September 10, 2012
Nudged the rooster and got up just before the sun. Can't understand how people can sleep when on 'cation. Twenty-five minutes later Betsy is packed and I'm trying to hold the power down to limit the disturbance on my motel neighbors. I know I'm never going to see them, but courtesy deserves a chance whenever it can get one these days.
Pulled out of Page on AZ98 connecting to US160 about an hour later. Another thirty minutes and my backbone is asking my stomach what's going on. About twenty-five minutes later, three or four miles west of Kayenta, AZ, I see one of those rather run-down motels with a sign saying restaurant open. The motel is the Anasazi Inn and lacks the distinctive character of that peoples elevated homes up in the narrow reaches of canyons throughout the southwest. But it seems as old and run-down. You can see from the reviews on the attached page what I mean about predatory monopoly pricing on the "res" out here. (Anasazi Inn - Kayenta). But I'm not looking for a room, I'm looking for breakfast. And I found it.
Surprisingly, the breakfast was fairly priced and well worth it. In fact, worth more. It was excellent! I asked for biscuit and got two...covered in cream gravy. It doesn't get much better than that for this ol' country boy. (Of course, my cardiologist's wife may be getting a new Lexus, but WTH.)
Thirty minutes later I'm passing by Monument Valley.
This is where probably half the western movies every shot were filmed. Thanks to John Wayne, et al, this is why most people my age think Texas looks like this. Okay, there are a couple of places reminiscent of this, but no where near as magnificent and majestic.
At any moment I expect Donald "Red" Barry or Roy Barcroft (great western villain character actors) to ride out from behind the rocks guns blazing in retreat as Roy and Trigger, and Jerry and Betsy, hie across the desert in hot pursuit.
(Or, perhaps it was just gas from the biscuits and gravy...can't be sure.)
An hour and a half, and a hundred miles further, now on US64, I spy a landmark familiar to all motorcyclists who ride the west: the great Shiprock just outside of Shiprock, NM.
First, just a hint on the horizon.
Then it rises, Phoenix-like, in the New Mexico heat.
A short two hundred and fifty miles later I'm in Taos, NM and checking into a nicer, more reasonably priced motel.
Another picture taking apology. I don't know what's going on but it appears my little Lumix is not recording some of the pictures I've taken. The "settings" knob becomes difficult to turn at times and I'm thinking it doesn't "register" the setting though I do get a temporary picture display. Funny stuff, but not funny haha. I switch the setting to landscape scenery and many of them came through, but many didn't as well. Something to be tested and monitored in the future. Hopefully it's just DAO and can be corrected. Meanwhile, my pictures of Taos and the approach to its environs are missing and presumed lost for good.
In any event, Kit Carson first saw Taos in 1826-27, apprenticing with Matthew Kinkead, a former army mate of Carson's older brother during the War of 1812. Between periods of trapping the Yellowstone, Powder, and Big Horn rivers for the Hudson's Bay Company, and living near Bent's Fort while working for the Bent brothers, Carson lived in Taos, marrying into a prominent Taos family in 1842. He was buried here with his last wife after dying near Las Animas, CO on May 23, 1868, aged 58.
Far and away, the best book on western expansionism and Kit Carson is Hampton Side's 'BLOOD AND THUNDER, An Epic of the Old West.' Doubleday, 2006.
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