Elise told me when we started off that she was exhausted, and while I thought she was kidding at first, it became obvious on our way back to the car that she wasn't. She really was exhausted and was having a hard time walking. I buckled her into her seat and we went to get some lunch from the Subways at the truck stop before heading on our way.
She wouldn't eat anything, and she kept laying down on the seat next to me. I finally started to clue in, and I felt her forehead.
Which was hot as a stove.
Oh shit...
Poor, sweet kid, she never complains, she never cries or has temper tantrums, and maybe I would have clued in a whole lot sooner if she had. The stress of traveling must have been tremendous for her, and yet she just kept plugging along until she felt so bad she couldn't hide it anymore.
It was at this point that I called Jeff. We talked for a bit, and decided that it would be a good idea to just head out towards home, instead of spending a few days here and there as I had first planned. I bought some kid's tylenol (hereafter referred to as "the watermelon medicine") and got her back in the truck, where I gave her some. She was okay after that, a little slow and she still didn't want to eat, but she seemed to be feeling better.
We continued down the road, and crossed the border into Arizona. You'll see a few pictures I took through the windshield. Almost the second we crossed the border, we were inundated with signs that read something like "Chief Yellow Horse Trading Post, STOP NOW!" The first one was okay. The next twelve were monotonous.
And I had to think, that has got to be the only economic opportunitiy around. You've got great flat stretches of empty desert, and then you have a "trading post" with one hundred billboards advertising all the cool stuff you can buy there... Every 70 miles or so there's a truck stop/"travel plaza", and that's really it. If there are cities there, they're so far from the highway that you can't see them across the perfectly flat desert.
You know, somebody could make an absolute fortune putting a factory or something out there near the reservations, rather than shipping American jobs to India. There's a huge and probably very motivated workforce right there, and if an employer could work in concert with the tribal governments, who knows what they could accomplish? OR... conversely, start up a Native-owned industry (other than jewelry, blankets or knives) right there on the reservation... or am I just so monumentally simple and naive that I don't see why no one has done this before? Must be...
On with the story: when we had gotten up, the day had looked sunny and promised to be hot, but as time wore on and we got further and further along into Arizona, the weather started to worsen. Clouds gathered, the wind picked up, and I started to notice that the truck, precisely because it was so heavy, was not, therefore, particularly aerodynamic. The needle on the gas guage was dropping like a rock. We started to see flashes of lightning, and the wind was really howling.
We stopped at one of the travel plazas, and out back behind it we found these funny arrows - see the pictures - that looked like something out of the fifties. I took a few pictures - Elise loved them. I also took a picture of her in the back seat of Inny... She looks so small in that big huge truck, but you can really see what I mean about the crew cab having enough space for people. The back seat is as big as the front.
I'm going to take a moment here to describe one more thing about my truck that I'm really in love with, and that's its three gas tanks, which are arranged like this: there's a main tank and an auxiliary tank that came with the truck. There's a switch on the dashboard for switching between the two and you can do this while you're driving with the touch of a button, and the engine won't so much as stutter, which is a great feature.
Here's the REALLY cool thing - the third tank is HUGE, and it has a little pump and a switch under the dashboard. You hit the switch and fuel is pumped into the main tank. That means that, when I brew my own biodiesel, I can make up a huge batch, dump the whole thing into the three tanks, and not have to keep going back again and again.
In this instance, however, it was nice to know that I didn't have to worry about the big huge stretches of absolute nothing that filled this part of our trip. I've traveled by car enough that I have a rule, and that is, when you're in the mountains (or the desert for that matter) you don't let the tank get beneath half. The truck suits itself to this kind of traveling, and I really appreciated the sense of security I got from knowing that I could carry a thousand miles of fuel...
Anyway, on with the story. I was pretty sure at this point that we were going to have to miss the Grand Canyon, but we passed a sign that said "Meteor Crater", and the worm of rebellion flashed a fang in my soul. Elise seemed okay, and she said she was feeling pretty good, so I made the decision to stop and take a look.
Love’s Truck Stops: http://www.loves.com/
Tomorrow, The Meteor Crater and REALLY NASTY COFFEE In Kingman, AZ!!
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