Moab, Utah

(Main Street in Moab around the last time I was here.  Ain't like that now!  Image from here.)

Moab, Utah, holds a special place in my heart.  I first visited here I believe in 1994 with my friend Lauren.  Our friend Abbie was working as a park ranger at Arches National Park at the time & it seemed a good excuse to come camp & hike.  (I believe Abbie also gave us her reservations at Canyonlands that same trip, so we camped there, too.)  I came back in 1995 & dropped Lauren off - she & I camped for a night I believe, then I went to California, but I picked her up when I returned.

There's simply nothing like the landscape around here.  It's not something one forgets & yet I was surprised how unreal it seems compared to memory.

Moab was a sleepy little town the last time I was here.  No more!  The Main Street is bustling, there are apartments being built on the outskirts of town, there are restaurants & businesses I don't remember seeing the last time I was here - which was twenty-four years ago, mind you.  Wikipedia says Moab in the 1990s had around 4,000 residents, & the current population is over 5,000.  But just walking down the street today, I saw far more tourists than I remember seeing in the 1990s - & far less granola/hippie types.  (It's good to know that they have a community radio station now, though.)

None of this is terribly important because I'm supposed to be writing about my journey from Texas to Oregon, but I was stunned - stunned! - at how bustling the place seemed.  When we were first here, Abbie took me & Lauren to a tiny vegetarian restaurant (that doesn't seem to exist today) where we saw Woody Harrelson!  Now there are chain motels & a craft beer place.  & there was actual traffic getting here.*

Because it was a mostly quiet drive from Santa Rosa to Moab.  Even Albuquerque didn't seem too busy.  But the trip took longer than usual because, except for I-40, most highways were the kind which went through towns, where we were subjected to reduced speeds & traffic lights.  & sporadic rain.  That has nothing to do of course with the route, but we did hear so much about the storms in Fort Worth (& all over Texas) that we feared we'd be driving into tornadoes or hurricanes or I don't know earthquakes.  The wife & I chatted less on the drive than yesterday because we drove through "dead zones," where, as she put it, "there were no bars on the phone."

Many of the areas were Indian lands, which prompted me to tell the wife this terrible joke:

"Hey, Magda, did you know that New Mexico almost didn't join the United States?"
"I didn't know.  Why not?"
"They had reservations."

She hung up on me & blamed it on the lack of cell reception.

One other funny moment happened when we stopped at a truck stop, & I was offered some snack foods when I bought a soda, a two-for-one deal, & I just said, "No, I don't need that kind of temptation in my life."  I amused the clerk quite a bit with that comment.

The dogs were fine, they were with me of course.  Pauline, our lanky beagle girl, was initially not very happy with the lack of grass in these desert areas, but she adjusted.  The cats were not, however, as happy.  In the hotel room last night, Boone found a way through a hole in the box springs to hide under the bed, so at five am we were looking for him in the hallways of the hotel.  & they very reluctantly returned to the carriers.  Okay, they fought us.  & whenever I talked to the wife, I could hear Bolan complaining in the background.  She said she often stuck her fingers in his carrier (it was in the area just behind her seat) & he would rub his face on them & calm down a little.

Once in the hotel, they were all fine.  We took the dogs for a walk & got a vegan pizza & were lost in the midst of all kinds of tourists: campers, off-road bicyclists, jeep enthusiasts, travelers, the like.  Pauline loves meeting new people, so she was happy to say hello to whomever she could - a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses stationed outside the visitors' center were waylaid by her charms, & we were gone before they could even begin to tell us their version of the Good News.  For her part, the grumpy Yoko was too overwhelmed to bark at everyone so she barked at no-one, which prompted the wife to muse that maybe she'd be a good big city dog after all.  Maybe we'll test that hypothesis on long walks in Portland!

It was a long day & everyone is pooped.  There are no hiding places in the room for the cats so they're just lying around kinda spitefully.  The hotel lets us open the window a tad, which is fine - you forget how cold it gets at night in the desert! - & we had our pizza & now we're winding down.  Just two more days of this.  The wife is yelling at someone from Spectrum on the phone because they're charging us for something & she won't have it.  A second ago Bolan tried to jump from the floor onto the desk where my computer is, he didn't quite make it, & one of his back legs used the soft but sturdy tissue of my forearm to finish the leap.  I probably should put some neosporin or something on it.  It's quite bloody.

Tomorrow: Idaho!

* The wife wanted cookies so we walked to a nearby supermarket around 9:30 & the city had quieted down considerably.  Ten pm seems to be when it goes to sleep.  But I wonder if old-timers are a little freaked out by the late hours these days!