USA

What fun! Our friends Wayne and Jane came to visit for a few days. They’re the folks who sold us the condo a couple of years ago. Besides the pleasure of their company, we learned about a few new things to see.

One of those things was the Granite

For people just a little older than I am, the Sixties had to be an absolute gas. You could hop into your VW bug with the stick-on flowers, slip the latest Moby Grape into the old eight track, light up a joint and head to your Sensitivity Training group. There

Primitive tools and a lot of time can yield impressive results. To the Egyptian pyramids, the Great Wall of China and the dry stone fences of the United Kingdom and Ireland, add the O’Odham irrigation canals.

The O’Odham flourished for 1400 years in a collection of settlements near

Paolo Soleri, an Italian born architect, died in Arizona about a decade ago. He came to the States to study under Frank Lloyd Wright who had residences in both Wisconsin and Arizona.

Soleri designed and built his home in Paradise Valley, Arizona. He called it Cosanti. It’s an odd

You’d better like emerald pools when you hop off the Zion shuttle at Stop 5. In a single hike you can visit Lower Emerald Pool, Middle Emerald Pool (Lower), Middle Emerald Pool (Upper) and Upper Emerald Pool. If that’s not enough emerald pooling for one day, I guess

Zion National Park is popular. So popular in fact that private cars are no longer allowed in most of the park. Anyone who has experienced the overflowing parking lots at Arches will understand that banning cars is a good thing.

Rather than drive, visitors use the free bus system to

Between the Escalante and Zion, we passed through one of my favorite Utah attractions, Red Canyon. Mary Anne and I drove through this area when we visited Bryce Canyon in 2013.

Red Canyon is small but has some really pretty scenery. Here are a few examples.

I‘m messing with

Grand Staircase – Escalante National Monument was the focus of some recent controversy. Trump and his spineless appointees reduced the size of the monument in order to facilitate oil and gas exploration. Fortunately adult, not to say sane, control has returned to the White House and the acerage has been restored.

There was a gym downstairs from a small company where I used to work. I would use their locker room to change before lunchtime runs. A very fit older fellow handed out towels and locker keys. Nice guy. He would sometimes wear a t-shirt that said: The older I get,

From Moab, Utah where we stayed while visiting Arches, we drove back north to Green River, then southwest to Torrey. We stayed here for a couple of nights while visiting Capitol Reef National Park.

I like this relatively small, relatively unvisited park. There are fewer hikes and nothing so magnificent

In the end, we drove about 2000 miles between Seattle and Scottsdale. By US standards that’s not much, but to Europeans a 3200 km trip may seem significant.

We heard that the parking lots and trails at Arches were overflowing and that the park rangers were closing the gate