Mistake number 745-003-456B

Note to self:

……When wearing black jeans, do not pet your orange tabby right before leaving to meet people for dinner.

……And that was after brushing them clean.

Jim

Full Moon Night @ The Chevron

I don’t know if there was a full moon tonight, but from the likes of the people coming into the Chevron tonight, it was.  Too many to mention them all, but a small glimpse:

1. Guy nuked his food from Taco Bell to the point it was smoking.  Not easy to do with a microwave, but several people who came in after asked what was burning.

2.  Woman found it laugh-out-loud funny that our cash registers can figure out how much gas to put on your pump when you say “the rest in gas”.

3.  People in a big old van stole my roll of garbage bags when I was out changing the trash at the pumps.  Teach me to leave it alone for a minute and a half.

4.  Bad credit cards.  I usually see one a week or so, we saw 4 within one hour.

Yup, it was an interesting, and amusing, night.

Arches Weekend

Not really much story to tell – went down Thursday and stayed in one campground that wasn’t in Arches.  The next day we picked up camp and moved over to our reserved ones in Arches.  The weather was perfect – during the days.  No rain, nice and warm but not hot.  The nights and mornings were a little bit chilly, an extra 2 or 3 degrees warmer would have been nice.  Got a bunch of hiking done, bunch of relaxing done and a bunch of hanging out with the family done.  ‘Twas awesomely rejuvenating. Click below to see the pictures and get more details.

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The Bowl.

…. ‘Twas the spring of 1976 and Linda, our Sophomore English teacher, had assigned us “Desert Solitaire” by Edward Abbey as our reading assignment.  We convinced her (and she actually convinced the administration) that the best place to read it was down in Arches National Park. So one Thursday morning Linda, her boyfriend and some 20 of her students took off in a caravan down to Moab on a field trip for the weekend.  I was driving my father’s 1974 Dodge Van with 6 or 8 of my closest friends, my parent’s huge army-issue type tent, sleeping bags, a bunch of food, and other necessities.   The first night we walked down one of the wider crevices in the rock and found this bowl in the red rock about 15 feet above the floor. My friends and I ended up spending the night in it, only to wake up to the realization that had it rained there would have been no way out.  It wasn’t until 2 decades later that I actually got around to reading the book, but we sure had a fun time.

…. I went down to Arches with the family this weekend and, of course, had to go looking for the bowl.  The campground has changed a lot over the last 33 years, so it took a bit of looking, and the help from my little brother, to find it, but we did.  It’s still there, although there is a lot more dirt in the bottom, it wouldn’t be too hard to get out even if the rock was wet and slick.  The trees have grown, leaving less room up there than I remembered.  But it was fun finding it and taking a trip back in time.

…. More pictures and story to come…