Not so random thought from the road

... and where we heap effusive praise upon the government... in a manner of speaking...



Heavy thunder showers across central and southern Utah and the four corners region, including a couple of tornado touchdowns in northern Arizona, is threatening our road trip but there is some collateral benefit to this inclement weather which we will share later.




One of the things promised by Porkulus was that they would spend between $2 and $4 billion on infrastructure upgrades in our National Park system of which we were assured was in dire need (this was in addition to radio spots begging for donations to the NPS for the same reason). Being frequent visitors to various sites of this nation's best idea, we were skeptical as the eye test simply did not warrant this outlay. Sure, an upgrade here and there, but upwards of $4 billion worth?

After giving it some thought, we felt that perhaps the easiest and most accurate way to assess the infrastructural health of an individual national park would be to grade what is probably the most representative feature of the efficiency and aesthetics of any publicly-held land and that would be...


.... the block house.







After a random sampling of 4 outhouses inside Canyonlands National Park, let's look at the scores.


Lighting: With plenty of windows for natural lighting, even with the stormy/overcast conditions: Good

Cleanliness: Probably the most important factor: Excellent

Quantity/Availability: Adequate

Provisioning: Eight rolls of TP good enough for you?: Again, Excellent.

And bonus points for each one being outfitted with an anti-bacterial (scented!) gel dispenser.



And let's all bear in mind that Canyonlands NP, located where it is in southeastern Utah is, by definition, remote.

In all seriousness, if the overall condition of the park infrastructure (visitor center, road conditions, camp site maintenance, condition of hiking trails, etc.) of Canyonlands NP is to be taken as an example, then our skepticism is only confirmed.

And if the National Park Service is truly operating under budget, then they should be held up as an example of a federal agency that is doing a masterful job with limited resources.

Overall, the Park Service does an outstanding job with balancing the desires of the public with respect to access on one hand and on the other, not turning our park system into a paved, four-lane, amusement park.

A Bravo-Zulu to the policy-makers and men and women in uniform of the U.S. National Park Service.





Oh, and those collateral benefits to crappy weather? This is what we were treated to traveling west on I-70 and which set north of the highway after a squall blew threw.







Needless to say, this picture does not do justice to this God-send.

County Road 59 and a naming contest

After traveling through the high desert farming region of the Hopi Nation Reservation in northeast Arizona, we needed to get back to Kayenta, AZ, the gateway to Monument Valley. There was an unmarked road on our Rand-McNally Atlas off of U.S. 191 that turned out to be County Road 59 and it did not disappoint.





















And now for our naming contest...

these dudes showed up about half-way through our trek from Many Farms to Kayenta.


















Our working title so-to-speak will be "Grumpy Norsemen" but we will submit any and all worthy submissions to the Navajo County fathers for their consideration.


P.S. If photos of the Norsemen and other formations are a bit sketchy that owes to them being taken on the fly from the hoopdie.

Battling with a semi and an RV for lead dog position on a remote and undulating single-lane highway was not to be sacrificed by stopping and getting out to take the pictures.

Alamosa, Colorado

home of:

Adams St. College and the San Luis Valley Brewing Co.












A pint of the Grande River IPA




As for the beer and the fare there, we will not ever speak ill of any of our gracious hosts, so let's just say that for 3 straight years, we've brought the head brew master a bomber of a San Diego beer hoping he would take a hint.





We don't always stay at motels on road trips, but when we do we prefer the Lamplighter.

Photo image of the day

Call it divine Providence or just dumb luck as what you are about to see was the last picture we were able to take yesterday before our camera decided to crap out on us.


If you have any doubts that Porkulus really has put and continues to put people back to work, we offer the following as proof, haters.


We didn't have our camera at the ready on the first occurrence of this phenomena, so with Porkulus signage festooning the highway, we made sure we were ready in case we were to see it again.


Lo and behold, on U.S. 160 in southwest Colorado, somewhere between Bayfield and Pagosa Springs, we captured two more jobs created or saved.




It's kind of tough to make out so enlarge to suit, but one can see a signal man on the right side of the road holding the slow/stop sign and up ahead about 200 yards on the other side of the road is his counterpart.

And in between.... nothing. Nada. Zilch. Forget any actual work... there is not even any equipment laying idle nearby to give the illusion that perhaps workers were on break.

Seeing as how it was kind of warm out there and these two gents ran the risk of exposure, perhaps the prudent thing of the President to do would've been simply to mail the pay checks to these two at home. Safety first!

We were utterly amazed. This was stupendous. Porkulus has officially gone from digging holes and refilling them to simply leaning on the shovels.

Highway blues

Best business model for creating a tourist trap: Instead of connecting people directly from the interstate to the highway on way to a major destination...






... route people, instead, through the business district of small, cute, kitschy Western outpost before connecting to said highway.

Such is the case with I-40, the Grand Canyon, Williams, Arizona and its 15 mph business district speed limit.


To hell with you, Williams - you ain't getting any of our scratch. Not now, not ever.

The much anticipated Condor post

Folks, the gentleman pictured is Ranger Dave who volunteers at Grand Canyon National Park and who gives nature talks. Yesterday was his first one on condors who have been re-introduced to the Grand Canyon on an incremental basis since 1996. There are currently 77 condors in and around the Grand Canyon area.

Some fun facts about the Condors:

- They mate for life.

- There is no distinguishing features that differentiate between male and female which may help explain their very low reproductive rates - more on this later. In fact, the only way humans can tell is by blood tests.

- They have a 50-60 year life span and can begin mating at age 6 or 7.

- Being scavengers (they don't kill their prey) they have tremendous immune systems as what they're dining on may not exactly be farm fresh. The fact that its head and neck is hairless aids in cutting back on bacteria buildup as the condor will literally be in neck deep come chow time.

Ranger Dave was not reading from a script and when they asked him to give a talk on condors, the Park Service gave him a stack of books and points of contact for condor subject matter experts.

Condors at one time were much more numerous than they are now and they ranged from the Canadian border down to Baja, concentrated in the western half of the United States.

We'll spare you all the gory details but their population decline was so precipitous that by the early 80s they numbered 22, 15 being in captivity and 7 in the wild

Their comeback was a painful ordeal as the 80s proved to be a decade that marked bitter divisions with respect to how best to restore the condor population. On one side, you had folks who were opposed to breeding condors in captivity as they felt that a young chick would not learn the life skills from its captive parents. And preserving the few that remained in zoos was akin to museum pieces or as Ranger Dave described, "pigs with feathers".

The other side said, "Hello. There are only 7 free condors left in the entire world. We have to do something to preserve this species".

So, the captive breeding continued: Breed, breed, breed - fail, fail, fail. Condors only lay one egg every two years and this was obviously a constricting factor in the condor comeback but then a funny thing happened: in the late 80s, scientists discovered that if you took the egg away from the Condor, the female would simply lay another one. Bingo!

The egg count went up but this gave rise to another problem: Imprinting. Imprinting is the phenomena where a new born animal will think it is the very first thing it sees and as Ranger Dave explained, the last thing that was wanted was for the Condor chicks to think they were government employees.

So, the scientists developed condor puppets just like you see on Ranger Dave to feed and nurture the young condors. But this still didn't solve the problem of the abysmal survival rates of the captive-bred condors when they were released into the wild in the early 90s. Since breeding couples could not be taken out of the egg factory rotation, it was decided that formerly wild condors that had been brought into captivity would be released with the young Condors to serve as "mentors". This approach has appeared to work and everyone seems pleased with this approach.



Today, there are nearly 400 living Condors with an even split between those in captivity and those in the wild, with the vast majority of free condors (77) in the Grand Canyon area.

If any condor expert accidentally stumbles across this site and takes umbrage with any of the points presented herein... blame Ranger Dave.

Prescott, Arizona

First stop on our roadie and the "Sorry, Arizona, for that whole insufferably moral preening and yet hypocritical California boycott thing" leg of the trip.


Something is screwy with Blogger this morning, so let's just take it by the numbers:

A couple of looks at Whisky Row in downtown Prescott.

The War Memorial sculpture outside the Yavapai County courthouse of which Prescott is the county seat and which is across the street from Whisky Row.

Inside the Prescott Brewery Co.

And enjoying a Bell's Two-Hearted Ale, a hoppy but balanced red ale, at The Raven Cafe in town.





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Programming Alert

Starting today, we will be out on the road for a couple of weeks, enroute to kinfolk in Colorado and back.

In the meantime, we hope to have BwD populated with scheduled and recycled posts as well as that from some guest blogging and from the road as we've boldly entered the 21st century and purchased an air card for our laptop.

First stop, Prescott, Arizona.

OPEN!!!

We suppose it's human nature to often times whine about the good ol' days and how much better things were back in the day.

So, in order to better appreciate how good things are right now and to acknowledge that at least in one respect things were not better as of a couple of weeks ago, let's all stand and recognize.... (drum roll, please)......


.... the opening of the Alpine Beer Co. tap room!





Yeah. It was kind of like Christmas morning yesterday afternoon.

Not incidentally, they also have a small kitchen that produced the best pulled pork BBQ sandwich we've ever had.

The mini-roadie out to Alpine reminded us of making similar treks to the geographically dislocated Tommy's Burgers of Southern California while growing up.

Nerd Alert!

Just sharing some pictures from our roadie.

Normal human beings will be able to spend about a half-hour at Glen Canyon Dam on the Arizona-Utah border. Anyone with an engineering background, though, count on at least 2 to 3 times that much... and that doesn't even include the guided tour.
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The downstream side of the dam.

Yes, that is grass to the left of the generator housing and yes you might be able to pick out the guy in the mower in the upper left of the putting green by clicking to enlarge.
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The bridge dowstream of the dam that spans Glen Canyon.

Construction began in the late 50s and was completed by '65. It took 15 years, though, to fill the canyon behind the dam and which would form Lake Powell (named after John Wesley Powell whom we believe to be one of the most under-rated figures in American history perhaps surpassing Samuel Gompers in our power rankings) so the power plant was not fully operational until 1980.

We came onto the earthly scene in the late 60s just as mammoth projects like this were winding down so we get strangely nostalgic walking around and viewing these marvelous human endeavors: we (Americans) used to do stuff like this. Big stuff. The interstate highway system. Hoover Dam. Putting a man on the moon. And now..? Our big idea is weatherizing windows..?

P.S. Through carelessness, Blogger has advised us that we have burned through our allotment of labels/tags. Can anyone advise on how to delete labels or get additional labels? Thanks.

Thoughts from the road Pt. IV

Our big road trip is winding down and in fact this will probably be our last remote post, scheduled or otherwise, from outside BwD world headquarters in San Diego. Doing some time in the hoopdie got us caught up on a little talk radio, both sports and political, that we would not have caught otherwise grinding away at our day job.

Anyway, one of the things that we were chewing on is that for all these years we thought the liberal-Left's big blind spot was the tolerance, nay, even the aiding and abetting of communist/socialist totalitarian/authoritarian regimes the world over. Imaging the re-racking we are going to have to do with our power rankings when it comes to light they have been huge apologists for prostitution, statutory rape and forced underage sodomy as well.

Hey, we'll catch you all back at the ranch when we unwind with some more photos of the trip as well as our assessment of the West Coast hops phenomena vs. their Colorado rivals.

Thoughts from the road Pt. III

Our kind of highway...
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Huh..? But why?













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Ah... That would explain it.
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(The following pictures from top to bottom: I-25 northbound south of Pueblo, CO., State Route 41 just northeast of Four Corners in Colorado and State Route 72 south of I-70 in the Utah high country.)

Programming Alert

Starting Monday morning we will be departing the family compound high on the plains of Colorado and will be out on the road again on our return leg to SoCal so we will be going with a combo of scheduled posts and guest-bloggers. We want to thank our guest-bloggers again for their outstanding contributions to BwD in our absence.

Random thoughts from the road

Checking in live this time from Milagro's coffee shop in Alamosa Colorado. The computer upon which we are banging out this correspondence does not appear to have a port for our photo card... wait, here it is... but not working - otherwise we would share some pictures. Tomorrow, perhaps

One of the cool things about great American road trips are the people you meet out here. Last night in Monument Valley we camped next to some retired people from Michigan who had never seen any of the desert southwest and were overwhelmed to the core by the majesty and expansiveness of the scenery. On the other side was "Norm" and his wife from Phoenix. Norm is originally from Great Britain but had moved here stateside a few years back. He just became a naturalized citizen a few weeks back saying it was "quid pro quo" for making his wife live in England for twenty years. We welcomed him to the "fam" with a hearty handshake and a cold one.

Then there was Bastian and Vivien from Germany. Mere pups on a 3-month western U.S. odyssey that took them everywhere from San Fran to Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon and even a Pacific Coast League baseball game we surmised as Bastian was sporting a Stockton Ports t-shirt. That every red-blooded 23 yr. old male could do a 3-month roadie with company as delightful as Vivien. Yikes.

Uh-oh... coffee shop is closing. One more thing. G-20 is in Pittsburgh and you know wat that means? Yep. The planet's perpetually aggrieved will descend upon the steel city to wreak havoc and generally make themselves walking, talking, rioting counterpoints to whatever points of incoherency they were trying to make in the first place. Wonder if the 'Burghers were wishing instead that a few hundred thousand tea-partiers were there instead that would leave the city cleaner than when they arrived.

Out.

Programming Alert

Starting tomorrow we will be out of pocket for about a week and a half while we are on the road to visit family in Colorado. Not to worry, though, as we have assembled about as formidable a team of guest-bloggers as could be imagined.

A team? That is correct. We figured people would be busy getting back into the swing of a regular routine after a summer of lounging about so we did not want to burden any one individual. Besides, some people are feeling so doggone good about their life decisions, they are no longer feeling the urge to pry themselves out of the rack at 4 in the morning in order to blog. doh!

Some of the guest-bloggers you are very familiar with and some you will be introduced to for the very first time. We were going to give you the lineup but we figured we’d let them introduce themselves to you all as they see fit.

As time, technology and inclination permits we will be checking in from the road or via scheduled posts we had in the can before departure. We want to thank our “team” in advance for taking on the stewardship of BwD for a while.

Now, how to deal with a head cold while alternating between the A/C cocoon of the car and the near triple digit ambient conditions of the desert southwest? Good times.

Rethinking vacation destinations

OK. Let’s move out in a slightly different direction. The First Family is currently wrapping up their first vacation out on famed Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts and considering the stress of the presidency of the United States, we sincerely wish it was a relaxing and enjoyable time for the Obamas although with the death of Ted Kennedy it probably didn’t pan out quite as they hoped.

Now, having said that, we think they can do better than Martha’s Vineyard. Forgive us for thinking that the locale is a tad old school but for our young President and his family, it represents the very epitome of East Coast establishment and “business as usual”. And yes, the reach for the Kennedy/Camelot mystique thing appears forced and contrived, especially when President Obama has Hawai’i connections. We’re supposed to believe that President Obama would rather be lounging around on white Adirondack chairs, sipping martinis in a tweed jacket than boogie boarding with his two daughters in the Hawai’ian surf?

We realize there are basic logistic and security problems with some of the places we would prefer but that’s not going to stop us from soliciting suggestions from BwD nation for some alternative locales to be enjoyed by the First Family. The suggestion box is open.

P.S.We know it’s only a photograph – an instantaneous snapshot in time that may or may not reveal the larger narrative but doesn’t the picture kind of sum up the Obama’s first vacation.

The president is slumped at the shoulders and is wearing a wan smile. Hey, sorry about that, gang… I’ll make it up to everybody next year. The girls definitely don’t look happy to be returning and the First Lady…? Hijole! Dead Senator or not, I’m not tolerating any interrupted damn vacation next year, pal.

Us, "Lucky"? That would be one way of putting it.

We may post more on our trip to the greater Philadelphia area and State College, PA later… well, we may post some more pictures but were up to our eyeballs right now in other stuff, including an 8 o’clock tip for our rec league hoops game that because of this unseasonal heat and humidity, we are not looking forward to (scheduled post flashback).

So, lest we become sidetracked with anything else, we just want to say we had a fantastic time, enjoyed every minute of it (except that Old Testament-like deluge around Harrisburg on the drive back from State College) and would go back in a heartbeat if invited.

We also would like to say we had the privilege of being hosted by the most gracious, giving and friendly people both in Philly (“Jonesy” and “’Becca”) and State College (“Todd” and “Toni” and family). We are continually amazed by the quality of people that pass through (and hopefully stay) in our life as we unwittingly schlep through it oblivious to Providence that is constantly working to make our time here on this planet a more blessed one. We can only hope that we are half as much that to others in their lives.

Bill and George's International Roadie.... On Hold?

“Himself”, Bill Clinton, quipped about 3 months ago that if Hillary won the Presidency, the first thing she would do is send he and former President George H. W. Bush on a world-wide goodwill tour to mend the all the fences destroyed by the current Administration and to remind everybody that once again, “America was open for business.”

Of course, this was news to the other principals involved but no matter…. it appears that some of our most strategic allies have beaten “himself” to the punch by placing conservative, pro-American leaders at the heads of their respective governments. Read here for article from American Thinker about the heads-of-state trend in Canada, Great Britain, France and Germany that runs counter to the conventional wisdom.