much through such different terrain and had only brief, fleeting visions of famous and/or gorgeous parts of the country, our sense of scale is totally shot. the grand canyon is big, yes, but how do you really appreciate it when your mind is still trying to comprehend, say, las vegas and the city of excess/sin. everything happens so fast, and yet at the end of every day i feel like i've lived 3 days at least. so no wonder i think today is wednesday, when (i THINK) it's tuesday. my brain has totally checked out of town as far as calendar time goes.

i thought at least tonight i'd get a chance to sort of slow my brain down, but then i realized that while time sort of slows when you're sitting on a bed in a hotel room all night (woooo free wireless at the travelodge!), civilization and modern amenities are a little crazy on their own. i went into an albertson's tonight and was totally overwhelmed, and the internet (especially AIM) has sucked me in. we watched the real world, austin, tonight and got psyched up for our own austin trip in just four days (i think) - except of course our austin experience will not involve people getting facial fractures in bar fights, breaking up with their boyfriends, or wandering around in boyshorts and cowboy boots (especially since i left my cowboy boots at home, haha). what a weird world we live in.

it's a pretty grand canyon

where we filled up in gap, arizona

sky. obviously. near page, AZ

bryce at dusk

sunset in bryce, utah (or is it wyoming?)

5 minutes outside zion... wtf

zion

zion

docile motherfucker (zion parking lot)

the happiest place on earth?

i love vegas. it's disneyland for adults. why, you may ask? aside from the very metaphorical meaning - grown-up playground of debauchery, alcohol, gambling, sex and other forms of excess - it also literally has theme-park elements. such as: overly chlorinated water in fake canals/rivers etc., a MONORAIL for christ's sake, lots of maps to direct you around town and inside casinos, souvenir shops and other money traps (read: slot machines) around every corner, arcades, corporate-owned everything (or at least mogul-owned - for example, MGM grand shower heads and towels, strategically located food stands, and smaller faker replicas of larger, cooler things (excalibur, new york new york, the venetian, paris, luxor, even lame-ass mandelay bay). except the difference between main street, USA of disneyland and the las vegas strip is that in THIS main street USA, you can buy booze and carry it down the street and people hand out cards for call girls and hookers.

in other words, wtf?

turns out, however, that i LOVE vegas. not for its gambling, drinking or strippers, but for its people watching. and also because it's FUN. all the hotels are really cool. we arrived at the MGM grand after driving all the way down the strip (from circus circus and wynn. [with a period] on the north side to the south side where MGM is located). unfortunately we realized that the red hat society ("ladies over 50 for fun and friendship") were staying in our hotel - approximately 6000 of them. we therefore had to wait in an epic line to check in, where the usual problem of people thinking that dan and i were a couple happened: "is it just the two of you?" "yes." "so just a king bed, then?" "no." odd stare.

this continued to happen all night, mostly because of the money issue. i was dan's sugar mama for most of the night, because i owed him for the room and for the dinner. so every time we got to a bar, we both ordered and then i paid with my debit card. every single bartender commented on it, i kid you not. "so ms. wood's picking up the tab tonight, huh?" "so i guess it's miss emily here who's paying?" i think they thought he was my paid escort - because NO woman pays for a drink in vegas, at least no woman pays for someone else's drink.

anyway, after showering in the hotel (very large bathroom with MGM grand labels on the towels and showerhead, which was just a corporate version of dorm showerheads, btw), we went out to see the town. we walked to the venetian, which is really awesome, and i don't just say that because they have a burberry boutique. it's so weird - dan said it was like the real venice only cleaner. the inside, in case you haven't been there, is a fake version of the canals - including fake evening sky and gondolas for hire. there's also a fake st. mark's square, where we had our first drink of the night and chatted with the bartender marco about how it was cool because there were no pigeons. then was dinner back at the MGM at wolfgang puck's. very tasty, plus we got money off as part of our room reservation, so we basically got free wine. after dinner we decided to go off to see the town - luxor (cool bar on the second floor), mandalay bay (kind of lame), then after lots more tram/monorailing, bally's (on way to paris), paris (like venice only the fake eiffel tower inside is truncated oddly when it hits the fake sky), and then bellagio. we got past the hottttttt shops (i almost died outside chanel and fendi) just in time to see the last fireworks show of the night and pretend we were in ocean's 11. we planned on going to the ghost bar, which has a great view of the strip, but realized it was actually OFF strip in the palms (which incidentally i have been informed is owned by the sacramento kings). exnay on the ghostinis, we returned to tabu, the hippest club in MGM grand.

this was the real crazy vegas shit, because there the people-watching began in earnest. unlike LA hipsters who are hyper-conscious of their image, vegas types are actually TOTALLY unaware of what they're projecting. and they're just bizarre. the whole place is bizarre. there were lots of couples who were majorly into PDA (the whole hand in back pocket routine), herds of young men with beers and polo shirts (and asshole auras), and of cousre the aforementioned red hat society. in tabu ("seven deadly sins? we demand a recount"), we saw the real action. as soon as we got in we saw a bunch of kind of pretty young women (around 24-25 ish) in expensive jeans and heels, dancing with each other in poorly executed but well-intended lesbianish fashion. why? because they were getting free champagne and bottle service from the group of 45-years-or-older beer-bellied men wearing hawaiian shirts tucked into their pleated khakis. so very strange. at first i thought the girls were only going so far as dancing with them or sort of chatting with them in order to get the drinks, but after a little while they actually left the bar with them, to do god knows what. they weren't prostitutes, just desperate.

after a little while some more entertaining and less sad customers entered the establishment - 3 breakdancers, one of whom was this asian guy with a fedora who was like MJ incarnate. kind of awesome. they must have been friends with the DJ because soon after their arrival he moved into funk & soul night and started playing some gooooood shit. dan pretty much wanted to die i think. then, a group of girls came into the bar, loosely attached to a couple of nerdyish guys drinking beer in buddy holly glasses. the girls were fun - like the DGSC only with less shame. i decided they were from texas, just because i could. all of them danced like maniacs, and it was fun to watch them carry out their attempts to seduce the nerdy guys and try to entice them to shake their poor whiteboy hips. one of them was pulled onto the floor by the asian fedora dude and she ROCKED OUT. i'm sad that she left before they could bone. all of this continued... we just people-watched until 3 am.

god i love vegas.

it's almost like we just robbed a casino

the red hat society goes wild in vegas

the ironic part is that i actually love that song

emily and sean in venice

leaving baker, not las vegas

we just barely escaped from hell.

we left for vegas from LA this morning - leaving one freak show for another. we had heard that we had to stop in baker for this gyros place, the "mad greek" - a vegas tradition of some kind. it was lunch time when we went through baker, so we pulled off and parked. the mad greek is truly mad - swarms of vegas types, a weird multicultural menu (gyros, falafel, enchiladas, burgers, horchata, seattle's best coffee), strange signs on the walls ("famous greeks (hellenites)" and "honorary non-greeks"), 11-year old bus boys, an actual SMOKING SECTION in the middle of california, and so on. absolutely insane. the weirdest clientele. everyone looked like mutant people, outlined in neon (i feel like vegas is going to be worse) - like the lizard people in "fear and loathing," to be honest. i think i saw some of every possible kind of person. lots of "mutant road warriors" as dan says - people with bad tans, too many years of wrinkles from the sun, bug-eyed glasses. i felt like i wandered into another planet. i couldn't stop staring at the people around me, and they stared back.

we left the mad greek as soon as our gyros were finished - as soon as we possibly could - and ran for the car and a gas station. (btw, gas is $3 a gallon here!) then we really realized we were in for it. a bunch of 14-year old girls (in juicy couture tops i might add) leaving the coco's next to the gas station (and piling into one of those 9-person ford vans) spotted the horns on our car and started harassing us. "you killed a DEER!" they weren't actually scandalized - they just took the antlers as an excuse to start harassing people from a safe distance. one of them, with a chic feathery haircut, wearing mismatched knee-length striped socks, checkered vans slip-ons, a patchwork skirt and a black tank top, stood there shaking her finger at us. i felt like eloise was disapproving of me in the middle of the goddamn desert. "what did the deer ever do to you?!" she cried, then "you killed bambi's mom!!" dan yelled, "it's a male! at least get your fucking biology straight!" we were surrounded, though, by the freaks of baker and the unabashed assault of the 14-year-olds. we couldn't get out of there fast enough. you don't have to have a trunk full of illegal drugs, a la fear and loathing, to feel like you need to get out of town QUICK, and we blasted the loudest music we possibly could while we blasted the hell out at 90 mph.

deep breaths now, while we prepare for the real freak show.

just another day in LA 

sister d finally got him 

dan and sister dinosaur 

la daze

we spent yesterday and today in LA - i'm sure dan will have more to say about it than me because after all, i live here, but i suppose i have a little to say about it. we've spent a lot of time talking about the difference between LA and other places - pretty much every other place. you don't set out to become a los angelan - you just end up there. all of a sudden you're just LIVING there without planning to, and none of it seems strange to you until you go somewhere else and everyone else reminds you how weird your hometown is.

so yesterday we went to the LA county museum of art and saw weird exhibits. i wish i had pictures - the guy was really cool, he made all these strange mechanized sculptures and things like that. then we went to the tar pits - odd, ancient bubbling black pools in the middle of west LA. for dinner we hit up pink's, the best hot dog place in the world, for very tasty dogs, with pastrami and sauerkraut on top. mmmmmm. we're basically having a gastronomical tour of LA, because today, we went to philippe's, the home of the french dip (and very spicy mustard). TODAY however we did something unique to ourselves - we went to the "infusion" gallery where dad's dinosaur was being displayed. today was the day he had to take it home, so we did. we dismantled the 12-foot giant into its separate parts - skull, torso, arms, legs, tail and pelvis - and carried it 100 feet down the streets of downtown LA to put it in the car. it was kind of hilarious, although i have to say we didn't get as many stares as i expected, probably not as many as we get from the antlers on the front of the car. maybe people are just used to weird stuff in los angeles.