04.13.09 - 9:01 am

phoenix.

my first family vacation. it was a complicated journey, created and executed with a fairly strict budget with great success. julie and i had separate flights. i didnt get ashton until the end of the week and there were some transportation concerns. some phone calls, some sisterly help and a waived $20 fee all contributed to ending those concerns.

landing.

getting off the plane and to our rental car started things off. julie and i would be at the phoenix airport at 1030 pm, nearly 45 minutes south of our ultimate goal, carefree. my aunt and uncle both worked early and went to bed early, there was no way they were going to drive all that way and back just to pick us up and then some how drop us off at the car rental. this is where my sister jillian offers her good friend, the colonel, to assist. the tiny man dressed in his socks and shoes and shorts picked us up in his beautiful cadillac cts-v. we spend the night in his museum of a condo and he took us out to breakfast in the morning. he has the helmet of the first vietnamese he killed next to his television.

we picked up our dodge caliber from enterprise. $170 for the week. the biggest consumer rip off was a mere four miles away: the airport enterprise wanted nearly $400 for the same car, during the same time period. absolutely ridiculous. add to that, if we wanted to drop off our car at the airport enterprise, there would be a monetary punishment of $20. so lame.

home base.

carefree is a beautiful place. leaving the endless tight sprawl of suburbia and consumer consumption, carefree houses are required to have land separating them. the town is small and has a clean, proud feeling to it. and a very large sundial.
my aunt and uncles house is beautiful, filled with themed rooms and things of expensive taste everywhere. the coffee table is topped and filled underneath with what must be a decades worth of dozens of different magazines issues. the kitchen has two ovens.
we would use this house as our mothership. while it was nearly 45 minutes or more from everywhere julie and i traveled to, it was nice that the beds were free. that alone saved us hundreds of dollars in hotel stays.

first and foremost: get me a vespa! i took julie on the same back roads i first rode on with my father a year or so before. they are terribly enjoyable to ride. we visited the sundial, the biker bar and the local eateries and shops.
for longer distances, we hopped in the caliber and drove to restaurants, to my aunt and uncles JW Marriott resort and enjoyed dinner with them when they returned from work.

tourists.

later, we visited the botanical gardens, on display a curious infusion of glass sculpture and cacti. there was a butterfly garden filled with 700 fluttering insects, the copper winged ones were my favorite.

ashton had already left oregon the week before with sarah during her "coincidental" spring break trip to arizona. meeting up with her to get ashton was frustrating of course but was over and done with on one of the windiest days. they closed the airport down for an hour or two due to 55 mph winds.
i drove through these winds north to flagstaff. or flag, if youre from arizona. there were times when i though the aluminum city direction or mph signs were going to tear from their wooden poles into my windshield as i drove.

flagstaff was terribly cold. julie was exceptionally annoying. and it was cold. after we got into our $33 two bed room, we fell asleep looking forward to the day that would follow.
the grand canyon. after our brief breakfast, we packed up and headed north another hour and half. i very much enjoy the drive from flag to grand canyon. its flat, the trees look fantastic under the clear blue skies and it reminds me of oregon. bend ive been told.

fucking cold. unreasonably cold. at 7200 feet of elevation, i knew it wouldnt be sweltering. but holy fuck. the ranger at the entrance said 44 degrees, but when your face stings and it hurts to inhale, its colder than 44 fucking degrees. we were all sweatered up and the blinding sunshine was convincingly deceitful. neither julie nor ashton had ever been to the grand canyon. i think they were just as taken as i always am with the place. its absolutely a marvelous feature. i long for the ability to stumble across the canyon some 500 years before it was discovered and come out of some treeline to experience it in complete silence, far beyond the chatter of tourism. ultimately, i think ashton was more excited about the prospect of catching insects for his wristwatch bug container and the army of fearless ground squirrels. we all three took a nap on the side of the road inside the caliber. we spent a fair amount of time enjoying the views and eavesdropping on visitors wearing OSU or UofO sweaters. and then we headed back to flag for dinner and the lowell observatory.

saturn.

after a quick meal at the downtown pita pit, and all of the memories of college it produced, we visited the observatory just as dusk began to give way to the stars above. we watched an interesting tour of the universe dramatically visualized with early 90s computer animation. julie, ashton and i were released and allowed to visit the exhibits, touch a iron meteorite and follow the illuminated pathway outside to the telescopes.
an 8 inch, 16 inch and a two story 24 inch telescope awaited. saturn was the main focus of the evening and it was thrilling to see her again through the small black monocle of the telescope. it was still fucking cold. the three of us collected into a sweater bundle while we waited in line to use the 24 inch refracting scope housed in the observatory dome. the line crept along. in the stinging cold. so cold. we reached the lens, i held ashtons eye closed and he saw saturn for the first time. he was estatic.
"thats the real saturn! not just a picture!" he would exclaim to the astronomer helping him with blocks to stand on. i shared his enjoyment and felt the wait to view saturn and her most visible moons exceptionally worthwhile. clearly visible was the plane of the rings, two bold stripes across the planets midsection and the two bright dots of titan and rhea. freezing, we retreated back to the car for my two hour drive back home.