AUGUST 17, 2005

Today was a tragic day. I don’t even want to talk about it.

This morning, leaving the hotel, we had a miscommunication of the worst kind. Liz was packing the car and she pointed out a box that she had shoved some patches and the medicine wheel into. I opened the lid to look inside, but left it where is was since Liz was packing. S

he thought that since I had opened the box, that I had put it away. The was left on the trunk when we drove off, and didn’t realize it until a mile down the road. We drove back and scoured every block for a mile. I was dogging between traffic like Frogger, but no luck. Not even any debris. And we SEARCHED.

Tell me why we didn’t even find the paper things were wrapped in?

I think someone took it. Really. After searching more than an hour, we had to resign ourselves to the loss of 5 patches and a medicine wheel. Since I’d already told my mom about the medicine wheel, I had to replace it. We stopped at a Navaho trading post and found a very similar one. Hopefully a little searching online will help us replace the patches.

So, we’re already in a bad mood when we head out of town and drive an hour to Four Corners… which is literally in the middle of nowhere, only to discover that they won’t take checks or credit cards… and since we had no way off getting cash, we had to leave without seeing the monument. Disappointing to say the least.

Then, we headed south to the Petrified Forest, or tried to, anyway. Our route meant driving through the heart of the Navaho Nation. Now, the map shows one or two main road that go through it, but that’s because there isn’t funding enough (assuming) to fully map the reservations. And road signs are nearly nonexistent.

We didn’t realize our road had forked and we were on the wrong side of the fork until we were beyond the wrong direction. For the first time on our trip, we could honestly say that we were lost in America; or the Navaho Nation, specifically.

We couldn’t locate ourselves on the map because there was no map. It took some uneducated guessing and 35 miles on a broken down dirt road to get us back on track.

Eventually, we made it to the Petrified Forest, which was so much fun. Liz found a crow that thought he was a chicken, and I took tons of pictures of both the painted desert and the petrified forest. Gorgeous!

Some of those pieces date to 225 million years ago. That’s positively unbelievable. Tomorrow we’re going to the Grand Canyon, and tonight we’re staying in the stereotypical 70’s décor Route 66 hotel.Good Night!

Peace