Since this blog is part of my journal, I'd like to write about walking across the high desert looking for arrowheads near the Limhi mountains, a storm sweeping in and pouring rain, hail, and snow on our heads; walking across a red road in San Juan county looking for Anasazi ruins in the cliffs known to only my father and a few others, while ravens, hawks, and swallows search for prey and a rattler crosses the road on its own business; climbing up and down cliffs and squeezing through holes in thousand year-old walls; crossing an ancient sea bed where clams left burrows which have hardened into a gnome village; getting foot massages in a waterfall pouring over slickrock; watching my kids watch cowboys train their horses; searching for fossils and dinosaur tracks and finding some.
ALSO: the smell of sage brush, many games of Rook, carrot cookies, hugs, sunshine.
Paul did end up being able to come on this vacation, which was a blessing, since he has missed so many. The Senate climate change bill that was keeping him in town was defeated (YEAH!) so he flew out a few days after us. He was able to see most of his siblings, his 95 year-old grandpa, and his parents as they were on their way home from a mission on a Navajo Indian reservation in New Mexico.