We were up early (I think we are still on Florida time) and ready to go at 7:40 this morning, and no one was more anxious to leave than Beamer. Being in the desert, the hotel didn't have as much as a small patch of grass. Last night when he went for a walk, he stepped on a burr and got it stuck in his foot, which didn’t make him very happy. At that point he decided Santa Rosa should be in his rear view mirror, so in the morning he was happy to leave.

When we pulled out of the hotel parking lot, the temperature was 50 degrees and the seat heater felt awfully good. It was overcast for several hours and since we were at 5,000 ft., visibility was limited and some of the hill tops were in the clouds. By the time we got to Arizona, the sun had come out and the temperature was up to 90 degrees. Ahhhhh.

We drove through Albuquerque and on west, into a lot of desolate areas. Along the way we saw a few small towns and what appeared to be a lot of poverty…rusting singlewides and dilapidated wooden houses in clusters here and there. It would be really easy to come to the conclusion that the people in these areas have no interest or motivation to keep up their homes and their land, for it seems like, whenever they are finished with something, whether it be a house, car, truck, or anything else, they just abandon it wherever it stands and let it fall apart or rust to death. We saw falling-down houses and junk everywhere. Sad.

As we drove on, the elevation varied between 5500 ft. and 7000 ft. But the temperature remained constant. The desert, on the other hand, was constantly changing. Sometimes it was tan dirt with small sage bushes peppered about and a few dark evergreens on flat land that went on for miles and miles. At other times, the dirt was gray and the land was rutted like a dried up river bed. And at times the ground was covered with yellow grass, mixed with silver green sage. I thought about Karen, and how she would really like this color palate. In Arizona the topography was more interesting and the colors brighter. Plateaus rose majestically out of the ground and displayed various shades of pink and orange and gray in horizontal striations, with green plants on top. At one point one plateau extended westward for miles and it seemed to sprout lines of mesas out of its side like fingers, side by side in straight lines. And later in the day, rock formations were everywhere, huge, round, smooth, orange eruptions from the ground below. Beautiful.

We passed New Mexico’s Land of Fire and Ice, a place on the Continental Divide, where exists the Bandera Volcano near the Ice Cave. We didn’t have time to stop, but we did see a lot of black lava rock along the road. And we saw a lot of mines in the hillsides. They mine coal in the Navajo Reservation. We saw a big power facility where the coal is utilized to produce energy, and we saw the trains that bring the coal to the plant. Yes, like last year, we saw A LOT of trains. The tracks were always out there, and the trains were almost constant, sometimes to our left, and sometimes on the right side of the road, loaded with tractor trailers and containers piled one on top of another.

As we approached Flagstaff, we rounded a mountain and on the other side were tall green trees, lots of them, and grass and plants. It became another world. We checked into our hotel in the late afternoon and made plans for tomorrow, when we visit the Grand Canyon. And I ended the day reflecting on the beauty that is our country, the USA.