the painted desert

We'd arranged to take a small vacation after our initial move, something I thought necessary for my mental health and to assist in the transition from back there to over there. M is happily capivated by her grandparents so we took off on a mini road trip to a national park in the middle of the desert.  We've been here for three days now and today is the first connection I've been able to muster, neither cell or wireless seems to work anywhere else for miles on end. So it's been a good break, spending evenings in a tiny cabin and days running through the desert, hiking 5-6 miles a day broken up in thirds as we go from one place to another.  I've forgotten how big desert sky can be.

It's quiet here, and while it's as far away as possible from the climate we are heading to it's the entrance to the isolation and full bodied nature of our future.  Folks here are friendly, everyone is happy to talk a bit and upon hearing our story seem to feel required to buy us a beer.  I never realized how the first question you hear on the road is where are you from, and for the first time it gives us pause because we can say where we've been but right now we've got neither home or job, none of the usual trappings that define us and for a moment it's disconcerting more often to them. 

The strangeness of that doesn't escape me but at the same time it's the beginning of an adventure, one with nothing recognizable and everything a bit hard to figure out.  We wandered a ghost town today, one that has been abandoned for 100 years and while the structures were somewhat defineable the utter lack of life struck me most. Under the ground were perhaps broken tops and buttons and coins and maybe even bones, lives that lived rough and hot and one day packed up and disappeared with only the shells remaining.

I can't access my reader and probably can't for a few days more, so I'm curious as to what I am missing and of course wanting to make sure you know I am not ignoring you, just unable to find a way to get the wild west and the age of technology to collide.