With the Pine Motor Lodge in our rearview mirror, we headed up the road to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Now it's getting romantic, I thought - with visions of standing at the edge of nature's magnificence, my head leaning back against my new husband's shoulder, his arms circling my waist, sighing words of love. . .
He turned the car off the road to follow a sign that pointed us to Meteor Crater! Hot Dog! - he likes to sight-see, I thought! A good thing, yes? Should take a half hour off our trip to side step over and peer into this hole in the ground left by a mass of iron. The dirt road wound on ahead of us, and brought us to an empty parking lot, save for a little shack that was the "visitors center". John trundled in and asked a few questions while I surveyed the dusty landscape that several yards ahead dropped off into a deep bowl of stark reddish-tan earth.
Moments later, John appears, all smiles, and said, "I'm going in!" Apparently, there's a trail that takes one all the way to the bottom of . . .a hollowed out place in the ground. Nothing down there...the meteor is gone. But there was the trail - so off he went. And he disappeared for the next 3 hours!
August in Arizona. . .dry and hot. And now it's mid-day. Me...? I'm up at the rim of the crater watching the form of my husband grow smaller as he saunters down the trail. Honeymoon romance on hold for just a bit longer as I wait - and wait for him to emerge from this trek. There was a little bench under an awning. No book to read (who brings a book on their honeymoon??) And after an hour I had the desert vistas memorized, as I strained to see John hiking up the trail.
He appeared, a little worse for wear, and mighty dehydrated. Ah, but the Grand Canyon was next. A honeymoon paradise, at least for starving college kids!
That's the next installment. You aint' seen nothin' yet!
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