Nothing Much to Say

Sorry about the title, I couldn't resist.  The pun was waaay too easy.  After seeing the Grand Canyon, we drove through the desert for about three hours towards Nevada and the Hoover Dam which blocks Lake Mead on the Arizona/Nevada border.  Traffic is very heavy on the road leading to the dam.  Partially because there is a bypass being built around the dam to expedite traffic and presumably to protect the dam and the hydroelectric power plant from terrorism.  As we neared the dam the first thing that happened was that all West-bound traffic was diverted off of the road through a checkpoint where several security guards/state troopers gave our car the once over to determine that we, in our Buick,  were not carrying enough explosives to destroy one of the largest civil engineering projects of the Twentieth Century.  We were immediately waved through.

Traffic began to slow down about nine miles from the dam and completely stopped around seven miles from the dam.  It must have been over 100 degrees, so of course our air conditioning decided to give out at this time.  I swear if I hadn't been there and were reading this like you are, I would think that this is funny.  Well, maybe it is a little funny after a week's retrospective.

The dam traffic (Get it? Dam traffic? This is too easy.) was so slow that it was possible to get out of the car, take the following pictures, and then get back in before the car had the chance to move again.  Did I mention that it was hot?

The Grand Canyon is big.  Really, really big.  There isn't much else you can say.  It is a National Park, a protected wilderness reserve and an international tourist attraction.  When I think of the Grand Canyon, I think of sweeping vistas, solitude and communing with nature.  It turns out that the Grand Canyon is pretty crowded, even early on a Sunday morning.

Ok, Ok...here are the photographs everyone expects:

A ranger told me that the Canyon sees 1 or 2 suicides per year, hence the last photo in that series.  I believe that the solitude comes probably only if you hike down to get away from all the other tourists.  We did not do this.  In stead we pointed the car in the direction of Las Vegas.

More about that later.  For now I leave you with yet another picture of rocks and a big hole in the ground.

More hard driving.  We woke in Amarillo, Texas and headed West on the Interstate.  Apparently, I-40 parallels the old Route 66 in most of the Southwest.  This was a cause of great excitement for my mother.  I suppose Route 66 is a source of great nostalgia for baby boomers, who grew up watching too many bad movies with Elvis, James Dean and Jerry Lewis. 

Aside from a steady rise in altitude, New Mexico is a lot like Texas - at least seen from the Interstate System.  Albuquerque, aside from being extremely hard to spell, has a lot going for it.  It is the only settlement for miles and miles.  This is typical for the American West, and I remember that from earlier travels and living in Washington State, but it still takes getting used to as I have not traveled from the East for so long.

Old Albuquerque is what one would expect of an area settled in 1705 and then repeatedly changed hands from the Spanish to the Mexicans to the Americans.  The town apparently was an old fort.  But it gives the impression of a medieval area of a European town.  The streets are close together and bordering on maze like.  These features are helpful when the inhabitants are constantly defending their homes from attack from invaders.  These days it is just a tourist draw and a haven for those who cater to tourists.  Not that there is anything wrong with this if it is what you are into.

The Painted Desert National Park is a very neat area to drive through.  The rocks are layered in strata of mineral compositions, e.g. limestone, iron oxide, etc... that made the rocks look, well...painted.  There are also some hiking trails to show evidence of Native American culture and also remnants of petrified forests. Pictures just can't do it any justice.  Nevertheless, here are some just to show that we were there and took photographs:

That night we stayed in Flagstaff and apparently were just in time to occupy the very last vacant room in town.  I'm not sure if was the impending holidays or some other factor (a clerk told me there were a lot of baseball teams in town) but the place was just packed.  The Grand Canyon is only an hour and  a half North and I suspect those who weren't camping in the park (like us) this was the last possible chance to find lodging.

Here are the more interesting photos from the second day of our vacation.  Many of these are excerpted from an email I previously sent.  From the email:

"Not much to report.  Drove through Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois and part of Missouri yesterday.  Stayed in a place called Rolla, about halfway between St. Louis and Springfield.  There was much rain.

Today we spent most of our time driving through Oklahoma and Texas.  Most of the time it was cloudy and aroung 75 degrees.  Good driving weather, though we did come into some hard rain between Tulsa and Oklahoma City.

Texas was slightly nicer as seen in the photos from along Route 66 (see the blue skies).  Tonight we are staying in Amarillo.  We haven't been fighting too much.  Hope to make it to Flagstaff, AZ tomorrow, maybe a bit closer to the Grand Canyon, which we plan to see on Sunday.  Then on to the Hoover Dam and then Las Vegas.

More in a few days (maybe).

-Jeremy"

Believe it or not, because of the rain this was the most interesting things we saw for the first two days:

I have smoked three cigarettes today.  I smoked four yesterday and four the day before.  I decided to quit this past Tuesday and have been cutting back for the past few days.  It isn't as bad as I expected.  Besides feeling not-quite-sick, the hardest part are not having a smoke in situations when I normally would have one.  When I leave class, or take a break at work, or when I am driving are times when I feel I should be smoking.  I want to smoke.  The force of habit is worse than the addiction.  And it just about drives me crazy.  I feel as if something is missing.

What a stupid habit.  I wish I never started.  A year and a half of the stress of architecture school was enough get me to start.  Now that I am nearly finished and the craziness is mostly over, it is time to stop for good and try to get myself into better health.

Here is a guy who took the trouble to map all places that Springsteen writes songs about.  I'm a fan of Springsteen's older music. Nebraska is one of my favorites.  He even goes as far to breakdown the list and find satellite images of the spots.  Link.

I've been hearing good things about Iain M. Banks for awhile now.  I read a lot of post-cyberpunk/post-human science fiction by British and Scottish writers and they all have good things to say about him.  The problem is that his books are a bit hard to find.  A few months ago I picked up a couple of his novels at a local used book store.  Consider Phlebas is the first in Banks' Culture series, so I decided to start with this.

So far I am about two hundred pages in and have mixed feelings about the book.  Banks goes into a lot of detail describing the universe and the characters, perhaps too much.  For example, he spent quite a bit of writing and several pages introducing eighteen (18) crew members of a ship that the main character found himself a part of.  Several pages after later he kills off half of those characters.  I am not complaining about the death of these characters, they obviously were there for story development.  This technique, I am beginning to realize, is representative of Banks' writing in this book.  He spends a great amount of energy introducing and describing new things only to throw them away after the reader becomes interested.  It would be completely infuriating if only Banks did not do this in such interesting or hilarious ways.

This particular habit of writing makes the story a bit slow at parts.  And it makes the reader constantly wonder if he is wasting his time.  The thing is: this is the only thing I can find wrong with the book and I am still reading. I want to keep reading because the writing and ideas are so good.  I am assured by a friend that most of the later Culture novels are better than this.