Hiking Monster

Jon and I went to the Grand Canyon yesterday. Stunning, astounding, breathtaking? Yes. Hordes of foreign tourists? Hell yes! But otherwise bliss? Well...

You see, the problem was that we decided to go for a hike. Or rather my sly little eyes picked out a minute little trail running down the side of an otherwise sheer cliff, and the rest of me started jumping up and down, pointing and making animal noises, demanding that we MUST go do this. You see, I've been stuck in a car for two weeks. I have so much pent up energy/ so many calories to burn from the lovely lovely lovely amazing food I've encountered this entire trip that I'm on the brink of doing spontaneous jumping jacks. Or perhaps... even... going RUNNING. Ugh.

So, the idea of the hike would have been lovely, except for two things. Firstly-- I turn brighter red than a tomato at the sound of the word exercise. I thought about that for a second, realised that Jon would probably have to see me in rapid motion at some point in our relationship, and that after eleven months, I was a silly goose to worry about it. The second, and more important problem was that I did a semester course backpacking with NOLS. NOLS is short for National Outdoor Leadership School, and, not surprisingly, it trains you to be a leader in the outdoors. I thought I hadn't gotten anything out of it, leadership-wise, focusing instead on the glory of having spent three months backpacking and rock climbing in Wyoming, Utah and South Dakota, but apparently, when mixed with my closet control-freak and brought out onto the hiking trail, I become a regular little drill sergeant. I dictated water breaks, always pushing for the next switch-back. I timed the entire hike, and was ecstatic when we made it five minutes under the recommended time, counting said water-breaks and occasional scenery-looking breaks (always surreptitiously huffing under my breath at how LONG Jon was taking to look at the damn view.) I was quietly happy when we passed people on the way back up, and mentally mocked them for being... tired from the incredibly steep ascent. I became strangely competitive when two excessively fit Aussies passed us on the trail. Jon kept an amused smile during all my dictatorial antics, only finally succumbing and bursting into laughter when we were in the grocery store, planning for today's hike, and I suggested we should each carry a bottle of Gatorade on top of the 4 liters of water I had insisted on. He replied that it was perhaps an unnecessary precaution. I turned to him, planted my hands on my hips and stated: "Sweat. Electrolytes."

We both managed to keep our faces straight for three whole minutes.

In other news, I am knitting this in Elspeth Lavold Silky Wool instead of the recommended merino and my knitting has miraculously stopped sucking and started being awesome! Hurray!

Tucumcari, NM

Apparently it takes 4 days to sober up from the drunk that the lovely New Orleans bartender (not waitress) Michelle put on me. Or perhaps, I've just had phenomenally bad luck with finding the internet.

We're in Tucumcari, New Mexico right now, en route to Las Vegas, NM and Santa Fe. Jon is napping since he had to get up early to take the car to get looked at by the mechanic, so I'm using the intervening time to look at knitting porn and catching up on all other things I've been missing since I last looked at the internets.

Our route thus far has been Princeton, New Jersey to Atlanta to New Orleans to Nottoway Plantation, Louisiana to here, with next big stop at Santa Fe. There have been assorted detours along the way, as we both have an absurd fascination with small town life, and so we've managed to rack up a good deal of time looking like insane foreigners, wandering around towns and exclaiming over silos and such. Our itinerary coming up is Santa Fe to Flagstaff to Grand Canyon National Park to Los Angeles. Jon will move into his brand new apartment and I'll take a plane back to school to start off the school year. Scary.

Unfortunately, I have to cut this short, as the immensely scary woman at the desk just called up menacingly to inform us that check-out is in 15 minutes. More coherent posting and road stories from Santa Fe, hopefully.

I am in New Orleans, and I am in love with a waitress named Michelle. Anything more will require a longer blog entry than I am sober enough to spell.

Great concept for a comedy

12:15 am, Holiday Inn reception.
Guy at the desk: You know, if you sign up to enlist, you'll get six dollars off on your room.
[Jon, half-asleep, pauses and assumes that it's actually only something involving signing a sheet. He nods vaguely.]
GATD: Then again, I'm not sure if the six dollar discount is actually worth having to go to Iraq.

I wonder how many people have accidentally been suckered into this. For SIX DOLLARS?!

On the road again

Greetings from the Holiday Inn Express in Greensboro, North Carolina! After innumerable setbacks, mainly involving the difficulty of consolidating Jon's possessions into one car, we finally closed the trunk and made it out of the garage, heading (eventually) out to places West.

For now, we're mainly heading southwards down the coast, towards Atlanta, where through a strange freak of coincidence two friends of ours (his childhood best friend and one of my best friends in high school) ended up as roommates and continue to live together. Visiting them should be interesting, as I haven't seen Josh since graduation, though there was a time when we spoke on the phone every night before bed. I'm minorly terrified of the fact of being the one girl in a trio of boys, and also of being relegated to bizarre limbo "girlfriend" status. Also, from what I have gathered from Jon and knowing Josh, all of them tend to consider themselves comedians in some sense or other. Worst case scenario, I sit, idly sulking and nursing a beer, while Jon and his friend devolve into inside-joke land. Best case scenario, we'll have a great time in Atlanta. It's just my antisociality kicking in.

From Atlanta, we plan to head on towards New Orleans, to see what there is to see, then the route is tentatively Baton Rouge, then Dallas, some other town in Texas, Albuquerque (sp?), Sedona, and then eventually LA! My grandfather lives roughly an hour outside of Los Angeles, so we're going to stop and say hi to him en route.

More updates will be forthcoming, if random hotels keep up this new trend of free wireless in the rooms (for which I could kiss every single fat unfriendly lady sitting behind the desk at Reception.) I predict that there will also be great amounts of lovely Southern food consume (mmm... fried chicken) and as we get further West, lots of lovely Creole cooking and Mexican food and random things like Navajo frybread. Hopefully this will not occur with an equivalent addition to my waistline. Here's to the "fitness centers"!