Settling in to Moab
Sunday 11 July
Tony, standing by Stanley (our giant SUV) at the top of Independence Pass
(which has nothing to do with this entry…)
We’re going to be in Moab for a week so today is get ourselves organised Sunday. There’s no Safeway in town, but there is a CityMarket, with the same kind of member discount card, a nice deli with pasta salads and cooked foods (and 10c off per gallon of petrol at their in-house gas station). Another barn-like place, where I failed to find a jar of pickled beetroot, which I had a real fancy for. Tony and I both attempting to explain to the assistant, who was trying so hard to help us, but he couldn’t decipher either of our accents and in the end we took pity on his visibly growing air of panic and let him go. Stocked up with fresh fruit and salads, cooked salmon steaks, chicken, bread and the indispensible peanut butter (it’s amazing how far a peanut butter sandwich will take you – perfect packed lunch food, keeps you going for miles and no mess – no bits to fall out onto your lap).
A visit to the Visitors Centre to get details of walks, buy me a new hat (my favourite straw one is past its best) and pick up a leaflet about safety. What not to do if you want to stay alive. My new hat turns out to have cooling crystals in the crown. You soak it in cold water, the crystals swell up and form a tight cold band around your head. Great idea but I wish I’d realised it before I bought it and I’d have bought a bigger size. (Tony says when it’s fully inflated it sits on top of my head like a giant pimple…) So now we have to add hat-watering to the list of things to do before we set off.
The weather is off-and-on rainy and consistently cloudy, so not much good for photography. In the evening we went to Arches National Park, and Tony signed up for the Fiery Furnace guided walk on Wednesday. I decided to give it a miss after I read the description and saw the photos. It’s three hours of strenuous walking, including ‘starfishing’ up rock clefts which sadly is at the outer edge of, if not completely beyond, my capabilities. Maybe if it was just the two of us, with harness, block and tackle I could do it, but I doubt if I’ll be able to keep up with a group. So sadly I will have to spend the morning all alone, by swimming pool and hot tub, maybe checking out the hidden delights of the CityMarket stationery aisle…
Driving round the park, hoping for the sun to peep through the clouds and create a perfect Kodak moment, we got chatting to an elderly frail-looking little bird of a woman, from Virginia. She was on holiday with her son and his ‘lady friend’. She had a German accent, but she was from originally Budapest and had gone to Germany after the war. Just settling in for a good old natter when her son said it was time to go. Tony and I speculating that maybe she was ethnic German, re-located after the war. Tone says millions of Germans were brutally displaced from all over Europe back to Germany, with mass rape, murder, etc. and nobody objected…
Anyway half an hour or so later and we bumped into each other at the entrance to Park Avenue and got to continue our conversation. She is an Auschwitz survivor – went back to Budapest after the war to look for her family but she was the only one left. She went to Germany to get away from the Russians and because wanted to get to America. She insisted on getting a photograph of us on her camera, and to my regret , we didn’t get one of her. She said we look like a happy couple and we should do as much as we can while we still can. Make the most of every day she said, and her son’s lady friend took this photo of us…
