September 30, 2012

I HAD EATEN IN THE MOTEL'S RESTAURANT THE NIGHT BEFORE and was not impressed. Accordingly we decided to go to another restaurant for breakfast. I ordered three pancakes, but the waitress tried to talk me into a smaller order. She claimed that the pancakes were very large. Because three pancakes cost only six bucks, I figured that they couldn't be too big. When the order came, it looked like a stack of frisbees. I managed to make it through about half of them.

We tried to find a sports bar in town so that Carole could watch the Packers, but sports bars have not made their way into this corner of the world. Thinking that we might find a place where Carole could watch the Packers play near Monument Valley, we left Page around noon. Our destination was Kayenta, a town near Monument Valley. We didn't fill our tank with gas because our map showed that there were several towns on our route. When the gas tank was near empty, we saw a sign for one of the towns. What was labelled a town on our map turned out to be a collection of rusty trailers, but no gas station. The next "town" we saw looked just like the first one. With no town within 40 miles, and our gas tank on empty, we began practicing saying ya'at'eeh in case we met one of the locals who might have some gas. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, a gas station appeared and we were able to fill our tank.

When we arrived in Kayenta, we discovered that it did not have a sports bar; so Carole sat in the Durango and listened to the game on Satellite radio; that's devotion. I was afraid she would burn up a tank of gas, but she told me that she used up only a quarter of a tank. In pellucid logic, she explained that using up a quarter of a tank of gas was cheaper than buying  a ticket to a game. At least the Packers won.

While Carole was listening to the game, I amused myself by reading the local phone book. Because there are so few people living in the area, the phone book covers a wide area. When Carole came back to the room, I told her that we had to visit a town in Utah named Fredonia. Frankly, I was surprised when she inquired as to why I wanted to visit this town with a hallowed name. I patiently explained to Carole why I wanted to visit Fredonia: "Don't you remember the classic Marx Brothers' film  Duck Soup, and Groucho singing "Hail Fredonia? Groucho, AKA Rufus T. Firefly, was the president of Fredonia during its war with a neighboring country."

We saw a sign indicating that there was a museum in the area dedicated to the Navajo code talkers who baffled the Japanese during WWII.  We decided to pass up the museum. After all, our oldest daughter and I have been talking in code for years. No one has ever been able to break our code.  In fact, most people don't even know we are talking in code.