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.