April 26, 2014
It is coffee time and the sun, the blue, blue sky and San
Andreas Mountains greet us. This is one of the wonderful things about this kind
of travel: although the daily rituals of living remain the same – set-up then
tear-down the campsite; make the coffee and breakfast, clean up the dishes,
etc., etc. – the environment in which it is all done changes dramatically from
day-to-day and often many times within the same day. It is the thing that I
find the most interesting about traveling. For others it is the food, or the
culture, or the customs (all amazing!) but for me it is more about the physical
& natural environment. From oceans to deserts; from prairies to mountains;
from cities to country … I love these changes.
Today is the 26th of April. It is my father’s
birthday and I am thankful that he is alive and fairly well (better than in
previous years) and that I will see him soon. Today would also have been
Dominique’s birthday – 51 years old – it will soon be 6 months since his sudden
and extremely regretful death. Being on this road-trip is good for
Marie-Andrée. We speak daily about Dom and so many things about the trip bring
up memories of him. Her grieving of her brother will take a lifetime, but she
is allowing herself to be in the grief and at the same time, see beyond it. My
thoughts are with his whole family, especially Sylvain, his twin brother, his
wife and his children and of course his mother.
As we arrived at the base of the San Andreas Mountain range
where we camped last night (at campsite number 26 to mark their birthdays), Marie-Andrée looked up and said “those
two peaks are my twin brothers, the one next to it my mother and next to it my
other brother”.
I looked up at the jagged range beside them and said “and
those are all the Thifault sisters – strong, beautiful and omnipresent”.
Last night the full moon rose over the mountains and we had
a fire burning. It was cool, but not cold (which is very different than other
nights where we wore every piece of clothing we could find) and there are no
other people nearby. It is peaceful and we are feeling at peace.
I suppose I should try to give some kind of chronological account
of our trip (Marie-Andrée has been doing that very successfully in French) but
my mind doesn’t work that way, really. My thoughts are more abstract.
There was so much preparation for this trip that I find
although there are daily surprises; I already had an idea what things would be
like. For Marie-Andrée, who did not do any of the planning everything is a
major surprise. The second half of the trip will be a surprise for both of us
because I ran out of energy to map out the whole 3 months in detail. Although
we have had no reservations, I had a fairly good idea where we would camp (even
GPS coordinates to get us there) and the dates we would be at any given area.
We have had the freedom of changing things – adding destinations (the caves of
Sonora … wow!) and leaving other areas earlier than planned because of weather
or less interest or what ever. For the following weeks, I really have no idea
where we will stay or how to get there. That will make life a bit more complex
and will slow us down a bit, but it will be a new experience and even more
surprises for me, too! (check out the license plate above: "I'm lost" :)
Sunday April 28, 2013
We have been in the Santa Fe region now for 2 nights, where
we are staying is the extreme opposite of our previous campsite I described
above. Here we decided to stay in a KOA commercial site. It is pretty awful!
Crowded, ugly, dusty and uninteresting but we have our reasons for staying –
they have great showers and laundry facilities and WiFi (although the reception
is lousy and each photo I add to the blog takes about 5 minutes -- ggrrrrrrr). Since
American cities can be dangerous (not the case with Santa Fe I think), we tend
to stay in commercial campgrounds near cities. I will rethink this in the
future, but for now it has worked OK.
Speaking of Santa Fe – I am in LOVE (coup de foudre) ! It is rare that I fall
in love with a city but Santa Fe seems perfect. Approximately 300 days of sun
per year (oh the glorious light!), the desert hills and mountains as the
backdrop, and the city full of beautiful adobe homes and buildings (the city
has enforced this type of construction for many many years so there are no ugly
suburbs and no ugly chain stores visible in the downtown areas. The city is
full of art and culture.
I finally went to the Georgia O’Keeffe museum (which I have wanted to do for many, many years, n'est-ce pas, Aline?) and will
likely go to her ghost ranch near Taos tomorrow.The population has a very strong Native and Hispanic communities and we haven’t seen the kind of extremes of wealth and poverty (side-by-side) that I have seen in all the other cities that we have visited.
I met a young woman from Winnipeg, living in Santa Fe for the past few years for her studies, who confirmed my opinion of the city. She has no intentions of returning to Winnipeg anytime soon if she can help it. Gee, I wonder why? (Sorry Alissa but I don't think you would trade Montreal for your native Winnipeg, either?)
Other amazing sites and experiences during the past week:
the White Sands National Monument (I will leave out all the part of it being a
military missile deployment site – WTF?). Incredible mountains of white gypsum
sands created by the former landlocked waters that evaporated and left the
gypsum behind. This normally doesn’t occur in nature because it is very rare
that water is landlocked and usually any dissolved gypsum using remains
dissolved and finds its way to the ocean. Or that is how I understand the
phenomenon. I put many nice photos in Marie-Andrée's blog post and since downloading takes a lot of time, I will let you look at the photos which follow in her text.
What is fascinating, too, is how the White Sands suddenly appear on the
horizon as a kind of a cloud of blowing sands. We had just descended the Sacramento
Mountain range (thank goodness for good brakes!), which on the Eastern side is
all conifers and rugged land, and the Western side is bare red rock and cliffs. After crossing several miles of nondescript flat, desert lands, suddenly the white cloud appeared and then the sand dunes and then the pure white sand mountains. Walking on the hills of sand is interesting because the sand is cool even on the hottest of days since gypsum does not absorb heat. Also, wherever there has been moisture, the gypsum is in large crystals which are much firmer to walk on. By observing carefully you can see where the loose sand 'pools' and where the firmer sand banks and allows for easier walking. We might have borrowed toboggans and slide down the hills, as some people did, but we walked and photographed instead. (Sand surfing, Rägi?).
After spending a lot of time doing these blogs and several loads of laundry, I will sign off now and go enjoy more of what Santa Fe has to offer. Au plaisir!
