This is the Great Sand Dunes National Park in this picture here. There's a little stream that comes down nice and cold only in the spring from the snowmelt and people swim in it. Bizarre scene really, basically a beach, huge sand dunes, and in the background snow-covered mountains at 14,000ft. We climbed up to the highest one barefoot; nice to have that warm but not hot sand to walk in, and a lot more fun to jump downhill than going up. So we parked the van in a Comfort Inn parking lot, ready to finally go over the Continental Divide in the morning.
Crossing over the divide at around 10,000ft on the way to Durango the trees changed pretty instantly. Aspens and Cottonwoods now besides just the pines like it is on the East of the Divide. Well we got into Durango and after a while of biking around town I went for a run. This was at somewhere over 7,000ft but somehow the first run I really felt good on. Maybe I finally adapted to the altitude from the 2 weeks in Denver, or maybe I just can't deal with morning runs... Either way it was good to be back running fast again without feeling like I might collapse after 20 minutes.
Mesa Verde is a weird National Park, because, while most National Parks are devoted to various natural wonders, meant as spaces not to be developed, untouched by the hand of man, the entire idea of Mesa Verde is these man-made cliff houses from the 1200's a National Park. Not that it wasn't an amazing place, but a brick house built in the 13th century hardly merits a monument on any other continent. We took a tour of the "Balcony House" led by a Ranger but they let you walk all around and in the buildings, just as long as you don't touch the walls. There was a 32-foot ladder (they were always very specific about the 32-feet part of it) you had to climb and a little hole of a tunnel to crawl through at one point. There are hundreds of these cliff dwellings around, but after you see a few, your mind gets saturated with pueblos for a while and you go.
Out of here we headed into the Ute Reservation and then into the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico. We stopped for gas here and a Navajo man pumping gas into his truck in front of us started asking about our trip. He said he liked Virginia and he saw our license plate, said it was like Germany. I told him it's close but less snow and less Germans generally. We asked him where to eat but he said everything here in this town is closed we should go over to Farmington. He told us a little about the Reservation, how it was the biggest because the Navajo Nation would never sell off their land. He said if he had more time he'd show us around. "In Virginia you have hicks, like 'rednecks', right? Well here I'm a real Red redneck" I got a kick out of that. He welcomed us and we took off towards Santa Fe.
Tearing pretty fast out of Santa Fe, a clusterfuck of fake adobe, Indian jewelery, tourists, and art, we needed to stop for gas since the trip odometer hit 300mi an the van gas gauge doesn't work anymore. I pulled around to a cheap gas station on an Indian Reservation and Robert filled up the gas. He had to go inside to get the free 12oz. Coke they give you with a tank of gas and there was me, pulled around on the other side of the pump towards the road waiting for him, just thinking about some strange dream I'd had the night before and how I needed to let go of trying to control everything that happened to me so much so I could just live and enjoy it more, and me just kind of staring out the window in the mirrors looking at a girl in a white dress and a hat with a dog waiting for Robert and wondering what was going on inside her head under that hat. He came back with his Coke and I drove out of there pushing the van pretty hard. It was a hot day, so the van would get to the point of overheating in the desert there every hour or so. We stopped at casinos along the way to let it cool and I won four and a half dollars at one and lost twenty at the next. Time to get to Arizona.
Right when you come into Arizona on Interstate 40, you go into the Petrified Forest so we checked it out. Some badlands and strangle piles of petrified wood that looks like it's been chopped up by someone, but since it's made of stone that's unlikely. They had signs everywhere telling you not to "collect" the wood or take it with you and the Rangers would ask you if you had any wood on you, and they even had an incredibly boring 20 minute video that ended with a man getting arrested for taking some wood out of the park. Really I didn't want this petrified wood that much, or at all; I didn't really get why anyone would, so I left it alone.
So here we have to fill up with gas again somewhere in Holbrook, AZ and it's the old mechanical pump and you can even pump you gas before you pay, right off of old Route 66 near the Wigwam hotels. We run into the grocery store to get something to cook up for dinner and some beer, and when we come out this old drunk Indian comes up and starts asking about where we've been and where we're going. He was interested but seemed like he was more interested in the four and a half dollars I had in my pocket from earlier. So he prayed for us in Navajo, all is going good, but then he decided that wasn't enough and he needed to inform me that I didn't believe in anything not even myself and unless I did something about it I would be cursed to death. I told him I knew better than he did about that and I believed in myself just fine, and besides I was the only one who could do anything about it anyway. He told me he was a medicine man and knew he was the only one who could help me, and then he asked me for a dollar. I said "hell no I'm not giving you a dollar, you just cursed me, that's not really the way to go about it" and then Robert gave him a dollar. I got in the van and asked Robert what he did that for, and then we took off to find somewhere to stop for the night.
Day 26, 3885mi, 1 oil change
