Raspberry Flavored Notes from the Road

I bought a new Blackberry. But since it's red, I consider it more of a Raspberry. It was useful during the approximately 70 hours I spent in the passenger seat of our Ford pickup the last week, half of it while pulling a U-Haul trailer over the Rocky Mountains (if you don't think a pickup can whine, wait until you ask it to pull a trailer doing 75 at 7,000 feet and climbing).

I started writing notes to myself while listening to The Road by Cormac McCarthy. He tends to lapse into poetry, and although I may be alone in this, some of it is ghastly purple colored.

Although I loved it when trees in a forest fire became "heathen candles," I must draw the line when commuters nuked inside their cars were purported to have "10,000 dreams ensepulchered in their crozzled hearts. " I don't know what a crozzled heart is, but I plan to develop one, just so I can use the word some more.

Here are some of the notes I made. Now that I read them, I realize how little entertainment value there is in them, but it's all I got, except for pictures, which will take some time to upload and edit (I got a little carried away).
And, no, I don't know what's up with the fonts. I tried to tame them, but they would not be tamed.

Apparently one must order food to be served alcohol in this Utah establishment. Dean plans to order one hundred beers and a taco.

Wyoming is smoggy. There are smokestacks in all directions.

There are trucks the colors of every jelly bean in the jar. How come trucking is seen as such a macho vocation?

Here is a porn exit. The only service here is porn. Looks like they had gas pumps at some time, but they must not have been nearly as lucrative as the porn.

Easter sunday and we are here and in need of wine. Blue laws are still in place here in Colorado. No drinks over 6 percent alcohol can be purchased in grocery stores and no liquor stores may open on Sunday - especially Easter Sunday. We feel like such reprobate winos.

If you see a pair of black skid marks on the road, you can bet you will see a dead deer on the side of the road. About every mile or two in some places.

By the amount of empty houses out here in the deserty areas of Utah, it seems like the odds of any particular modern-day pioneer's making a go of it around here are about 50-50. Either that or the folks here opt to move and start over about 50 yards away on their 40 acres of scrub when their old house starts to looked a little out of date.

Someone has performed random acts of Christmas out here - on randomly selected scrub junipers.

We passed by Mesa Verde, thinking we didn't have time to wait in line to see Indian ruins. Then we notice some just visible from the road - a small pull-out called the Butler Indian Ruins. There are 3 cars here (including ours). There was an iron railing and a wash between us and the caves both of which were easily breached with a little energy and some good hiking boots. You could see the little adobe-bricked rooms - just like at Mesa Verde, only probably a little snugger, and with no park rangers. Or crowds.

Drew heard his first "my heck" in Mormonland yesterday. Now it's his favorite new swear word.

There's a Remington print in our room tonight. I had to convince Drew that the Indians in the painting (the ones being perp-walked by some other Indians on horses) were horse thieves and not slaves.

Today we saw Zion National Park and a herd of buffalo with a pet cow. Oh, and we hiked 1488 feet straight up to Angel's Landing . No big thing. We weren't tired yet so we kept going another mile or so up the trail. On two granola bars for breakfast and lunch.

We are going through a town called La Verkin. The name was so off-the-wall that I had to look it up on my raspberry as soon as I had a signal (oddly, signals seem to come and go out here in the far red corner of nowhere) first I tried a French-to-English dictionary. The French would not claim such an ugly word. Wiki theorized that the name was a bastardization, or Mormonization, of the Spanish name (and pronunciation) of the town's river, La Virgin. That's where we felt the urge to buy cheese in a can.

Here I am, sitting in a Best Western in Boise squirting cheese out of a can on to a Triscuit cracker and waiting for Drew to come back from the store with some wine - completely medicinal for long-distance-driving-induced swelling - to round out my meal. Guess its time to go home.