AB1 Tour 2014 - Week 30 - Chinle, Flagstaff, Havasu Falls, AZ and HOME!

Okay, we’re down to the last blog entry for “AB1’s Travails … (make that “Travels”) 2014.”  It’s been one exciting moment after another for seven months, but now it’s time to act like a grown-up and go home and pay some bills.  Our time on the road was summarized nicely by loyal reader John Janezic from Mesa, AZ, who enjoys following us on Facebook.  He calls it our “constant vacation.”
     I like the sound of that.

 On Sunday, October 19, we made our way to Monument Valley, Utah.  It was the only site this year out of the 43 campgrounds at which we pitched our mobile tent that we also visited last year.  Unfinished business and all, you know.  We had actually planned to stay further east at Canyon de Chelly (pronounced “d’SHAY”), but there didn’t seem to be any campgrounds with full-service hook-ups (electricity, water, sewer, cable), and we didn’t want to risk the cats getting stuck in AB1 with no air conditioning on an unseasonably hot day.  They also need to watch their “stories”on “Animal Planet” cable, so, Monument Valley it was.
   The next day we made the 85-mile drive to the aforementioned Canyon de Chelly (CDC) National Monument.  This incredible freak-land of nature has some of the most beautiful scenery in the country.  In fact, after pretty much seeing the whole nation this year, we’d both have to say that the prettiest natural scenery is in the Arizona-Utah lands of canyons and mountains … just our opinion, remember.
     CDC was established on April 1, 1931.  Its 84,000 acres are located within the Dine’ (Navajo) Nation Reservation.  A few Navajo families still live down in the canyon making it one of the longest continually inhabited areas in the North America.  Native Americans have lived there for over 5,000 years.  It was only (only?) about 700 years ago that they moved away, probably due to lack of water.  The walls that create the canyons are 1,000’ high over the canyon floor.
     On our self-guided tour, we stopped at a few overlooks.  The first was Spider Rock, an 800’ tall spire that is the most prominent landmark in the area.  It was named for “Spider Woman,” the deity who taught Navajo woman how to weave.  She’s a distant relation to Spiderman.
   

 We also made stops at Face Rock, Sliding House, and finally the White House overlook.  At this last one, we hiked the only trail down into the canyon permitted without a Navajo guide.  As usual, going down was easy; going up, well, we made a few more stops to rest up.  When we finally made it to the bottom, we were rewarded with the site of The White House Ruins/Cliff Dwellings.  They are absolutely incredible.  Approximately 12 families used to live at the White House Ruins which had 80 rooms.  The cliff dwellings were constructed around 1060 A.D.  A lovely French-Canadian couple was nice enough to take our Christmas card picture for us in front of the ruins.  Our cards will be titled:  “Merry Christmas … from the White House!”
     Our fine Monument Valley campground had the good sense to offer cable TV hook-ups, so the next day after some extensive R&B (rest and blogging), we were able to watch game 1 of the 2014 Major League Baseball World Series.  It’s something I never miss.  The Giants’ Madison Bumgarner was tough again as he led the Bay Area boys to win #1.
     Now all you Kaye and Stuart blogsters are keenly aware that we don’t normally pay to take tours.  We like doing it on our own, figuring things out for ourselves.  Plus, you’re usually at the mercy of the many weird eccentricities of the other tour customers.  But unfortunately for us on Wednesday, the 17-mile road through Monument Valley is far too bumpy for us to drive our little Zippy, so we decided that the only way we were going to get to see the incredible sites of the Valley was to bite the bullet and take the tour.  Good luck to us today.
     Our Monument Valley campground was in Utah, but most of the park is in Arizona.  It’s also a Navajo Tribal Park; its 30,000 acres were established in 1958.  Its elevation is 5,500’ on the Utah-Arizona border.  The first inhabitants of the Valley were the Anasazi who built cliff dwellings there some 1,500 years ago, then vanished.   

 To see as much as possible without shooting the whole day, we opted for the morning deluxe tour of 3.5 hours.  Besides the sites of Monument Valley, we also got to go into a traditional Navajo shelter.  It was a hexagon shaped dome structure called a “hogan” where an elderly Navajo woman showed us how to weave blankets.  She used some of her homemade yarn to tie up Diedre’s hair as my comely wife was the only lady young enough in the tour with somewhat long hair.  I then proceeded to pull the bonehead move of the day (or better “the week, the month, or the year”) when I tried to take DK’s picture with the elder Navajo woman.  Not paying attention as I am wont to do, I attempted to kneel down for a better picture by bracing myself on a nearby metal table … only … it wasn’t a table.  It was a stove.
     HOT!  HOT!  HOT!
   

 Yes, I and about everybody else in the hogan yelled, although I was the only one who burned the four fingertips on my left hand.  Luckily, Joe the Navajo Guide had a rare old Indian salve that he smeared on my fingers.  Miraculously, it took the pain away immediately as well as my fingerprints.  If I’m going to commit any major crimes in the near future, I’ll have to do them left-handed so as to leave no fingerprints.  Joe had a Navajo name for his rare burn ointment.  He called it “bah-ka-teen.”  I noticed the bottle spelled it “Bactine.”

 Coming back rapidly from that near-death experience, I gamely hung in there and finished the tour.  We made it to “John Ford’s Point,” named for the first Hollywood director to use Monument Valley for movies.  His initial film there was “Stagecoach” in 1938 starring John Wayne.
     

There were so many incredible natural rock formations.  I can’t remember what they called one, so I named it “The Big W” which you’ll no doubt remember from that great movie from the early ‘60’s, “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.”  I can still remember a dying Jimmy Durante telling the group who found him after he drove his car off a cliff, “IT’S UNDER THE BIG ‘W’ I’M TELLING YOU!  350-G’s AND I’M GIVIN’ IT TO YOU!  I TELL YA, I’M GIVING IT TO YOU!  THE BIG W!”
   

 We also made it to “The Big O,” although the natives prefer to call it “The Big Hogan.”  It was a natural amphitheater with an incredible natural hole in the rock ceiling.  As we laid on the ground looking up at The Big O, native guide Joe sang to us an ancient tribal Indian song; I think it made the Top 40 in 1887.
   

 Although the sites were spectacular, we really can’t recommend this tour to you, our loyal blogophiles.  It seemed that every ten minutes, Joe was stopping the tour bus at mini-flea markets where his pals and palettes were selling Indian jewelry and other trinkets.  It was time better spent seeing the countryside, but we really had no voice in the matter.
   

 One year ago on the 2013 AB1 Tour, Diedre and I had hiked around the legendary Monument Valley landmark, The Left Mitten.  Just short of four miles, we had gotten halfway around it when the rains came.  Lucky us.  This year, under very blue skies, we decided to try it again.  It’s one of the best hikes we’ve ever taken, although for whatever reason, this year we were completely exhausted by the time we got back to the trail head.  Maybe we needed the rain to energize us.  When we got home, we collapsed on the couch, barely able to stay awake to see Kansas City even up the Series at a game apiece.
   

 On Thursday, October 23, we drove to Flagstaff, AZ, for a two night stay.  We had originally scheduled it to meet up with DK’s cousin, Connie, whom she hadn’t seen in 30-some years.  Unfortunately, Connie was called out of state.  But we had never really given Flagstaff a fair shot, having driven through it at least 20 times on our way to and from Minnesota, but never stopping for anything more than gas and a Burger King.  So on this night, we decided to walk the historic downtown portion of the city.  And it was fascinating. 

 The next day we saw another of Arizona’s Native American ruins at the Walnut Canyon National Monument.  Elevation there was 6,690’ at the trail’s start.  The ancient Sinagua people appeared here about 1,400 years ago.  In 1915, Walnut Canyon was declared a national monument to preserve the remains of 300 ruins, mostly cliff dwellings.  The homes, built on the side of mountains using huge rocks naturally cantilevered out as roofs, acted as natural fortresses.  The most scenic hike led up and down the mountain as we investigated the centuries old cliff dwellings.  Diedre also got in some much-needed Grand Canyon training while I tested the strength limits of every bench they had along the route.   
 Exhausted and starving, we made our way back into town to a place we had been to in years past.  The Beaver Street Brewery is loved by us for three things: an incredible tap beer selection; the best Fish Tacos of all time (says Diedre); and the best (says Alexx) Chicken Caesar Salad (with anchovies) ever.  The salad was so huge that no matter how much I ate … it never got any smaller!
     “How can that be?” I asked.
     “Oh, it be, “ replied Diedre Kaye (Note another “Seinfeld” reference).    

 After that hardy lunch, we walked off some of the calories by checking out the campus of the nearby Northern Arizona University.  Diedre wanted to see the theatre department’s offerings because so many of her young students and actors had attended college there.  As part of my history fix, we found the first campus building erected in the late 1800’s; now it’s an art museum.  It was a very pretty campus, especially with the autumn leaves falling everywhere.  We’re just not accustomed to seeing leaves, at least not since our time in Minnesota 17 years ago.  It was fun to see them again, although I told Diedre in no uncertain terms … I’M NOT RAKING THEM! We then picked up pizza and boogied back to AB1 in time to see KC win World Series game #3.  YAY!
   

 OK, one more stop to go, then it’s home again for the first time in seven months.  While we drove to Lake Havasu, AZ, DK and I went through our usual ways to pass time while going between campgrounds: crossword puzzles, sports trivia, brainstorm sessions and research about a play I’m working on (entitled “The Hobo Diet”; watch for it on Broadway soon), and books-on-tape (CDs).  We had been so enthralled by the book, “Unbroken” by Laura Hillenbrand that at times we couldn’t wait to get back into driving mode so we could hear more of the story.  Well, today we finished it.  It was the incredible true story of Louis Zamperini, an American runner who qualified for the 1936 “Hitler” Olympics, and who later, as a bombardier, crashed in the Pacific, survived 47 days on a life raft while constantly battling sharks and Japanese aircraft gunners, and then went through two years of absolute hell in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps.  It was a gripping tale.  It premiers as a movie on Christmas Day; you won’t want to miss this one.
     Settling in that night at the fine Havasu Springs RV Park and Resort, we relaxed as the Giants evened up the Series at two games each.  The unrelaxing part would come tomorrow.
     Historically, Diedre and I avoid time-share presentations like the plague.  Oh sure, we did one in Key West, FL, in order to get both free snorkel cruises and free admissions into the Ernest Hemingway House, complete with six-toed cat descendents of Ernest’s original pets.  And on the island of Cozumel, Mexico, we did cave in on a 90-minute presentation in order to get free use of a motorbike for touring the island.  But those happened 20+ years ago, and we had never done one since.  Life’s too short and there’s too much else to see and do on our trips to waste time subjecting yourself to the entreaties of high-powered sales people.  So, we didn’t … until now.
     This resort offered something we actually might use: free camping for life all over the country for a one-time fee.  That plus an offer of four free nights on this trip plus $100 of gas and a free I-Pad knock-off (I think it was an “R-Pad”) made the 90-minute presentation seem somewhat reasonable.  Sooooo, on Sunday, October 26, we met with Stacy, the campground timeshare guy.  I knew I shouldn’t trust him almost immediately; he was wearing a Green Bay Packer T-shirt.  After the presentation, he did that salesman thing where he pushed for a commitment right away.  Diedre wanted to do some research on his offer, so in the end, he gave us 24 hours.  While I then watched Madison Bumgarner win for the Giants again, Diedre got out her computer and calculator and went to work.  That was not a good sign for Stacy.
     It turned out that by reading the fine print, Diedre discovered that the “free” camping promised us would actually cost about $3,000 a year in miscellaneous “fees.”  The next morning, Stacy was shocked to hear that; apparently the resort had fooled him, too.  We said we might consider it again in two years, and like that, our 90-minute commitment was over.
     

Before dinner, we hiked the Bill Williams River National Wildlife Refuge, both The Delta Trail and The Peninsula Trail.  It’s an incredible bird sanctuary and there’s also apparently very good fishing in the area.
     From there, we drove into Lake Havasu City.  It was founded in 1963, but multi-millionaire Robert McCulloch of McCulloch chain-saws And Engines really gave the city its notoriety when he bought at auction the nursery rhyme famous London Bridge for $2.46-million in 1968.  The London Bridge was erected in London over the Thames River in 1831, but 90 years later, they realized it couldn’t handle the weight of 20th century automobile traffic, so the city put it up for sale.  Winning bidder McCulloch then had the bridge disassembled, the bricks painstakingly numbered, and had it shipped to Lake Havasu City.  The bridge was reconstructed in 1971.  I especially like that the vintage lamps on the bridge were made from the melted down cannons of Napoleon Bonaparte’s army.
     

Dinner that night was at a brewery that was practically ON the London Bridge.  And contrary to what I’ve heard many times over the years, London Bridge is NOT falling down.
  Dinner was followed by a walk over to the movie theater to see that wonderful new Bill Murray movie, “St. Vincent.”  We both recommend it.  Bill Murray attended Regis College with my lifelong friend, John “Duppy” Lamb, back in the late 60’s.  If you ever get a chance, ask Dupp to tell you the story of when Bill Murray pranked him with the “Atomic Sit-up” gag.  It’s pretty funny.  

 For all practical purposes, that movie was the end of “RV Trip 2014.”  On Tuesday, we had our last R&B.  We packed up for the final time as we watched the Royals rally to tie the Series at 3-games all.  Then on Wednesday, October 29, we set sail for the last time this year.  In just three hours, we’d be home for the first time in 212 days.
     Although it has been a great time these past seven months, as Dorothy so wisely once` said:  “THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME!  THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME!”
     See you in 2015!