A Summer of Adventure, Travel and Photos

We Learned to Stay Flexible Because Few Things Went as Planned

Leaving home was a precursor for things to come. We'd planned to leave for our three month journey, and working on organic farms, early on Friday but drove out the gate shortly after 10:00 am the following Monday. Our first stop was Rodeo, NM to take some more pictures. Most of the pictures I'd taken previously, went with the text I'd written for my weekly newspaper column and Celinda was left with not much for her Rodeo story on our website.

We got to Rodeo around noon and, after driving to the south end of town, we worked our way back north with camera and steering wheel in hand. When we got to the Rodeo Natural Food Store we found it was closed on Mondays. The yoga instructor was in and Celinda had a good talk with her while I wandered around taking pictures of what we had access to. From there we went north again and I missed a once in a lifetime opportunity to take a photo of a jackrabbit sitting and panting in the shade of the old Ford panel truck that advertises the Sky Gypsy Cafe.

We had planned to stop the first night in Rimrock, AZ at our son and daughter-in-laws to visit with them and the grand kids. They'd all come down with the flu a few days before and we neither wanted it, or wanted to take it down the line as we traveled on. We stopped long enough to talk for a few minutes out on the patio, give the kids the toys we had brought and then get back on the freeway headed north toward Flagstaff.

Our first choice for the night, after scrapping the Rimrock stay, was Williams, AZ a few miles west of Flagstaff. When we got there we found it was their tourist season, when people go there to get out of the heat of the desert below, and prices had gone up about forty percent. Our credit card company had placed a possible fraud hold on our card, which complicated matters at the gas station. We later found out it was because one of the gas pumps where we'd gotten gas a few days before leaving had to be programmed more than once and that automatically trips the red flags for fraud or stolen cards. It made things difficult, but we're glad they take those precautions.