The Move
As Heidi and her mom venture towards the rising sun, you are there...

Day One

Mom and I have driven to Flagstaff before so today was completely normal.

"Do you think that more bugs are splatting against our windshield because the front of the truck is so flat?" I asked.

"Probably," said Mom.

The truck's gas cap appears to belong to a different model truck and one of my many important jobs on this trip is to jam it back on after every fill-up. I do this well. For her part, Mom read the truck manual and discovered that turning the heater dial to point at the icon of the little guy with an arrow in his face sets the air to Vent Mode.

We were pretty tired by Seligman, AZ but since we still lacked matching outfits we bought Route 66 baseball hats. Mom's is denim. Mine is black. I'd include a photo but all three shots I took by holding the camera out in front of us are pretty bad. None of them include the hats for one thing.

Oh, and gauges is spelled "gages" on our dashboard.

Day Two

A two-hundred mile detour might not sound reasonable to some, but to visit the modern day Easter Island it is a minor inconvenience. The Very Large Array is the world's largest radio telescope. It is large, arrayed, and very-Very -- 27 giant white dishes in a high desert valley all pointing at the sky, looking back in time, making bright pictures out of galactic magnetism and gravitational fields. We set out for it immediately after breakfast with my grandparents and aunt&uncle.

What to say about the VLA. It was awesome. (See photos) I'd love to see it tightly configured. It was in zoom mode yesterday, all the adorable dishes splayed out inside an area about 26 miles wide. Scrunched up it's about half a mile long. So cute!

We were going to write a poem for it. To scribe into the visitor center guest book. But we didn't get very far with that: "Very Large Array/Why are you in the way?"

We only counted 27 cars on entire 150 mile stretch of road to the VLA. A fact mom shared while we waited for coffee. I mean, she pointed it out to a table of diners in the restaurant. As if it was normal to be counting the cars. Of course, they acted as if it was normal to make us wait ten minutes to put coffee in to-go cups.

The rest of the day was pretty confusing. We got lost outside of Albuquerque. The kind of lost where people ask where you're trying to go and you say "Albuquerque" and they say, "Well, you're in Albuquerque."

After I went inside to register our rooms for the night, Mom managed to wipe out half of a decorative archway with the top of the truck. I gave her a cookie. She gave the manager dad's number. Hi Dad!!

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