The Last Hopeful Moment of the Cacafuego
Cacafuego
1978-2008
It had its merits.
Driving wasn’t one of them.
The Continental Divide, New Mexico
August 1 – Loading the van, Four Corners, and Colorado
Breakfast that morning was provided by the RV park: lots of pancakes and eggs. Delicious. Sarah and I rode the bikes back to the auto shop and the Cacafuego, while mom and dad took the rental car back to the airport. We started taking the last of everything out of the cupboards and drawers, and once we were all assembled again, began unloading all our worldly goods out onto a tarp.
We are gypsies.
People were actually slowing down on the road that went by and sort of pulling into the parking lot, trying to see if we were having a yard sale. The Fed Ex guy that stopped by to drop something off at the auto shop came over and asked if we were trying to make a sale. Mostly he wanted mom’s moped.
So we covered up the moped with a sheet and scowled at everyone who even thought about slowing down.
Not being ones to waste resources, we also took the fridge.
And the microwave.
Ten minutes to noon the newly assembled Surprise/Sophie (we haven’t agreed yet) left Gallup for Shiprock, AZ, and Four Corners.
Ship Rock.
Four Corners was cute and cool. Dad declared that 30 years ago, there was the monument and the cirle and everything, but no people. He was surprised people knew about this place.
It’s on the map, I said.
It was hot, so we left (in our air conditioned vehicle!!!), and drove to Cortez, CO, where we camped.
We also salvaged some of the big bed-pillows from the RV, so we cushioned the bottom of the tent with them, and were infinitely more comfortable (except that we are all used to futons, so it was now a bit too squishy, but I guess you can’t have everything).
July 31 – still in Arizona
We left Flagstaff in the morning and drove down to Cottonwood, AZ, which is somewhere south of Sedona, to shop for our new vehicle (tentatively called the Surprise or the Sophie… oh and as a completely related side note, as we left Gallup to drive to the Grand Canyon in our rental car, having decided to leave the Cacafuego behind, we listened to the demise of the fictional Cacafuego in the Aubrey/Maturin book. How fitting.). Our objective was a cargo van, first to get us home, and second for dad to use as a vehicle for Rising Tide, Inc.
So we spent a few hours at a car dealership, hassling Mr. Louis, taking the van for a test drive, and generally screwing around and eating Funyuns (maybe that was just me).
Mom, Sarah, and I left and went to Sedona for lunch, while dad finalized everything and signed things and got the keys to the van. The drive to Sedona was pretty cool.
Sedona’s a weird place: apparently it has a lot of mystical energy or magnetism or something. We’re glad we saw it. I also made a trip to the local yarn store, Red Rock Knit Shop, but it was sort of average and not very exciting. Not like Hill Country Weavers!
We left Sedona and drove back to spend the night in Gallup where we left the RV (~4 hours), and made a detour for the Petrified Forest.
It was a crazy moon-land-scape, full of hills and rises and eroded rock, right in the middle of a whole lot of nothingness. I spent a lot of time pondering “why this area?” in a strictly rhetorical sense.
The Teepees.
Newspaper Rock, and landscape.
Puerco Pueblo, apparently inhabited from roughly 1100-1200 A.D., and then again 1300-1400 A.D. The people who lived there, however, were referred to as “pre-historic,” mostly because no one in the “history” department ever got to meet them or talk to them. It is supposed that they are the ancestors of the Hopi and Zuni Indians, who live in the area.
