Houston

Traffic and security are both remarkably light this morning, and my experiences would have been described as uneventful but for a woman who attempted to put her small dog-carrier through the x-ray machine... with the dog still in it. Fortunately the vigilance of the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration is not limited to preventing terrorist actions, and the alarm was raised and the conveyor-belt stopped before the hapless yorkshire terrier could be thoroughly irradiated.

Disaster averted, I arrive at my gate in record time.

As I have nothing to do but wait for my flight to board, I turn to a recent acquisition of mine, an Apple iPod to provide the soundtrack for my life. The first three songs summoned for the moment prove to be surprisingly prescient: "With a little help from my friends" from the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band "There is life outside your apartment" from the soundtrack to Avenue Q "Such great heights" from The Postal Service

Airbourne and Arizona

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.

The Kenslers and Salt Lake

Of course, finding them was not without its difficulties. Salt Lake City is notable for more than the Great Salt Lake and the Bonneville Salt Flats. It is also the heart of a major modern religion, the Church of Latter-Day Saints, also known as the Mormons. Their city takes much of its spirit from their character. It is remarkably clean, and well laid out on a precise grid whose extensively numbered organizational system is at first a total mystery - until one realizes that the point of origin from which all roads ascend in a Cartesian plane is the central temple of their faith. It is an astonishingly elegant building, and I wish we had taken the time to visit and photograph it.

We feast that night at "Pi Pizza", a comfortable eating establishment that is underground in more ways than one. It is here that we are joined by Dieter the Bold, another Grinnellian of our acquaintance. Another biology major in college, Dieter now works as tech-support for eBay, and they keep him real busy. We are fortunate to capture some of his free time on one of his rare days off. We order two massively thick pizzas heavily laden with toppings, one for the carnivores in our soul and our party, and the other pie is for the vegetarian inclined. As much as I hate to admit it, the vegetarian pizza, with its fresh tomatoes and artichoke hearts, is almost the better of the two.

Dana and I linger for a while, catching up on the simple joys of conversation with old friends and new ideas and find ourselves leaving the Kensler residence late in the evening, heading down the road towards our first true stop of this adventure: Timpanogos Cave - and a motel at which to crash the night. I decide to be clever, and try and find my way to the park in the blackness before searching out a motel. Perhaps I was merely reluctant to return to civilization with the black sky lit up by the endless diamond night above us, but I did manage to get somewhat turned around on the way back to the interstate from the Park's front gate. Dana good-naturedly suggested that we might be lost, but I knew better. We were definitely somewhere - we just didn't know where yet.