Good news! My driver’s license arrived back home in Seattle. I spent some time poking around UPS’s website and had my sister ship it to my motel at Carlsbad Caverns via two-day air. If all goes according to plan, I’ll have my license when I arrive at Carlsbad tomorrow.

At least, maybe. There was a mild SNAFU when my sister was shipping it out where UPS couldn’t decide what address was correct. The issue was resolved before I could get out of traffic to respond fully. Eventually, I went back to my booking information:

This is the confirmation email I got from Travelocity. The two different addresses are listed IN THE SAME CONFIRMATION EMAIL. So maybe I’ll get my license. Maybe not.

To get out in front of it: I don’t want any accusations of racism thrown around on this blog just because I decided to stay in a placed called “Whites City”. I was a little concerned at first, so I did some extensive research by Googling it, and it’s called that because it was founded by a chap called Charlie White. Don’t @ me.

Tonopah NV to Flagstaff AZ was a long and fairly boring drive, made more so by road work and other nonsense. I made a quick stop in Las Vegas to grab some In-N-Out for lunch but otherwise remained on the road, listening to old episodes of The Jeselnik and Rosenthal Vanity Project podcast to pass the time. Nevada, on the whole, is a very boring state to drive through. It’s very flat, very dry, and aside from the rocky mountains and spotting the brothels, not super interesting.

Both Nevada and Arizona are incredibly windy which does keep you on your toes, as massive 18-wheelers keep getting buffeted by the wind, sending them swerving over the line into my lane. That, or all the truckers down here are drinking and driving. Maybe both?

I crashed almost immediately after hitting Flagstaff, but woke up refreshed, ready to make things happen. Unfortunately, the Lowell Observatory was closed, so instead, I decided to backtrack maybe 25 minutes to visit “Bearizona” a wildlife – well, not really sure if it’s a preserve or what, but the gist of it is you can drive around through the park and see wild animals, including wolves and bears and bison and whatnot.

It was interesting enough, particularly prior to the start of the bear tour, where each vehicle had to stop so a matronly employee could lean in and say “Keep your windows closed and doors locked during the bear tour” in a serious enough voice that makes me certain that some kid has been eaten by a bear. I did some googling and was unable to find anything like this, so I’m guessing the park must have hushed it up. I did find a hilarious review left from someone upset that their car got fucked up by a bear. Still, I couldn’t help feeling mildly uncomfortable about the entire thing, with a quote from Hobbes coming to mind:

As I continued, I saw signs for Walnut Canyon National Monument, a park I’ve never even heard of. There’s not too much to it, but it is a beautiful (and incredibly windy) canyon.

I toured the small visitor’s center and did a brief hike along the side of the canyon. There weren’t many visitors there; my guess is most people (like me) have either never heard of it or are more interested in the Grand Canyon (which dwarfs it); but it was a nice, unexpected stop on the trip, and something new, since I’ve been to the Grand Canyon before.

A ways later, I stopped at the Meteor Crater, a ridiculously sized meteorite impact crater in Arizona, where I spent the majority of my time stifling the urge to scream at other people to put their masks over their fucking noses.

The crater itself was inspiring, but the visitors center was terrible. After viewing and taking pictures of the crater, I decided to stop by the gift shop to see if I could buy, say, a postcard or a nice picture of the crater to have as a keepsake, maybe something I could frame on the wall back home? The gift shop had dozens of shitty things that said “Meteor Crater” on them, and virtually nothing that actually had a picture of the fucking crater. Unbelievable.

From there, it was another 4.5 hours driving time until I finally arrived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I am writing this post.

Some final thoughts:

• I have officially lost track of what day of the week it is, which is the hallmark of any good vacation
• I continue to have anxiety dreams about work nearly every night, where I wake up freaking the fuck out about “Project Elrond” and it takes me twenty minutes or so to remember I’m on leave and Project Elrond is not my fucking problem right now
• This is pretty fucking annoying. I had hoped that by a week in, I would have forgotten about work, and could just concentrate on enjoying myself, but that hasn’t happened yet. Maybe by the end of week 2?
• There’s a (small) part of me that is annoyed by this blog, since it is a thing I have to ‘do’, and one of the main points of taking vacations is NOT having things you have to do. For the most part, writing this blog hasn’t felt like a chore (although writing the backstory part took a very, VERY long time, and was exhausting), but there is a part of my brain that asks me if I’ve done enough in a given day to even make up an interesting blog entry. Then I remind myself that this is a free blog that I’m writing that gets maybe 40 hits a day and if the posts are boring and the readers hate it, who really cares?
  • then I remind myself I might lose my job and maybe I should take blogging more seriously?
  • then I remind myself that there is no way I could support myself as a blogger, who am I even kidding?
• There are a LOT of pro-Trump signs down here, which is somewhat surprising for four months after he lost the election.
• It’s really interesting to see the state-by-state divides around COVID mask usage, among both business and the populace:
  • California: Pretty good. Businesses take it seriously, people are maybe 60-40 in mask habits.
  • Nevada: About the same as California
  • Arizona: Very bad. Businesses wear the mask but don’t cover their nose, people are maybe 30-70 in good mask habits.
  • New Mexico: Very good. There are roadside signs throughout the state aggressively promoting mask usage, signs up telling you how much you can be fined if you don’t follow mask guidelines,
• I continue to see signs of burnout in myself, even outside of work. For example, as I was leaving California, I was tickled pink to see that I was going over the Donner Pass, named after the infamous Donner Party that cannibalized each other after being stuck in the mountains, and knew I want to write about it. When I wrote the post, I completely forgot about it. (I have since edited the previous post to include this, for the benefit of any future readers, in case anyone is silly enough to read this in the future).

If you have ever asked yourself, does the Bible have stories that include genocide, incest, and weird sex, the answer is yes. I write about them. Buying them is cheap and helps support me.