A Little Bit of Map Love

I just finished reading the book Maphead by Ken Jennings (you know, the guy who won Jeopardy! a million times...). He wrote the book to give all of us a look into the secret lives of map-lovers. I love to look at a map as much as anyone, but clearly the people Jennings interviews are on a completely different level (a level Jennings resides on as well). Reading this book was excellent timing, considering our recent extreme road trip.

Jennings talks in the book about the kids who compete in the National Geographic Bee (similar to the Spelling Bee, but ridiculously more interesting!). We walked past the theatre in DC several times where the Bee is held each year, but we missed the throng of contestants by a few weeks. From ancient to modern, his book covers map lovers, map writers, and map interpreters throughout the centuries. For example, contrast the Travellers Club in London in 1819, who limited its membership to men who had travelled at least 500 miles from their city, with the modern Travelers' Century Club, founded in Southern California in 1954, which includes more than 2,000 members who have each visited at least 100 different countries in their lifetime. While many members are much older than I am, the youngest member ever to join this club was only 2 1/2 when she qualified, and at 37, Charles Veley became the first member to finish the entire club's checklist, visiting all 319 'countries' on the approved list.

I don't think I'm ready for that kind of commitment, but I felt endeared to many of the other 'clubs' in the book. Jack Longacre founded the Highpointers Club, a group of people who try to visit the highest point in each of the 50 states. And in case you're scared of heights, you might like to know that Delaware's highest point is in a trailer park. Ohio's is a school flagpole, and the highest point in Florida is only 345 feet above sea level (at a rest stop) - lower than many of the skyscrapers in the state. Apparently only five states require climbing skills, and at one point the most difficult height to scale wasn't Mt McKinley (at 20,000 feet) but the 800-ft hill in Rhode Island that lay on the property of a cranky old man who would not grant access. He died in 2001, allowing members access at last. When Longacre died of cancer in 2002, members of the club scattered his ashes on the top of all 50 high points.

Looking for something more personalized? You could join Peter Holden, who has eaten at 12,000 McDonald's restaurants, or Rafael Lozano, who has been to all but 20 of the 8,500 Starbucks in North America. One man has made a checklist of his checklists, visiting "every site in the national park system, all eleven parishes of Barbados, all 30 'historic houses of worship' in Philadelphia, all 51 weather stations in Thailand, and every US Presidential birthplace". You could make up just about any list, just to check it off. Tempting. 

Or maybe you're one of the people who drive the roads every day, looking at signs, checking directions, and correcting mistakes, like the "roadgeeks" in Chapter 9. If you knew that Hwy 99 used to run from the Canadian border all the way to Mexico, maybe you are a roadgeek. Most of highway 99 was abandoned when I-5 was completed in 1968. The roadgeek in the book has a customized plate that says MAPPER, with a frame that says "I'm not lost. I'm a cartographer."

I'm not sure who would be surprised that I may entertain joining one of the above groups someday. I'm not ready for that kind of commitment right now, but I am truly intrigued (and I have a little bit of a headstart on visiting many things in the US). However, there was one thing in the book I am ready to dive in and try - Jim Sinclair's annual St. Valentine's Day Massacre map navigating contest. It's a contest done by US mail and has been going for more than 40 years. Contestants receive a map in the mail with a complicated list of instructions and an answer sheet with multiple choice options. I'm a little nervous that Jennings was only able to complete half of the map himself (an option that's available to first-timers), but I'm hoping Jaimee will agree to do it with me and we can help each other figure out the answers ;)

There are also chapters on map collectors, geocachers, make-believe map creators, early explorers, the creation and beginning of Google Earth, and the mappers who mark streets on OpenStreetMap. And while the characters in the book are interesting and thoroughly entertaining in their topophilia, what I really loved most about the book was the obsessive way he inserted gobs of obscure trivia into each chapter. If you're going to read the book, (which I highly recommend), don't worry. This is just a small percentage of the trivia in the book, so go ahead and enjoy it. But I just had to share some of this nerdy trivia with all of you. It gave me lots of things to look up on Wikipedia and read about, and I am planning to buy the book myself, if for nothing more than the 16 pages of referenced books, articles and online resources in the back. Here's some of my favorite trivia.

- Weirton, West Virginia is the only town in the US that borders two different states on opposite sides - it's in that tiny little stick we drove through on our trip.

- Victoria Island in Nunavut, Canada is the world's largest "triple island" (an island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island). There are others, but this is the biggest.

- Bir Tawil is a little piece of desert between Egypt and Sudan that neither nation can claim because of some strange international treaty, making it one of the last little pieces of land on Earth that belongs to no one at all.

- The Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress has 8,500 cases of maps with 5 drawers each, nearly two entire football fields worth, including maps hand-drawn by Stonewall Jackson, Magellan, Lewis and Clark, and George Washington.

- The USGS began creating a series of topographic maps just after WWII in 1:24,000 detail (each mile is 3"). They didn't finish the project until 1992, and the map is so big that if you pulled out the blank blue maps of the Great Salt Lake it would be 783 feet by 383 feet (about 3 city blocks).

- When the Defense Department came to the Library of Congress after September 11th for a map of Afghanistan they could use, the Library had one because it had purchased it the year before in the equivalent of a garage sale that a vault in Arizona held while trying to clear out items they didn't want anymore.

- You can get a Reader ID (library card for the Library of Congress) and look at maps in the Reading Room (you can't check them out, though). <This is definitely on my list of things to do!>

- New Moore Island in the Bay of Bengal was a hotly disputed piece of land between India and Bangladesh, until it disappeared under the water due to rising sea levels.

- But the island of Ferdinandea (a submerged volcano) occasionally rises out of the Mediterranean and then subsides or erodes again. It last surfaced in 1831, where it was swarmed by tourists and argued over by diplomats before it went under again. The US accidentally bombed the island in 1986, thinking it was a Libyan submarine. Oops.

- Censored or altered maps still exist today. For example, while Google Earth shows a US military area on the Korean Peninsula clearly, the most popular South Korean site (Naver) had covered the area with a barren wilderness, literally erasing everything in the area.

- President Eisenhower made the cross-country trip I did in 1919 (he was an army officer then), heading to California to visit family, except he did it without paved roads in many areas. It took him 62 days (an average speed of 6 mph) and the convoy lost nine vehicles and 21 men were injured in the 230 accidents on the trip. In 1956, when he was President, he signed the Interstate Highway System into law, "the greatest peacetime public works project in history", using enough cement to build 80 Hoover Dams. Thanks, Eisenhower!

- Rand McNally predated Google StreetView Maps by about 100 years. When the company first started in 1907, they didn't have maps, but had a series of "Photo-Auto Guides", which were dashboard photos with a driver's eye view of landmarks and intersections and little arrows that showed where to turn. Roads weren't consistently numbered or labeled, so drivers had to use landmarks to get around.

- It was actually Rand McNally that initiated the labeling of our roads and highways shortly thereafter. Instead of figuring out how to get more photos, they changed everything. They created a numbering system and decided to drive all over the country, labeling every single road and route by hand. By 1922, they had labeled 50,000 miles of roads. Luckily for them, state and federal agencies pitched in with their own efforts to get the job done.

- Some geocaches are so extreme, they've never been found, although I think the one left by a Russian Mir submersible at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean is cheating, considering people have actually been able to retrieve the one that was dropped by helicopter on top of a 70' tall pylon in the middle of the Potomac River in West Virginia, as well as the one at the bottom of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. There is also an unclaimed geocache on one of the highest peaks of the Nepalese Himalayas, if you're interested.

- Because land is so hotly debated, Google is constantly involved in diplomatic issues, negotiating with governments and sending its own representatives to the UN committee on place-names. This diplomacy has caused them to make concessions, such as making the border of a particular country appear different to viewers from each of the two countries - actually moving the borderline to that particular country's believed area to avoid conflict.

- Google has added a Street View snowmobile for snow trails, a tricycle for narrow roads, a trolley for indoor imagery (like museums), and a Trekker (like a backpack) for areas only accessible by foot (first used in the Grand Canyon).

- Many things have been discovered on aerial photos like Google Earth that no one had seen before. Examples include the ruins of a lost Amazonian city in Parma, and the 'forest swastika' - a group of trees planted in Brandenburg that make a visible swastika during a few weeks of spring and autumn when the leaves turn yellow. The trees were cut down in 2000. Or how about the fact that a team of German scientists discovered in 2008 that grazing cattle orient themselves almost entirely north to south, prompting further studies on animals and their sensitivity to magnetic fields. 

- Google Maps and Google Earth both list the West Lancashire town of Argleton. A place that does not exist in real life.

- The current marker of the Four Corners - where Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet - is actually 1,807 feet east of the real place where the four states connect.

- Tired of geocaches? Maybe you should hunt for convergence lines (where latitude and longitude meet - a perfect 0,0,0). From any point on Earth, you are never more than 49 miles from one of these spots - even closer together the nearer you get to the poles (although many are underwater). Want to see photos of these completely uninteresting places? Visit the Degree Confluence Project, maintained by convergence hunters seeking all of these points on the earth. There's still some that haven't been visited.

- Want to do something even weirder? Join the group who is trying to make a 'sandwich' of the Earth. It's nearly impossible in the US, because we don't have many antipodes (an-tip-uh-deez), or diametrically opposite points (on the other side of the world) that isn't water, and that would make the bread soggy. All you have to do is find two points that are on the opposite side of the world, find someone on the other side of the Earth who is willing to lay a piece of bread on the ground, and voila! an Earth sandwich! (two brothers  laid half a baguette on the hills of Southern Spain while someone else did in Auckland, New Zealand to make the first deliberate Earth sandwich in 2006, although I suppose it's possible one was accidentally made before that.)

Find your antipodes

I learned how to crochet yesterday, and I'm having a blast! A has already asked for this scarf, but hopefully I'll make more things soon. I have another lesson next week and then next month I hope to take a knitting class as well.

How cool is that?

A Day At The Spa

Today the girls decided to pamper themselves with a day at the spa. They mixed 'herbs' of all kinds (leaves and grass - although I kept hearing "rosemary") in a plastic tub of water with some juice from an orange to soak their feet in. When C complained about the water being too cold, K decided to trek warm water out from the kitchen sink. After about a dozen trips, I mentioned she might want to use the teakettle which helped her finish filling the tubs quickly for both of her sisters.

When she came to ask me if she could cut up a cucumber for them, I hesitated a minute but decided to let her go ahead. When I walked outside to see what she'd been working on, this is what I saw.

 

K excitedly told me that she was going to start her own spa and start charging people. Then when someone asked her where she had made all of her money, she would say, "My spa!"

 

Even though she said she wouldn't charge people she knew to come to her spa, A offered to pay her a dollar for the experience. When the two of them rolled over and K kneeled between them and scratched their backs, A proclaimed it 'the best spa ever' and offered to pay her two dollars. (Made an even better spa experience because she got to eat the cucumbers when she was done - one of A's favorite veggies).

 

In the car, both A and K said they wanted to sit next to the best spa person ever, so all three climbed in the back seat. And then it went nutty.

 

C decided she was going to stay up all night and plan for the world opening of K's spa tomorrow. A got involved, and of course the two of them decided that it should actually be a pet wash instead of a spa for people. And soon the whole thing had deteriorated into an Ed Debevic's-style pet wash, where they would insult people and their pets when they came in. They practiced their insults in funny foreign accents and laughed hysterically.

 

K wasn't interested in any of that and decided to kick them both out of her spa plans. If she opens a spa in the future, I'll be sure to let you all know!

Day 33 - Home at Last

Total Miles Driven: 8061
Total States Visited: 25 + the District of Columbia
Totally Exhausted People: 4

The actual route we took across the country

I'm pretty sure today was the longest 6 hours of my entire life. We must have stopped for 'a break' a dozen times on the way home today. We actually woke up pretty early and enjoyed the hotel's free breakfast one last time. I was amazed at how beautiful the property was here. Too bad it was so late in our trip because the girls would have loved to play in the big, grassy quad around the swimming pool. But exhaustion had set in, and after breakfast we just sat in our room and watched TV until they kicked us out at noon.

We talked briefly this morning about visiting Disneyland while we were here. We're only about 20 minutes away and parking and entrance tickets would be free, but the votes were split with A saying she wanted to go, C saying she didn't, and K bouncing back and forth. I, personally, could go to Disneyland anytime and love it, but this was the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend and the park was packed. I also had to take into consideration the likelihood that once I got into the park, I wouldn't want to leave, and the thought of a midnight or 1am arrival back home was not a pleasant one. In the end, I decided to be sensible and skip the park today. C had the most passionate opinion anyway, and it was probably for the best. She actually picked up everyone's clothes, packed up the entire room, and helped carry stuff to the car. Anyone who knows her knows that that is highly unusual behavior for her, and I just didn't have the heart to argue with that kind of passion to get home.

As the day wore on, I realized that we had made the right choice indeed, as the girls' (and my) exhaustion became too intense to imagine enjoying a day in the park today. I must admit that I also considered the possibility of buying another hat in Disneyland, but I guess I'll just have to order it online, like the Information Desk clerk suggested back in Florida.

We were literally on the home stretch now, and although I accidentally got on Hwy 99 instead of Hwy 5 at some point, I managed to cut back over and make my way north towards home. (It was a dead giveaway that there were flowers and bushes near the side of the road. I thought, "vegetation? scenery? this doesn't look like highway 5!")

As we got really close to our home, I remembered thinking how strange it was to realize that we hadn't been in the Bay Area, much less California, for more than a month. I suddenly felt like we'd only gone away for a weekend trip and were just heading back home.

Mike had hung decorations on the house to welcome us home, although I'm pretty sure I'm the only one that saw them.

The girls rushed inside to greet Ginger and Kamea, whom they had missed greatly.

 C with Ginger

A with Kamea

We had a wonderful adventure, but it's good to be home. We have lots of adventures here, too, and we'll try to share them with you as often as we can!

Thanks for joining us on our road trip! :)

Day 32 - Phoenix and into California at last

Miles Driven Today: Aout 405

The excitement to play with the cousins this morning proved to be too much for one of my girls as C woke up at 4am, 5:30am, and then again at 6:30am asking if she could go downstairs and play with them yet. My niece and nephew are early risers, but my girls typically are not. With all the time zone changes and varied bedtimes and wake-up calls, hardly any of us are getting a good night's sleep anymore anyways.

The kids all played together while Eric got ready to go to the funeral and Jaimee and I talked about what we would do for the day. It was such a senseless reason for that officer to die, made even more upsetting by the fact that he was so young himself and he had little kids at home. There would be a huge procession in his honor today (10 miles of patrol vehicles) on the way to the memorial service as the city grieved for the second day in a row, following a local firefighter's funeral yesterday.

After Eric left, we packed up the kids and headed to a local coffee shop for breakfast.

My three girls with my niece and nephew together in the center

We had decided to visit the Musical Instrument Museum, one of the attractions I had looked at for this area and one that Jaimee said was highly praised by the locals. It was about a 30 minute drive from her house, but it was well worth the drive. I wouldn't exactly say it was a kid-friendly museum, but it was certainly somewhere an adult could spend days gazing at the collection of instruments and the accompanying videos, and I would very highly recommend it to anyone who loves music or anthropology, or is even mildly interested in either. When we entered, the museum gave us a set of headphones with a receiver box. Throughout the museum there were instruments from each country and a TV screen that was playing a series of movies featuring those instruments. When you walked near a TV, the music from that video would come onto your headphones. It was an awesome way to enjoy the music and allowed them to pack the countries in tightly without distracting people in different areas, even if it was a little disorienting to walk through the museum and hear music in your ears, only to try to figure out which country around you it was coming from.

The first room of the museum acted as an introduction to the instruments that were to follow, and took some time to compare the similar instruments from around the country, like these lutes.

And these guitars

The center one in the glass case was from 1590, built in Lisbon, Portugal

The guitar collection included acoustic and electric guitars of all shapes and sizes, as well as a couple of harp guitars.

so cool!

The next room over had an introductory movie and a collection of some of the biggest and smallest musical instruments in the world, like these two stringed instruments

not as tiny as your tiniest violin, Mom, but close!

They even had giant musical instruments hanging from the ceiling!

The museum was separated by continent and then had displays by country. Although they were all fascinating, here are a few that I took photos of. We had to speed through the last couple of continents because the kids were getting restless, but Jaimee and I could have stayed here all day!

 crocodile noisemaker from Burma

 These women from Vanuatu were actually playing music using the surface of the water. It was one of my favorite displays. The sound of the rhythms they made together were so cool!

 This was one of C's favorites - a drum from Mexico made with rattlesnake tails resting on a cow skin hide. It says the tails buzz like a snare on the drumhead when it's played.

 And this was another one of her favorites. I'm not sure why she took such a close-up picture, but it's actually a drum made of allligator skin, also from Mexico.

 this recycled instrument display highlighted the people who take whatever leftover materials they can find and make very elaborate musical instruments out of them

 We wondered why some artists, like this guy, were chosen to represent the US, Canada, and Europe, instead of other artists. Their choices were head-scratchers sometimes

 an old-time parlor

 the Rock and Roll area

 bagpipes and accordions!! - who knew there were so many varieties?!

By this time, we had to throw the kids a bone, so we took them down to the Experience Gallery to make some music of their own. Jaimee and I were blown away by the 5,000 instruments from more than 200 countries in the main museum, but the kids just wanted to bang on something.

 my nephew on the big drum

 K on the guitar (she actually has been asking to learn how to play)

my niece on the giant gong

Everyone love the working nickelodeon, but no one loved it quite like my nephew!

After we thought they had had enough time playing the instruments, and just before they fell apart from hunger, we made a quick beeline through the Artist Gallery via the Mechanical Music Gallery. The latter was a smallish room with instruments that played themselves, like music boxes. But the Artist Gallery had a collection of instruments and costumes from a very random assortment of famous musicians. Some of them made sense, I guess.

 John Denver's beloved guitar

 Taylor Swift's area (she got two walls, like Elvis)

 Steve Vai's triple-necked guitar

part of the Elvis collection

And we found one more really cool thing in the Artist Gallery - one of the actual 2,008 drums that played at the 2008 Olympic Opening Ceremony in Beijing.

After a quick stop in the gift shop where K picked up a slide whistle and C got a pan flute (so she can be like Puck, of course!), we headed out to lunch to refuel before we all fell apart. We decided on BJ's, which is a favorite of my girls and we made sure to finish off the meal with some Pizookies and beignets.

Once we were back at the house, all the kids played together some more and played with their uncle's dog, Kima.

 A and Kima

 E's line-up of cars and trucks

 the girls playing some kind of wild animal game

the only boy playing alone (but I get the feeling he likes it that way)

Not too much later, it became clear that it was time to go. We had hotel reservations in southern California for this evening and the friendliness and emotional stability my girls enjoyed today was deteriorating rapidly as the early morning (and the last 30 days) started catching up with them again.

Cousin-love, aren't they adorable?

 I left Phoenix, heading out into the highway craziness leading up to Memorial Day weekend. The witty message "Drive Hammered, Get Nailed" blazed on the LED light boards on all the highways here, no doubt encouraged by the recent death of the local officer who was hit by a drunk driver.

The evening started out pretty uneventful as I began the 5 hour drive to Ontario. But a short time after I headed into the middle-of-nowhere, my 'Maint Reqd' engine light came on. I was hoping it wasn't anything too serious since on the Saturday night of a holiday weekend I wasn't expecting to get too much help out here in the desert. I was glad to see that the engine looked good and the coolant was still full. The car was riding just fine and the temperature was fine, so I topped off the oil (which was really low and very black), and headed back onto the highway hoping my assumption was right that it must be just a maintenance light for the oil change I needed. I was already more than 4,000 miles over my next scheduled change even though I had one just days before I left for the trip. My poor abused minivan - she's so tough!

In Southern California we hit a huge windstorm with steady winds at 25-30mph and gusts up to 50mph. This time we didn't avoid the wind and found ourselves tossed all over the road with the other cars out there. The trucks, motorhomes and trailered vehicles all bailed out for the evening and I noticed how weird it was to not see any of them on the highway anywhere. The rest of us toughed it out, driving with both hands tightly gripped on the steering wheel and trying to stay in our own lanes.

I was really tired by the time we made it to the Ontario hotel and the girls were already asleep. We dragged ourselves upstairs and collapsed into bed. We are so close now!

No sunset pictures tonight, but I did get a cool picture of the moon.

Day 31 - New Mexico to Phoenix, AZ

Miles Driven Today: about 405

Today we are all exhausted. At this point our trip has become more a task of dragging our bodies home than enjoying the sights around us. I know there is so much to see and do here in New Mexico, but I just don't have the energy. I don't feel too bad about it, though, knowing that we can come back here anytime because we're so close to home now. If I'm going to miss out on seeing the sights, it's better that it happens in New Mexico than Virginia.

And for every ounce of exhaustion I have, the kids have a ridiculous amount of stir-crazy energy from being cooped up in the car so much. So this morning we found the perfect compromise with them swimming at the pool and me sitting and relaxing. I knew this choice meant that we wouldn't get to see anything on the way to Phoenix including the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson that everyone's been telling me to go to for years (I'll get there someday - I know it!) and The Mini Time Machine which is a museum of miniatures, also in Tucson. We actually had about a dozen sights we would have liked to see in Tucson and Phoenix, but today I had no problem blowing them all off.

We ate lunch in a local Mexican restaurant called Andele! in Old Mesilla, New Mexico that had patio-only seating and a serve-yourself chip bar that A thought was pretty fun. And then we headed out for the 5 hour drive to Phoenix.

As I mentioned yesterday, Hwy 10 is so close to Mexico that each side has to pass through a border patrol checkpoint on the freeway, even if you didn't leave the US. The eastbound traffic had a station back in Texas, and we hit ours today. Even though they had dozens of video cameras set up all over the roadways, they didn't seem too worried about us and most cars were just waved through the station.

The view today is interesting, but in a different way. It seems like a lifetime ago that I was driving through the lush greenery of Virginia or the endless waterholes of Georgia and Florida, but now we find ourselves fully immersed in the desert. And as I consider the view around me, I find it ironic how well the area outside the car matches what's going on inside the car. The temperatures outside are reaching higher, while the temperature of the emotions inside the car grows with it. All around us were mini dust-storm twisters, whipping up and spinning clouds of dust around, not all that much unlike the short tempers that are springing up inside the car today. Clearly the girls are struggling as much as I am with this last leg of the trip. We either need to take a day to rest or hurry up and get ourselves home. Just three more days to go.

Signs all along the road warned of dust storms and potential zero visibility, but the twisters were all really small and were lots of fun to look at and watch for as they sprang up all around us and far in the distance.

 

Those things are a little tough to get a picture of, but thanks A!

 

Also joining us on the road again are the trains we haven't seen since the midwest. I know they've been out there somewhere, but today they came back alongside the road to accompany us again as we drive.

 

Crossing the Arizona state line, we cheated a bit and gained our last hour back a little early. Even though Arizona is in Mountain Time, they don't do Daylight Savings Time, so from Spring to Fall they have the same time as the Pacific states. It's such a shame we killed so much time in New Mexico because I forgot all about gaining this hour back so soon. We probably could have made it to one of the museums for a little while had we moved a little quicker. We actually got to the museum exit off the freeway 10 minutes before they closed for the day but we could have been here at least an hour or two earlier had we not given up on it so soon and dragged our feet so much.

 

 

overpass decorations in Arizona on one of our many pit stops along the way

 

Somewhere along the drive today I also noticed two other things. One was the realization that when we were driving across the northern states, many of the campgrounds weren't open yet for the season. Most didn't open until mid-May because of snow and cold temperatures. Today I saw a sign for a KOA down here, and their camping season is already over. The campgrounds are only open from September to April because it's literally too hot to camp here in the summer. So, we missed out both ways! I wouldn't have expected that.

The other thing I noticed was that we passed by a sign that noted the location of the Continental Divide. I remember passing a similar sign on Hwy 80 when we went east across the country, though the elevation was probably a bit different (this one was 4585 ft), and I wondered even then what the Continental Divide was. I joked with Jessey that we had somehow crossed something like the Prime Meridian or the center of the earth, but hadn't really given it much thought. Now that we had met with a second sign, my curiosity was piqued.

photo courtesy of Wikipedia

 

What I had crossed was the Great Continental Divide (there as several different divides in North America), and this one's the biggest, splitting the continent in half from Alaska to the southern tip of Mexico (actually it continues all the way to the southern tip of Chile in South America, but it's a separate continental divide down there).

 

So what is the Continental Divide? It is actually a hydrological divide, meaning it separates the water that flows into the Pacific Ocean from the water that flows into the Atlantic Ocean (and the Arctic Ocean in that very northern part). It travels more or less down the highest elevations of the mountain ranges and generally speaking, all rivers flow opposite directions from these points. I thought that was pretty interesting, especially where there are 'loops' on the divide line, where the water doesn't flow either direction at all, but just stays there, and where many mountain tops lay on the Divide and flow in two, or even three different directions to different oceans at their peak. Neat, huh?

 

Well, we arrived in Phoenix too late to see the cousins, but it was nice to visit with Jaimee and Eric for a little while before we went to bed. Eric had taken the day off work, because a fellow Phoenix police officer had been killed in the line of duty a week earlier and the funeral was tomorrow. It was a sad occasion, but I was still glad to be able to see him for a little while as he's sometimes hard to catch on my visits down here due to his night-shift schedule. Tomorrow we'll have a full day of visiting here before heading back into California for our final leg of the journey.