Trips are such a respite from the 9 to 6 monotonous company routine when you just put all work stress on back burner and chill out. I was jaunting to phoenix for a 3 day family trip to see my sister who is here for 3 weeks to visit her husband.
I was using METRO rail to reach airport for the first time in states which is supposedly very rare here; thanks to the oil and car companies bombarding rail networks and setting up road webs to spread their business in corporate US. So it’s just California, Georgia, New York or a few more who have some internal rail network but nothing similar to TGV in Europe exists across states with aviation left as the only option unless you want to spend days on a road trip.
For the first time I have left my laptop back at home since he companied me during sophomore year and rather decided to grab my pen instead to put down my thinkings. Part of the motivation was watching REMEMBER ME recently where Tyler goes very morning to a coffee shop to write a dairy to his dead brother about his what and where about .I could sense the soothing touch from it when you write your mind on a piece of paper and your thoughts take a graceful form. Now that I think of it, it is making more and more sense to pen down the travel dairies as memories are really lush green as you live them and you don’t fail to mention half of the things you experienced.
Left for Grand Canyons the next morning……..
Every place is peculiar when we view it from holistic perspective. Phoneix is sitting in the middle of cacti clad naked muddy mountains. These cacti are really fun looking trolls with hands protruding from literally anywhere. There are a just a few cities spread across Arizona and you travel like for hours till you reach from one to another not even seeing a fluttering bird for miles. It’s just the shining beacon of the sky making mirages and companying you all the way.
Rather than the curled up snake roads of the Himalayas making you puke out all the time, these mountains have straight gradually steep roads resembling like Aravallis of Rajasthan. The well developed road network makes the road trip such a fun with no hitches and jerks in the feel like airborne vehicle.
It was so endearing to see how the barren spirits of the desert gave away to the country side grass land kind of vegetation when the beautiful town of flagstaff came over. This city is designed with a European outlook to it with the same stony roads and restaurants serving outside on the streets.
Plateaus were nowhere visible for miles now and there were huge grass lands on both sides of the road and we felt like lost in middle of nowhere. The sign board to the Grand Canyon after miles was such a breather and so it became clear that we had already reached the pinnacles of Colorado plateau already and huge gorge canyons carved out by the Colorado was sitting below us shining in different shades of orange.
It was amazing to see how the canyons were being carved out with the forces of nature looking like a stack of plates on top of each other. I felt like a humungous old city came out of the earth’s womb. As I read on wiki that nearly two billion years of the Earth's geological history have been exposed as the Colorado River and its tributaries cut their channelsthrough layer after layer of rock while the Colorado Plateau wasuplifted. I had never seen such a huge valley and the best part were both wind and river chipping the mountains in their own styles.
PS: Grand canyons have awesome appeal to save in the hard drive of brains. Nothing seems better than a road trip in Sonata humming songs and watching the sun setting on the horizon through the vast grasslands.
Take Home Message :Stone is the most mutable thing given sufficient time.
