Day two at the Grand Canyon was pretty cool. I went on my tour in the morning. The tour guide was this cool guy named Jake who used to be a kind of teacher's assistant in a 2nd grade classroom, but then he went rafting down the Colorado River thorugh Grand Canyon and decided that was the life for him. So, for now he's guiding little tours and just waiting for a spot to open up as a rafter. It was a nice tour. Lots of driving and just listening to him, but he was interesting and we did go to several view points where he could show us things, and at one spot he grabbed me and another guy and took us off the beaten path a bit, led us on a little bit of rock scrambling to get us on this nice outcropping. I didn't take my camera so that it wouldn't get broken and so that someone could take a picture of me from the safer viewpoint, but somehow the view where I was seemed so much better than the view closer to the parking lot, even though that view is right on the edge of the canyon, too.
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| Just getting to the top. On my left the guide is helping the other guy up the last climb. |
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| At the top with a nice view of the canyon behind. |
Oh, and the guy climbing with me--who's not in the pictures--is named John. He was there visiting from CT with his wife. He's really afraid of heights, so going out there on those rocks was a big deal for him. We were chatting as we climbed and stood on the rock, and I told him I might be coming out to the east coast. So, he gave me his card and said if I was there I could stay with him and his wife. It's amazing how many people will make offers like that to strangers.
After the tour I got some pizza and ran into a couple other people who had been on the tour with me. So, we sat together and got to talk a bit. It was nice, though they didn't invite me to come stay with them. There was a museum nearby--more of a just western museum and not specifically the Grand Canyon. They had a lot about Buffalo Bill Cody and Annie Oakley and Wild Bill Hickok. They also had a lot of Grand Canyon art. There was one painter I really liked. I can't remember his name now. He was a German, painting around the 1920's if I remember correctly. Most of his paintings were a little bit stylized, not going so strictly for realism. To me that seems the only way to handle the Grand Canyon. You can't make it look right if you try to make it look realistic, but if you're good I think you can make a painting give a similar feeling. Our tour guide talked about that a little bit because we were talking about photos not really being effective. He was explaining that because most people have never seen anything on the scale of the Grand Canyon, you're brain isn't sure how to respond. Normally you look at something new your brain compares it to other things you've seen and you figure out what it is. But something like the Grand Canyon is so different from our usual experiences that our brains don't exactly know how to categorize it.
But, moving on. That night I went to the bar at the basement of my hotel. There were several people there who worked at the hotel across the street. There was one girl in the group, and at one point she made a comment about working laundry that day. So, I said, "You can do my laundry if you want." Pick up line of the year, huh? But it worked. A little bit later she came by me and said something and I apologized a bit and told her I was only joking and she says, "It's fine, but now you owe me."
"What do I owe you?" I asked.
"Just your company."
She was a pretty good looking girl, and I was a few drinks in, so this all seemed good to me. So, we headed outside so she could smoke and we could talk. This girl had a million stories. She has done theater work as a lighting engineer. I should have guessed. She was dressed in black from head to toe like every theater tech I've ever known. Apparently, "the good old boys" around town called her a goth, but that description really didn't hold water. She said she had also worked a little bit of radio. This was as a kid of only like 12, going to work with her single mom and filling in for quick station IDs from time to time. She gave me an example, and she definitely had the voice for it. Does Woody Harrelson have a band? Or did he at one time? I can't remember for sure, but I think she told me she did lighting for his band. And trying to impress me she said, "I've met Woody Harrelson a couple of times." But, actually even Woody seems like too big of a star from the way I remember it. She said she also was on Second Life for awhile. It's an online thing which is kind of what it sounds like. You make a second you and live a second life where you can do lots of things you can't do in real life. She didn't just play on there, it was a job. Apparently she and a computer programmer had created an ancient Greece based on mythology as well as an old Spanish sailing simulation. She said people loved to come there and pay their money to sail the ship or walk around with the Greek gods and goddesses. I still think, though that most people came on so they could have virtual sex with Aphrodite or a mermaid. This girl also wrote poetry and painted, and was a single mom. She showed me a painting and a picture of her daughter and quoted some of her poetry to me, but still I think that half the things she said were 50% bullshit. By the way, she didn't tell me all of this on one little smoke break. We went in and out of the hotel a few times. Then we went up to my room because it was more comfortable than the cold hotel lobby and the colder outside. Don't worry mom, we didn't do anything unsafe. We didn't do anything but talk and talk and talk. And by that I mean she talked and talked and talked and I slowly changed from being interested in her and what she had to say to just wanting to go to sleep. After sitting in my room for a little bit, she said she was going home, but being the gentleman I am, I said I'd walk her back to her place which was just across the street. Then she invited me in for a Stella Artois, a beer I do not like, but I felt I couldn't turn her down. Finally, about 4am I got away.
I had intended to go walking around the Grand Canyon more the following day, but with little sleep, and a bit of a hangover, hiking just didn't seem like a good idea. Instead, I drove back to the Hoover Dam. It's only 3-4 hours away, and I was in the mood for some driving. I got to the Dam too late for a tour that day, but I got a hotel and went out to dinner and cool little brewery in Boulder City. I said something to the bartender about traveling and some older guy down the bar jumped right into a conversation with me. He's done a lot of traveling, and was thinking about going to Cambodia, so I told him what I know about that and even gave him the name of one of my tuk-tuk drivers there. I was tired and went home fairly early that night, but he called me up and invited me out the next day to the Hofbrauhaus in Las Vegas with his wife and some of his friends. By the way, this guy is named David and he's 65. I wasn't totally sure about hanging out with a bunch of people who are older than my parents, but I figured it wouldn't kill me. So, this was maybe the evening of the 16th, if I don't have my days too confused. They gave me a ride out there, and I had a great time. The food was great, there were pretty waitresses in the German beer girl kind of garb, there was a band that played, and later in the evening some Beatles impersonators came in to play a few songs, and of course there was beer. So, we ate and drank and had fun. The highlight of the night, though, may have been the Jagermeister. There was this girl walking around selling shots of Jager, and whenever you got one you also had to bend over the table and get paddled. Plenty of guys were stepping up and it brought about cheers every time. The girl, though was kind of thin and not dressed in the German style. She looked more like someone you'd see at a normal bar. Definitely not my type, and kind of a wimp. BUT, our server, Kirsten was something different. She's from Ohio, not so thin and frail looking and she knew how to hit. So, I made sure to get my shot from her. There was a bit of a sting, but she gave me a little hug afterward and that made it all better.
Not long after my spanking we headed back home. It was still early and David was not ready to call it a night. He's a bit of a party animal I think. And we were having some good discussions. So, back in Boulder City he and his wife took me to a little wine bar called Milo's. They had wine and I had beer, and we ended up talking politics. It got a little heated, but no feelings got hurt. That's also when David's wife really got into all the discussion, too. After that, they took me back to my hotel.
The next day I finally got to the Hoover Dam. They were opening a new bridge there and I was afraid it would be wildly busy, but it actually wasn't. It's really interesting to see the Hoover Dam, especially after being so recently at places like Bryce Canyon and especially the Grand Canyon. People at the Grand Canyon don't really like the Hoover Dam. Our tour guide said it straight out when we asked him, but even the literature in the different visitor's centers in the park gave the connotation that the Dam wasn't too great. The canyons are of course all about the beauty and grandeur of nature, but the Hoover Dam is an unashamed tribute to the power of man. There was so much about how men had built this thing and improved the lives of so many others out west. It's not a sentiment that you find in many other places these days. Personally, I kind of like it. I think I'll have to find a book about the building of the Hoover Dam.
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| One of my favorite things at the dam. |
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| I don't think you'd see this kind of language today unless it's about soldiers. |
So, the Hoover Dam was pretty cool, and the drive out of there was gorgeous. In fact, I had to pull off the Interstate at one point so I could take some pictures. I was driving along, looking at the desert and the rocks and the clouds when I saw a beautiful rainbow.
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| Rainbow in the desert |
After the Hoover Dam I made my way to Flagstaff, AZ where I didn't do much of anything and then moved on to Albuquerque, NM where I also probably won't do much. It's only noon now, so I'll wander around and look for some fun, but to be honest I'm getting a little road weary. Without a travel partner or really specific things to see, such as the Grand Canyon, it's a little hard to keep up the energy of adventure. My next stop, though, is Dallas and then a looong train trip to New Orleans. Then I think I'm winding my way back home. I think there's a zoo around here, so I might check that out.
There you go, you're all up to date. I hope you're enjoying my stories. And, for those of you I will see in person at some point, I'll probably have more stories to tell.
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