Camp Nina

This is Nina's 4th year at Tallchief and the first year that we've seen photos of her posted online during her stay. I think that Wacky Wizard is holding a wand.

Benton Boys at Large in OKC

Mari had an all-day teaching conference to attend in Oklahoma City today, so we got up at 6, left the house at 6:15, and dropped her off at 8. With Nina at Camp and Mari's conference ending at 4:30, the boys and I had a day to fill.

It wasn't hot yet, so we started the morning at J.R.'s mini-golf, where we were the only putters on the course. Instead of competing against each other, we took turns putting for three mythical golfers: Albert Einstein, Han Solo, and Skanda Gupta.

The course had seen better days, but our mythical golfers brought their "A" game.

Han Solo was one stroke out of first through nine holes, but he had an 11-stroke meltdown on the 10th hole that he couldn't claw his way back from (although he was only 5 strokes back after hole #14).

Einstein had a three-stroke lead over Skandagupta after hole #15, but Gupta was never ever to make get any closer, and Einstein climbed back into his time-travel vehicle with the victory.

After golf, the boys ate free breakfast bananas at the supermarket at the invitation of the Walton family, and we picked up tiny carrots that we smuggled in to the 10:25 a.m. screening of "Ocean's Eight" at the Warren. It was still relatively cool when we got out of the movie, so we went on a 1.5 mile walk around Earlywine Park before we headed to the bowling alley at Heyday Entertainment in Norman, where I was surprised to run into an ECU Honors student who is working there over the summer.

Next, we drove to OKC's Paseo district. After we parked, I ran into the director of Oklahoma Shakespeare in the Park--who remembered me because I bring Honors students to see their shows every fall. I asked her for a pizza recommendation, and she gave me the Picasso Cafe, where the boys ordered a margarita pizza and I had a tasty, chicken-fried portabella mushroom with vegan gravy.

We finished our meal just in time to pick up Mari from a successful day of professional development.

Tuesday = success.

It's "I Miss Nina" Week

She and her Girl Scout pals have signed up for Wacky Wizard session at Camp Tallchief this week.

Day Last: From Las Vegas, New Mexico to Home

The last day of our trip was the hardest ride. The only diversion we allowed ourselves along the way a Dairy Queen pit stop and a lunch at Kabuki Romanza, a Japanaese teppanyaki-style grill in Amarillo, where a talented chef cooks your food in front of you and other dinner guests on a hot iron grill that everyone sits around (I noted the irony of eating here a day after we'd visited the Manhattan Project Museum in Los Alamos.)

We had learned about Kabuki Romanza from our Amarillo friends and had eaten her before. The kids remembered it fondly. They had fried rice and edamame.


After traveling more than 3700 miles, visiting three national parks, three museums, and Disneyland, spending one night in a tent and another in a tipi, enjoying the water in five hotel pools and one Pacific Ocean, reconnecting with lifetime friends, adding four new states to the kids' visit lists (which now stands at 20), eating Middle Eastern, Chinese, Italian, Cajun and Japanese dishes, bonfire 'smores and veggie hot dogs, home-made ice cream and Dairy Queen blizzards, lots of picnics and lots of big breakfasts, listening to a hundreds of years of world history in audiobook form, a compilation of classical music and the Hamilton soundtrack (repeatedly), and hiking through canyons and caverns, we got home before dark to find that our house was still standing.

And I went to the grocery store.

Day 13: From Monument Valley to Las Vegas, New Mexico

We woke up to a beautiful view in Monument Valley.

The rest of this day and the next were long on hours in the car and short on photo opportunities.

In Abiquiú, we watched a short film in the Georgia O'Keefe Visitor Center and had lunch next door at the Abiquiú Inn, where green chiles were the preferred ingredient.
The featured stop of the day was the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos, where we watched a film about the Manhattan Project, and saw several de-classified letters documenting different stages in its development. The kids liked the brain teaser puzzles in a different area, which was a win for them, but which I found somewhat unsettling given the

I was most interested in a corner of the museum reserved for an informational display prepared by one group that supported the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and another that opposed it. While most of the museum dealt with the Project as a scientific and secrecy challenge and a race against time, these displays focused on the morality of dropping bomb. The pro-side argued that the Japanese were cruel (and so, to some extent, deserved it), that more civilians and soldiers would die in a conventional invasion, and that the Japanese would never have surrendered otherwise. The con-side argued that the Japanese were ready to surrender, but Truman wanted to drop the bomb in order to get a head start in a race with the Soviet Union for post-War world domination. The con-side was heavy on quotations from Douglas MacArthur  and Dwight Eisenhower, both of whom reported that they considered dropping the bomb to be utterly unnecessary.

In the car on the way to Las Vegas, New Mexico, the kids and I spent some time discussing the scenarios and the arguments presented.

Day 12: From Page to Monument Valley

One of our kids' favorite memories from vacations in years past was the night we spent in a yurt at the Joyful Journeys Hot Springs and Spa in Colorado. So, although it was expensive for us, I arranged for us to spend a night in a tipi near Monument Valley on this summer adventure. This was only the third night on the trip when we actually paid for accommodations. We spent every other night either at a friend's house or in a hotel room that we paid for using points earned on our credit cards. The tipis did not have air conditioning, though, so although we got up early to visit the Lower Antelope Canyon, we weren't in a big hurry to get there and check in.

Before leaving the Page area, we stopped at the Horseshoe Bend of the Colorado River. There's a 3/4 mile hike--some of it uphill and some over--sand to get to the observation area and there were many people--including some who'd come in buses--to see it.
Our next unplanned stop was the Navajo National Monument, where we had a picnic, checked out the visitor's center, and hiked down to the observation point where you can see prehistoric Puebloan villages built in the sandstone alcove of the canyon. From a distance, we saw a village dated from 1250 to 1300. The last time Mari and visited a site like this at Mesa Verde in Colorado was in 1991. At that time, I learned to call the people who lived in these villages "Anasazi," which is the Navajo word for "ancient ones." I learned that the Anasazi had vanished from the region for mysterious reasons.

This time, I learned a different story. The Zuni and Hopi in the region--who also have a tradition of living in "pueblo" structures like these--both trace their ancestry to the people who lived in these communities.  Consequently, it is not accurate to say that the people who lived here "disappeared."  They just moved. And became Zunis and Hopis.  It is also strange to call them "Anasazi," which is a Navajo word. The name of this site is the "Navajo National Monument" because it was established in 1909, when the people responsible for naming such things didn't attribute much importance to differentiating between Native American nations, their cultures and their histories. Today, The Park Service is reluctant to take the name away from the Navajo, even though the cultures featured at the monument are not ancestors of the Navajo, since it is on Navajo land. To add further irony, the word the "Navajo" use to refer to themselves is not "Navajo," but "Diné." "Navajo" is the Pueblo Indian word for them.

In the photo above, the cliff-dwellings are not really visible in the alcove, but they are there. The day we visited the monument, they only offered one tour of the grounds, and it was at 8 a.m.

We were last in Monument Valley in 1991. The monolith on the right in the photo below is Agathla Peak. "Agathla" is the English spelling of a Navajo word that means "much wool," according to my good friends at Wikipedia. The Spanish called it "El Capitán." Its peak is 1500 feet above the valley floor, which makes it taller than the tallest skyscraper in the United States.

Our first stop after reaching Monument Valley was the Tipi Village. After checking in, we headed over to the Monument Valley visitor's center.
We got lots of conflicting reports about whether or not we should try to take a mini-van on the unpaved, 17-mile valley loop, the beginning of which is visible in the photos above and below. The last time we were here, we were in an 8th generation Delta 88. The guide at the information desk said that earlier that day, he'd had to dig a Camry out of the sand. His advice was to try it, but he also advised against driving slowly, which gives too much time for the tires to sink into the sand. In the end, we risked it.

I like the juxtaposition of the photo above, in which the East Mitten Butte is in shadow, and another, a few photos below, in which it is in shade. The West Mitten Butte (on the left in the photo above and below) rises 856 feet above the valley floor (79 stories); The East Mitten (in the middle) rises 1026 feet above the valley floor (94 stories), and Merrick Butte, on the right, rises 966 feet above the valley floor (89 stories).

After we made it out of the valley, we celebrated with a take-out food from the View restaurant--which opened in 2008.
After we left Monument Valley, I couldn't resist the urge to just drive around the area with the windows down while we listened to some of the classical music.

The view from our tent of the moon's dramatic entrance over Monument Valley was spectacular.

The final adventure of this extraordinary day began when we realized that the front door flap of our tent would not close. It's a story probably best told by Mari, but my part involved lots of tying and untying of cloth ribbons in the dark.

Day 12: Morning at Lower Antelope Canyon

When I tried to make reservations to visit Lower Antelope Canyon several weeks before our visit, I saw that tours were offered every thirty minutes from 6 a.m. until 4:30 p.m., and no slots were available on the day I'd hoped we could go. There was a time available on the next day at 8 a.m., though, so I took it.

Lower Antelope Canyon is on Navajo land and is not part of the National Park system or the Arizona state park system. The only way to visit the tour is with a tour guide. "Ken's Tours" was recommended. They only accept cash and require a confirmation via phone or online the day before the trip. The Ken's Tours website says the departure point does not have a physical address that some GPS systems recognize, so they give you map coordinates.

We didn't have cell phone access while we were in the Grand Canyon, so I waited until we got to our our hotel in Page before I called to confirm our reservations. Unfortunately, by the time we got set up in our hotel room in Page, Ken's Tours had already shut down for the day, so all I could do was leave a phone message. The website says you have to confirm 24-48 hours in advance, so I was worried that they would not hold our reservation--especially since we hadn't paid for it. Our reservation called for us to be there thirty minutes before our scheduled 8 a.m. departure time, and I was skeptical that someone would be there answering the phones before 7 a.m., so it seemed like a real possibility that we would pack up and leave the hotel by 7:15, only to be put on a waiting list once we got to the Canyon. The only upside was that tickets were going to cost us a total of $180, and we would at least not lose a deposit.

Just before we went to bed, I explored the website a little further and attempted to confirm our reservation that way. It seemed to work, but I remained skeptical.

Ken's Tours is adjacent to a coal-burning power plant built in 1975 that features three enormous, 775 ft (71-story) concrete smokestacks that are "listed among the tallest structures in Arizaona," according to my good friends at Wikipedia. My friends also report that "the utility operators of the power station voted to close the facility when the lease expires in 2019." It is not an attractive desert feature.

Just before we reached the powerplant, we turned on to the unpaved road that leads to Ken's Tours and saw a large parking lot, crowded with cars and charter buses. A Russian man standing in the line at the ticket-purchasing window did not have a reservation, and he was told that he could get on a waiting list and hope to fill a missing spot on a tour, but he could end up waiting hours.

Fortunately, our reservation was secure.

At 8 a.m., we joined a group of 15 or so led by a Navajo man in his early 20s and walked a short distance with several other similarly sized groups across unremarkable desert terrain to a staircase and a ladder.

Part of what makes Lower Antelope Canyon so remarkable is that it is so close to such ugliness--the power plant, the parking lot, the hot, rocky surface of the desert. You can't see anything of the "canyon" until you're in it.

One of Pablo's favorite parts of this tour was that we were walking beside a couple of twenty-something Star Wars fans from Los Angeles who were eager to claim him as one of their tribe.

I would put Lower Antelope Canyon on a tier just below Sequoia National Park on a list of my all-time favorite natural wonders.