Day Four - Thursday

This is the day that never ends, it just goes on and on my friends! We started out at 9:00 am this morning from Denver, CO. We stopped about an hour into the trip at Manitou Springs to see some very cool Anasazi cliff dwellings. Pretty impressive what people could build so long ago and it still stands today. This stop also made for a 45 minute detour trying to get back in the freeway under construction though. The construction worker we asked for directions looked at us very strangely. The drive through Colorado was absolutely beautiful. We got into New Mexico at 2:09pm. New Mexico was not nearly as nice as Colorado!!! First, we almost ran out of gas because although there are exits every 5-10 miles, they are simply roads that lead to who knows where, they do not have gas stations or anything. But, we made it to a gas station in Las Vegas, New Mexico just as the gas light came on and started to ding. The drivers in New Mexico suck! Almost as bad as Milwaukee drivers I think. They do not know how to use their blinkers and are not polite at all! The country was pretty though, much rockier than the Colorado and definitely Southwestern US. We stopped for dinner at a Denny's in Grants, NM. Never visit here! It is home to several hotels (we don't know why!), a Walmart Supercenter surrounded by barbbed wire fence, a Denny's, a makeshift car lot, and at the time we visited a carnival. We drove across the Continental Divide in New Mexico as well. Kathryn is still fascinated by the cows. She thinks maybe someday she'll buy a house in the Colorado mountain countryside and own two cows. I explained that they are heard animals and only have one or two is ridiculous. So, she's going to pay a farmer to keep her cows with his heard and raise chickens as well. We survived New Mexico and made it to Arizona around 8:00pm. Arizona looked very similar to New Mexico. A lot of nothingness, but much prettier than the nothingness found in Nebraska or Iowa. We drove through a lot of Indian reservations. Looking at the houses, we never realized how poor they were. So many of the houses don't even look inhabitable. It's sad really. Finally around 10:30pm (which was really 9:30 we found out after we got into our room because Arizona doesn't observe Daylight Savings Time) we made it to a hotel in Flagstaff, which was our goal for the day. So, after a 13 hour day, we were done. But, it puts us on schedule to see the Grand Canyon tomorrow morning and then head up to Salt Lake City, Utah.

Quote of the day:
"It's like we drove off the map and landed in hell." - Kathryn (said about our adventure in Grants, NM)

Questions to ponder:
What is a "wash"? (we saw signs similar to river signs along the road several times in AZ, must be some geological form?)
What is the Ludlow Massacre?
Where do the people who live in the middle of places like New Mexico buy things? Food, gas, clothing, etc? Also, where do they work? Seriously there is nothing around for 50 miles + on the interstate. (Kathryn's theory is only old people live there and they don't eat anything so they don't need food, they wear the same clothes for years, they don't go anywhere so they don't need gas, and they're retired so they don't work)
How does a car get here from Costa Rica?

Mormon Fact of the Day:
In 1887 the United States passed the Edmunds-Tucker Act which outlawed Mormonism in the United States. It was intended to eliminate polygamy so the church would be decentralized and unable to function.