And the moon rose over an open field (Arizona day liu)

Short day today, but I have to warn you, there's gonna be a picture or two in this post.

Temperatures dropped to freezing on my last camping night. Maybe even a bit below freezing. I was sleeping in the Jeep again (People have asked, so I'll clarify - there was plenty of room to stretch in there. Next time I'm not even bringing a tent), and at some point I had to start the engine and let the heating work for 15 minutes before I could go back to sleep. That cold.

But nothing a hot cup of tea and waking up to desert views couldn't fix.

One last, very nicely composed, if you don't mind my saying, goodbye to Catalina State Park.


And it's plane time!

I originally left the area in a hurry, so I would have time for Monument Valley, but MV turned out to be way too far, so I suddenly had time to go back to the Pima Air & Space Museum, where they took the best corpses from plane graveyard, added some original Air Force loaners, and let us geeks run around freely.

It starts small, with the tiniest jet in the world. It will be familiar to fans of the movie Octopussy (are there such people anywhere?) and to people who owned the Acroject flight simulator on the Commodore 64 (which would be me).


Ah, 1985 graphics... This is the first time I see this in color, BTW.


My parents actually have slides of this thing flying in their basement. The slides are in their basement, not the flying.

It gets warmer with this B-26.


And moves STRAIGHT to the main attraction! An F-14. Right there. With me. For real. And my pants suddenly feel tight.
This is the first F-14 ever produced, which is very symbolic, with the last F-14 making its last flight a few weeks ago.


Prowler.


The Black Bird of Sexiness.


Classics: Beautifully restored B-24 and B-29, complete with dummies in flight suits manning the guns. Awesome, as in awe-inspiring.



Another meeting that's been a long time coming. With trembling hands, iDoc finally feels up the A-10 Thunderbolt II.

Interestingly I wasn't the only nut in that place. A guy was taking (what appeared to be) his grandson through the museum, explaining how this here A-10 was built around that big in the front. He could have been reading it from the sign next to the plane, but I sensed his insanity from as far as the F-4. He proved me right when he paused in mid-explanation and suddenly asked me "I can't remember. Is that gun 30 or 36 milimeters?" What the hell kind of a question is that? Of course it's 30mm, idiot. 30mm depleted uranium projectiles, specially designed for the Avenger, which you will only find on the A-10. Everybody knows that.

But how did he know I would know the answer? Was it because I was licking the gun at the time?


I never noticed the Starlifter had such an artsy tail.


He hey! Remember watching Bailey's Bird three times a year in the early 80's?
Oh, you missed growing up in Israel in the 80's? You didn't miss much. Anyway, Baily's Bird was a show about this guy (Bailey), living in some shithole in South-East Asia with his plane and his pansy blond son, and every episode he would get into a new adventure with his plane, which was an Albatross, just like this plane. And there were always smugglers of some sort, wanting to smuggle their smuggables on Baily's Bird. But he wouldn't let them. Cause he's Bailey. I also seem to recall a hot blond doctor, but I'm no longer sure. It was that age when planes were more interesting than women. I'll let you know when it ends. Was he Australian?




Update: Got it! After giving up hope of ever finding any real Bailey's Bird material on the net, it turns out that nothing is too old or too obscure for Google. Check it out! Pansy kid and everything. And an episode list!



Update2: Yes its Australian. And the show was known as Flugboot 121 in Germany. Silly Germans. Anyway.



Where did all the cool planes of the 60's go, huh?


Look at this Hustler, with that huge double drop-off fuel tank. That is the most pimped out fighter plane ever.


Crouching under a B-52G. Holly shit.


What are doing tonight, Brain? Same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world. Isn't it, like, the spitting image?
A Hercules, converted to carry moon rocket engines.


I got this F-111 aligned so perfectly, you can see right down that tube.


Turns out this isn't a Nord.


But this is, of course, a Harrier.


That's me, setting the tripod up on a bench. Muy artistico.


And that's me, hugging the F-14 goodbye. I can't believe they decommissioned it for that butt-ugly F/A-18. Feh.


After a few intimate minutes with the F-14, I looked up and noticed there was nobody left in the museum - it was closing time. But time for one last shot.
It was supposed to be a tiny me in the middle of the museum, but I couldn't get far enough before the timer took the picture, so here's a cool me with the sun behind me. Just like my hero, Josey Wales.



And that was it. My flight left at 8am, and I couldn't camp and get up early enough to pack my gear and drive to the airport, so I had to spend the night in the airport Best Western. How bourgeoisie. After a tearful 5am goodbye from Pedro, my loayl mule, I headed back to reality.

Reality bites (Arizona day funf)

What's that you say? You wish I had more panoramas from yesterday? Well. I guess this is your lucky day!
(Click for the seriously large versions)

The sunset that never stops.


Newspaper rock.


The oh-so colored desert.


Having lost some of my celebratory mood, so I decided to skip a few stops, take it easy, and drive back to the Phoenix area a day earlier than planned.

Through that wonderful redness.


Arizona is full places with great Western names. I even drove across a Dead Skunk Creek.


Stopped some Alpine Pizza in Flagstaff. Like the guy said (this works better with a heavy Russian accent): Flagstaff is a premium place to spend the afternoon in. I walked around for an hour or two, bought Marina a pretty wool hat, and, you know, chilled. This was the only city street I saw on this trip


Further down South. When you start getting off the plateau, you go through a brief forest period. Awesome.


30 minutes later, you're back in the Southern desert.


Quick stop at Montezuma Castle. The Spanish Conquistadors used to think the Montezuma, the Aztec king, stayed here for a while. Nowdays, white man say Montezuma never come this North. White man say, this just village of stinking farmers. iDoc say, is impressive anyway.





You can't actually go up there though, so let's head South and get some mileage before our last

SUNSET MADNESS!!!

And then it was three hours of driving back to Catalina State Park, listening to Neil Gaiman reading Fragile Things, his new short story collection. I cannot say enough about how this book is right for me. Let me tell you, reflective mood + driving alone through the night + Neil reading "Other People" = a whole new type of chill down the spine. And The Problem of Susan... Neil calls it "disturbing and annoying", and it is exactly that. If you've read The Last Battle, this story is just for you.

Close to the end now. Can you feel it?

Many a hand has scaled the grand old face of the plateau (Arizona day arba)

Just enough space between the bags to stretch comfortably, and I slept like a baby. A baby that was freezing his little baby nuts off. The problem was that my my big comfy sleeping bag is so big that it was essentially completely open, no matter how hard I tried to lie on its corners. Brrr.




I drove back into Flagstaff to get some tourist info. It was closed for Thanksgiving, but check out this El Dorado in the parking lot! Then it's out East, towards Meteor Crater and Petrified Forest.


The plateau just drove me wild. So flat. So BIG.


Just driving that perfectly straight road for miles and miles.


This one turned out nice.


Meteor Crater. It isn't a picture, it's a big hole in the wall. You can even see a bit of sky above the wall. Pretty cool, isn't it?


The Crater. 50,000 years ago, a small piece of rock slammed into this place at a rather high velocity. About 150 years ago, some white man passed by and said "mine". As far as I could understand, this place is actually private property. I've wanted to meet The Crater in person for a long time, and it was just as odd as I had hoped.



Not much to do on a cold day at MC (or on most other days), so let's stitch a few panoramas and hit the road. The stitching software the came with my camera is worth exactly what I paid for it, but these still came out nice. When you take these multiple-shot panoramas, you too concentrated on getting good overlap between shots etc. to see what's going on, and you sometimes find interesting stuff in there when you get home. Like this girl, who came out of nowhere and blocked my view of the crater rim. Is it spelled "hoe" or just "ho"? In other news, those pants really should be retired. They used to have a color.





These pictures aren't short, they're just wide as hell. Worth a click?

Time for the "hit the road" bit. The I-40 is officially my favorite road ever.

This was supposed to be a 360 panorama stitched from 15 pictures and show just how big and flat the landscape was, but the damn software, again. Click the left side to get an idea. Anyway: Wheeeee!


You can't take a sharp picture while driving, but you can park on the side and run to the middle for the picture. And nearly get squashed by a drunk tourist.


Petrified forest. It used to be all forest, but now it's all petrified. Get it? The story goes something like this: several millions of years ago, the forest that covering this area
was flattened by a (volcanic?) explosion and soon covered by (volcanic?) ash. A few million years of rain and pressure produced this amazing landscape that looks like wood, but is in fact pure stone.

B-I-Z-A-R-R-E.




It's not that petrified wood is so hard to comprehend, I mean, we've all woken up with - nevermind. But it's so tree-colored that your monkey brain insists on calling it "wood", and is quite surprised when you get closer, and see something like this.





But you know the old saying: He who gets to the big park after noon, has to rush through it.

That perfect blue in the sky. We wants it.


Every dark spot in the distance is a petrified log. It it weirder because they're stone, or because there isn't a live tree in 100 miles?


A crow! One of 6 animals I can recall seeing on this trip.


Fox footprints. Maybe not a fox, but certainly non-feline - see the nail prints?


The painted desert is not the most colorful I've seen, but definitely the most goes-on-forever I've seen.


That's my Jeep.


And that's me.


And that's crow number deux (make that 7 animals).


And maybe it is the prettiest ever.


In ancient times, vandalism was just as serious a problem as it was now. But since this Sinagua graffiti is almost 1,000 year old, it is now considered art. I thoroughly dug this. Click for more detail.




It's 5 o'clock. Do you you where you sunset madness is? I got mine right here.

There's an old car skeleton where Route 66 used to cross the park. Here are but a few of the million pictures I took there.









If you made it this far, you will be rewarded by seeing the best picture of this trip. I'm especially proud of it because I actually took time to compose it and knew exactly how I wanted it to come out.


Elements of a perfect camping night: Gas lantern, tea on the gas stove laptop for documenting the day's experiences, a bag of chocolate chips, and temperatures so low that I just turned everything off and jumped into the relative safety of my sleeping bag.


Long post. Tomorrow will be shorter, promise.