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| [Question: Can anyone recommend a sweet place to stay in Carmel or San Francisco?] ARIZONA Barry: Well, the Grand Canyon was a wash. Obviously huge and deep but not surprising since I had seen many photos of it, far too many people and no easy hikes. So I looked at it for about an hour while Goldie was on a long distance phone call planning a retreat, then off we went looking for greener pastures. Goldie: Almost a decade ago I was part of a Kosher Canyon Run, two weeks white water rafting down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon. We had a milchig raft and a fleishig raft, davenned in the side canyons, it was glorious. Have a mind to organize another similar trip for next year or the year after...anyone interested This time, though, have to agree with Barry, especially since the park service was conducting deliberate forest fires and the place was all hazy and hard to discern the usually gorgeous colorful panorama. Barry: We landed at Jeanettes, a b and b in Flagstaff just off old route 66. Goldie insisted on some place less frugal and more romantic, some place she could enjoy working in (the retreat thing). This is a very authentic, newly built post-Victorian style building down to the last detail and furnished in period antiques. Our tub is 7 foot long, ceilings, even in bathrooms are 12 ft high - strange at a time when people were shorter than us. One bedroom has old medical equipment and an exam table. We passed on this, though in hind sight seems kind of kinky. We toured the Lowell observatory (where Pluto was discovered and the idea that the universe is expanding was hatched.) Goldie: You have to visit the observatory, the domes rotate so that the huge telescopes can be pointed properly....Light pollution from a near-by sports complex has limited the formerly ideal nature of the site for research....Hillary Clinton has booked the place for a private viewing of space on Wednesday night....resourceful woman! Barry: We needed some fun, so we took our host's advice and went to a western style place called Black Bart's. We had a directory of restaurants in Flagstaff and the comment next to this name was "barf."The restaurant was in a trailer park, adjacent to a junk store. The area was dark and seemed fairly deserted except for the trailers. We looked at one another and smelled an opportunity for adventure. Walked in and it was filled with people. Piano music was playing. Students from the local university school of music are the waiters. They put on a bit of a vaudeville show between serving and it was lots of fun. Food was fine by the way. I climbed a volcano in Sunset Crater Volcanic National Monument this morning while Goldie worked (retreat.) It's named Sunset because the volcano has a rust color at its summit due to iron in the lava. In the twenties, a movie producer planned to stick dynamite in the cone and blow the top off for a movie, so they decided to make it a monument to protect it from similar idiots. Adjacent to this volcano is a taller snow covered one called San Francisco named such by Franciscan priests about 200 years before they named a little backwater town on the west coast with the same name. Goldie: Barry reported walking on a field of lava as a highlight, sniff, sorry to have missed it. Barry: Some brief impressions to keep this short: Sign in Kanab, Utah which is the site filming for many western movies: "Greatest earth on show." Sign at Bryce Canyon National Park, site of incredible geologic formations caused by erosion: "Keep off, erosion control." Sign along road - at a place where there was no fence along the 75 mph highway (the only place) "beware cattle on highway." And there were! Reminds me of the sharp corner of the door of our Olds van which has a tendency hit heads. In later models they fixed the problem by putting a sign on the door which read "sharp corner." Standing at an observation spot at Bryce inhaling the magnificent pristine scenery and clean crisp air. Someone lights up a cigarette. Heard someone speak English in a national park the other day. No Japanese tourists, lots of German and French folk. Guess you can say something about the world economy based on this. Goldie was irritable and exhausted the other day while we were on a long drive. I suggested she meditate. She slept for half an hour and felt much better. Had I suggested she nap it wouldn't have worked, I'm learning the lingo. Utah was amazing. Don't know who came up with the landscaping, but it worked for me. Read how the Mormons chopped their way through rock to build roads, then lowered their wagons 1200 feet by rope. Just like the Voortrekkers in South Africa. What I have learned so far is that nothing is permanent on this planet..seas, mountains, deserts, species, they all disappear. Human civilizations come and go, layering on top of one another just like the Grand Canyon. Everything on this planet ultimately dies and even the planet one day, recent headlines suggest, will end up being like Mars. Goldie: The Northern Arizona museum states its purpose as being "about ideas more than information" and lived up to it. Became aware of so much about the native peoples that I didn't realize in full before....one that comes to mind is how in 1610 the Spanish colonists forced the Pueblo people of the Rio Grande area to labor for them and to convert to Catholicism and cease their native religious practices. In 1680 the Pueblo revolted and reclaimed and held onto the region for 12 years. I'm finishing a story about when I stayed with the Bedouin which relates to similar contemporary circumstances, will try to post it in a week or so. Here's a factoid for my sons, during the Wild West public school only met for three months during the summer. And another, physicians were unschooled and self proclaimed for the most part. Here's a cure for rheumatism one of them sold: Fill a whisky bottle half way with Vinegar, add a handful of red ants and apply internally. Sounds like the Talmud. A couple of facts brought to our attention by readers: l. The bookstore in Denver is called "The Tattered Cover." (Thanks Bennie!) 2. The Japanese mats are used to measure room size not house size. (More thanks Bennie!) 3. The co-housing website is: www.cohousing.org (Thanks Jeff!) 4. Rabbi Gary Ellison and his community raised the funds to get the Abraham family out of Pakistan. (Thanks Steve!) Also, many of you have written asking for back issues of postings, Goldie will put them on her web site under "Stories". http://www.RebGoldie.com (This is a change of web site location, give us a week or so to post them.) Barry: Tomorrow we drive through Sedona to spend a night in Jerome, Arizona, an old mining town built on a hill. Not surprisingly our b&b is located on Hill Road. The town is perched on Cleopatra Hill on the side of Mingus Mountain. Once there were 15,000 residents, in 1960 they were down to 24 voters, now it's up to 450. It was wild and called the Sedona-Gemorra of the West. In 1903 a reporter for the N.Y. Sun visited Jerome and went home in a state of shock saying, "It is the wickedest town in America!" The town is still crooked since one end is at 4,400 feet and the other end is at 5,600 feet. Why are we visiting Jerome? We'll let you know, when we know. |
