vacation Tues (6/11) & Wed (6/12)

Tuesday (6/11) - How life can change in an instant....Michael and I were both almost killed this morning.  Even as I am writing this, it is hard to believe we were not.  We were up at 6 and packed and on the road to Flagstaff AZ by 6:30.  We thought we would drive for a couple of hours, stop for breakfast (to break up the 5 hour drive) and then continue on.  We were probably on the road for about 45 minutes and were passing through a small 'artist-type' town that we had traveled through on Monday.  The road was a 4 lane road with no median, and the speed limit was 40 miles an hour.  I was driving in the passing lane and there was a car slightly ahead of me in the right hand lane.  Suddenly just ahead of me, for no reason that I could see, a white van/truck (Michael and I couldn't remember which) crossed the double yellow line and headed straight for us at an angle (they didn't just drift over the line, the truck made a sharp turn into the oncoming lanes).  Michael saw 2 girls on the side walk jump into the chain link fence (because at first it looked like the truck was headed that way), then the driver kind of straddled the middle line of our 2 lanes.  The car ahead of me veered to the right...the white truck struck that SUV in the rear fender and bounced back into our lane directly in front of our car...I swerved to the left and only by the grace of GOD did our cars miss each other by inches.  It was probably all over in 5 seconds or less, but It all seemed to happen in slow motion and I really had time to think 'this is it!' just before I swerved.  We pulled over to the curb and sat there shaking as we saw the truck travel a bit more on the wrong side of the road before swerving back to the correct side and roaring off.  I have never been so frightened in all of my life and still can't believe how quickly it happened.  I am 100% convinced that if I had been doing a book on tape, or even talking on a hands free phone, any distraction at all….I wouldn't be here typing this right now.  The studies they keep doing are right….we can do all of those distracting things, as long as nothing really exciting is happening on the road ahead of us.  We finally felt a bit calmer and continued on to Page AZ.

We stopped for breakfast at 11 AM (good thing we still had some leftover breakfast bars from the helicopter day!)  After breakfast, we backtracked for just a bit to the Glen Canyon Dam (upstream of the Hoover Dam) for a tour.  We watched a couple of short films, one on the early exploration of the area and one on the building of the dam itself (incredible) before our actual tour.  Our tour guide Rachel was a Native American of the Navaho tribe.  She had only moved back to the area this year, after spending 6 years in ....can you guess????  Fort Mill South Carolina!!!!!  What are the odds of that?  At one point in the tour we took an elevator down to the bottom up the dam.  As we got off of the elevator, Rachel mentioned that there was a 4 inch gap, through which we could look up and see the top...it was dizzying!  I thought one of the most interesting facts about the dam (built in the 60's) was that, if the builders hadn't done any intervening, the concrete would still be very hot!  Apparently the chemical reaction to produce the concrete produces heat....the builders put pipes throughout the concrete and ran ice water through them to cool it down and help it set. 

 

beside one of the concrete carriers

shooting down to the bottom up the dam

one of the 8 turbines used in the dam

After the tour we hopped in the car for the remaining 2 hour trip to Flagstaff AZ.  Two hours later we were no closer to our destination!!!  Michael had driven about 1/2 a mile when we hit a detour.  The roads out here are few and far between, and the detour took us miles (and hours) out of our way.  The whole time Sheila (our GARMUN) kept trying to get us to turn onto dirt roads to get back to our destination.  When we finally got to a paved road that would begin to take us back towards where we were going...there was road construction.  We sat for 15 minutes talking to Steve (a Navaho)

 

who was stopping the cars on his portion of the road (Michael wanted to give him the Indian name of 'Man with big sign'!)  We gave him a bunch of candy we were traveling with (which he really seemed to appreciate) and finally we were on our way.  Instead of arriving around 3 PM, it was after 5 when we got to the hotel and we were both beat.

Wednesday (6/12) we ate at the hotel then headed out to Sunset Crater.  This volcano erupted 900 - 1000 years ago and was probably producing lava for close to a year.  We walked the 1-1/2 mile loop around one of the lava fields:

We had a guide at the beginning of the walk and he pointed out that from where we were standing, we could see 3 of the 4 types of volcanoes there are: cinder cone (this was the Sunset Crater), strata (those were the distant San Francisco mountains) and dome.  We drove a little further into the park after our hike, looking more closely at the "cinder mountain' and the trees which were growing every which way.  We left the park and headed to the meteor crater.  They had 2 movies, one on how the crater was formed (about 50,000 years ago) and one on what the government might be able to do to prevent another large collision in the future.  Then it was off (with a guide) to walk to the rim of the crater. 

There are no pictures that can adequately convey the size of this thing.  You need a frame of reference to understand the awesomeness and size.  Our guide told us that there was a lot of debate about the crater and up until the 1950's, the government had decided that it was a volcano crater.  It wasn't until a private, interested geologist inspected it that it was determined to be a meteor impact crater.  After our visit to the rim, we visited the museum and checked out the observation deck, before leaving around 4.  One the way home, Michael said 'today we saw stuff from the deepest part of the earth and from the farthest reaches of outer space"...pretty good for one day!