Airstream Adventure Week #1

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Trip Start Jun 25, 2006 Trip End Nov 01, 2006 Next
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  Vernal, Utah
Wednesday, July 12, 2006

We arrived in Vernal, Utah, last night, located in the northeastern corner of the state on our way to the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone. As soon as we settled into a nearby state park campground, we learned that the nearby dinosaur quarry was closing in the next two hours for renovations. We knew nothing about the quarry, but we knew we had to see it before it closed, so we bolted down the highway just in time. Turns out this area was loaded with dinosaurs back about 150 million years ago, and the bones were deposited in riverbeds (now granite rock) pretty much intact. The quarry, part of the Dinosaur National Monument, is a large piece of rock where one can see bones and vertebrae sticking out of the rock, all of it sheltered by an airplane hanger-like structure. We are now dinosaur-philes.

We planned on staying for only one night here in Vernal, but tonight is the start of the famous Dinosaur Rodeo, so--surprise!--we decided to check it out. As many of you know, Marshall was herself a Rodeo Queen and a champion quarter horse rider (we still have the chaps and silver trophies somewhere in storage), so we just had to check it out. We will use the day instead to get the blog started, change the car oil and perform other housekeeping chores.

As you can see, we are pretty flexible these days.

We have been on the road now about two and a half weeks. We have had a series of adventures and rookie mistakes, and we are just now getting into the swing of the trip.

We left Searcy, Arkansas, Marshall's hometown, on June 24, driving a brand new 2006 Chevy Avalanche and a brand new 2006 23-foot Airstream Safari, thanks to our sponsors at Airstream of Arkansas (son-in-law Mike and super salesman Gene Morris). I have never pulled a trailer and was a little trepidatious, but for the most part it has been smooth. The weather was so sweat-dripping hot that it was hard to plan ahead for a trip that requires layers and fleece.

Our first night was in an Arkansas state park, where the first crisis was finding a local liquor store, because many of the counties on the west side of the state are dry, but we crossed a county line and spotted a beer stand. All set. We left the next day heading due west through Oklahoma, because it is straight and flat. We ended up staying three nights in a state park, giving us time to explore nearby county museums, play golf, and ride bikes next to oil pumps and natural gas pipelines.

This area is near Anadarko, OK, which is apparently the epicenter of many American Indian tribes. There are headquarters for the Kiowa, Apache and other tribes and a few casinos, including one in a mobile trailer. The Kiowa museum tells the story of how the Indians lost their land and buffalo to the white settlers, but today Indians, full American citizens since 1924, have sent soldiers to the American wars. There was a memorial for one Kiowa soldier recently killed in Iraq. Apparently, this area did not get the politically correct memo about renaming their facilities. The local high school teams are "Braves" and the local movie theater is the "Redskin" theater.

The local Department of Interior Indian museum describes the transfer of Indians to the reservations in Oklahoma as a "migration," which is a euphemism if I have ever heard one. The Indians relocated here include the Cherokees from the Southeast (North Carolina), the Delaware (Pennsylvania and Ohio), and the Plains Indians (Apache, Kiowa). None of them wanted to be relocated. (Read Dee Brown, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee). It is no small irony that the State of Oklahoma license plate reads "Native America" with an Indian graphic. As we drove through Woodward, Oklahoma we stopped into the local Plains Indians and Pioneer Museum, a little gem of local history and culture. One quote caught my eye, describing the massacre of the huge buffalo herds in the tens of thousands as an effective way to remove the Indians from the Plains. I never could fathom why the earlier settlers were so determined to kill all of the buffalo, but this explanation and the growth of the cattle industry during the Civil War probably explains it.

We stayed at another Oklahoma state park on a high mesa, also empty, and we were feeling our oats about this trailer thing. We left along a local road, well-graded but gravel, for about 40 miles. As we pulled into a one intersection town of Folsom, NM we realized we had a flat tire on the Airstream. Rookie panic! First we couldn't find the jack. A phone call back to Arkansas determined that it was under the back seat of the Avalanche. Then we couldn't get enough pressure on the single-handled lug wrench. Stuck in Folsom!

Marshall went into the post office to find a phone book. The town is too small to have a phonebook, but they did have a loose-leaf binder with phone numbers. The postmaster picked up the phone to call Jimmy, the tire guy, but he was out of town for the day. So the postmaster closed down his window, walked across the street to get his lug wrench, and with few words (and a bemused eye at us goofballs with the fancy trailer) walked over to the Airstream, jacked it up, replaced the tire with the spare, and set it back down. He refused the money I offered, but said only, "Just get a real lug wrench." Two hours later we did have a new tire--and a new lug wrench.

I don't think the post office guys in Washington, D.C. would have done that, do you?

Next entry: Colorado and more kindness of strangers.

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Mountain pass	Oklahoma oil well	Our Airstream Home	Redskin theater--not PC
Utah Mesa

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