J Matt's Winter Vacation, Days 5-7

This is a big country.

And I have been doing some serious driving.

on Thursday (four days ago) I went from Santa Fe, through Vegas.

All I can say is the high southwest desert is absolutely gorgeous.

And I HATE the way I feel when I drive through Native American reservations.

Why? Because these people really were routed from their land and forced into these patches of expansive, desolate land. And then in order to survive they have to trade on the general public opinion of what an Indian is.

Examples:





Anyway. That aside, on the road from Santa Fe to the City of Sin, I met some really nice, kind, giving people. I also stopped in this Pueblo:



(the Pueblo of Laguna) in western New Mexico to get gas, then found myself doing some shopping. My family has a strong native side, one of which my mom is really proud of, so I stopped to pick her up some stuff. I was struck at how much this Pueblo, and many of the other Pueblos in New Mexico feel like they belong in the third world. They are still the homes of many different tribes, yet they feel like archaeological sites in some ways. Beautiful, but also kind of sad. And in their own way, they made me appreciate my native heritage more than I have in the past.

Anyway, the drive to Vegas pretty much looked like this along the way:



One highlight was passing the Continental Divide, where rainfall divides equally in draining toward the Pacific and Atlantic oceans:



Then I passed by one major anomaly in the desert landscape: The Meteor Crater in central AZ. Millions of years ago, a meteor (of which this rock here is a fragment of):



crashed into the desert, blacking out the sky, and sending debris around a five-mile radius. The crater itself is about 1000 feet deep, and over a mile across. And here it is:



And here I am at the bottom of it:



OK, not really. Due to the delicate nature of the site, you aren't allowed to hike on the crater, or down into it, for that matter. But what you can do is take a photo in the museum with the bottom of the crater as the background. You can tell from the blatant overhead lighting on my face that it's an obvious fake. Otherwise I'd tell you about how I "totally was a badass and broke the rules to totally run to the bottom of the crater, where I fought the crater protecting ninja brigade to the death...."

So much for my plan.

Then it was further east to Flagstaff, and into Nevada and Hoover Dam. Mind you, I hit Hoover at the twelve-hour mark, so my mental state was somewhat...altered. This video will attest to that:



Now, I KNOW Hoover Dam is named after President Hoover. At the time, however, my brain was at about a third-grade level, so there you go.

Then I made it to Vegas:



where I had the largest beer of my life at the Hoffbraus House:



Mmm. Beer.

Then on the road again to California. Which meant 6 more hours of driving through the desert, where I continued a tradition that my friend Rob and I started on our Vegas trips from years past: whenever in the desert as the sun is rising, you must pull over and listen to songs from Radiohead's OK Computer:



However, the desert eventually gave way to farmland near Bakersfield, CA, and some pretty damn adorable sheep:



Yep. Frickin' cute.

After the farmland I hit the highway where James Dean had his ill-fated car crash that took his life. Here's the memorial to him at the spot of the crash in Chalome, California:



Almost at the coast, I come across one of the funniest images I've ever seen in the Salinas Valley...just use your imagination:



Finally, at 5:00 in the evening on Saturday, December 15th, I arrived at Monterey and Carmel Beach just in time for the sunset:



I miss living here.