Standing on a corner in Flagstaff, Arizona
09/22/2009 at 22:34 from (35.140278, -111.672218)
After a difficult night of struggling to find a comfortable position (including a number of attempts on the floor) in which to sleep, I finally nodded off outside of Needles, CA, only to jerk back awake less than an hour later. Too excited and restless to sleep, I finally gave up trying and set about preparing to disembark in Flagstaff.
Just before 5:00, I shook Marijana from her sound sleep and we hopped onto the platform to a dark and freezing Flagstaff. Jennifer had, with a touch of her trademark insanity, generously offered to pick us up at this obscene hour, so while Marijana waited inside the warm confines of the train station, I left out the front and scanned the parking lot. While I was doing so, Jennifer entered through the back door and, not recognizing anyone inside (she had never met Marijana), headed back out to the parking lot just as I was going back inside through the front door. A few minutes later, though, Jennifer ran back into the station and threw her arms around us, welcoming us to Flagstaff.
As she drove us to our new temporary home, she gave us a brief tour of the town and repeatedly offered us the use of her car, despite our pleas to just let us rent a car. Eventually, she wore down our defenses and, reluctantly (I don't like crashing family members' vehicles), I took the keys. When we got to her house, she showed us to Laura's room, where we would be staying. We dug into the cookies she had baked for us (keep in mind, this is still 5:30 in the morning) and then collapsed on the bed for a nice 3-4 hour nap.
We awoke refreshed and, after a hearty meal of more cookies and a nice chat with Mike (he was heading out on a hunting expedition and we wouldn't see him for the rest of the trip), we jumped in Jennifer's Subaru and drove up to Lowell observatory. Still too drowsy and not flush enough to fork over the cash for the tour, we instead strolled at our leisure from building to building, reading placards and snapping photos of the various wildlife.
Once we had satisfied ourselves with our self-guided tour, we drove down to Flagstaff and looked around for a personal GPS unit. After a couple of hours of fruitless searching (there were literally none, anywhere), we met with Jennifer at a fish taco joint downtown. The girls weren't crazy about their grilled fish tacos, but my fried one was top notch. I chased the meal with a huge beer, then we drove slowly home.
