Airbourne and Arizona
The first leg of my flight takes itself through Phoenix, Arizona. I am always horrified by the sudden verdant appearance of green in the otherwise dry desert. It was good to see that the airport gardens were stocked with native plants. These hardier creatures would be more adapted to the local climate and require less maintenance, and more importantly, less water.
As we pass over the Grand Canyon, I am amazed to find myself the only one leaping to raise the shutters and peer out the window at one of North America's greatest geological treasures. Even from fifteen thousand feet up, one can not encompass the whole of it at once, and it is nothing short of amazing to see this vast gash in the landscape. It is as if the earth's skin had become too parched in the hot desert sun and cracked under the heat. That mile-deep chasm reveals the true culprit for its depth: the hard-rushing flow of the Colorado River, which has carved quite a path through the Colorado Plateau for the last ten million years on its way to the Gulf of California.
We sail onward, and leave this canyon behind for the Great Salt Lake, and the eponymous City on its shore. The pilot makes one of the better landings I have experienced in a lifetime full of plane flight. It is soft and even, and there is only a slight jar and screech as rubber meets asphalt and friction bleeds velocity from our craft. I disembark and walk all of two gates and twenty feet to begin my wait for my travel companion, Dana Watson.
It is a surprise, seeing her again after so long. While we have kept in touch via the occasional telephone call and semi-irregular bursts of e-mailed correspondence, I do not believe we had seen one another in the flesh since I watched her walk at her graduation in 2002. It was also a little frightening to recognize a certain electricity between us still.
Interesting.
I provide her with a small gift for the years away, and for the road ahead: a scintillating amethyst... water bottle.
Reunited, we make our way to the travel desks of Thrifty Car Rental. They provided us with an amazing daily rate that beat their nearest competition by more than two dollars per day - as well as an additional ten percent discount for my Sam's Club membership. Their service was excellent, providing maps of the area, a guesstimate on local gasoline costs, and reasonable directions for finding the interstate from the airport.
I only wish I could be as thrilled with the subcompact-chariot they provided us with, a green Ford Focus. Let it be said that I hope to never purchase or own one of these vehicles. While it did receive excellent gas-mileage and I could fit my tall and lanky frame into the driver's seat with some reasonable expectation of comfort, I found the dashboard design and layout inadequate, and the placement of the gear-shift on the steering column disconcerting. Turning on the windshield wipers occasionally resulted in also activating my turn signal. The cup-holders in the center column were not large enough to support our water bottles. It handled well, but I did not feel that it had as tight a turning radius as a small car should have, nor was the control as smooth as that of my own Toyota Camry. That said, it was adequate to our purposes, and served us well on the long road still ahead of us.
It was amusing to note that this rental came with an in-dash compact-disc player, and no sign of a tape-deck anywhere. The world has moved on since I was born - and I can only wonder how many years before a Firewire or USB 2.0 port appears in the dashboard to synch up the local MP3-player with the content of a renter's portable hard-drive. While I did not think to pack any CDs, it is fortunate that in some things, I am ahead of the curve. One end of the iPod was plugged into the cigarette lighter for power (is there actually anyone gauche enough left in the world to actually use these for their originally intended purpose?), and the other end was plugged into Griffin Technology's iTrip FM Transmitter. This is a wonderful addition to complement an already outstanding product. All we had to do was chose an empty section of broadcast spectrum, and we could then listen to most of my CD collection in full stereo sound. While I have noticed a few sound-quality issues with lower notes, and one occasionally encounters a scratchiness and hissing from other strong electrical signals interfering with the broadcast, listening to the iPod was no different than listening to any other station on the road - except that I had considerably more control over the content.