Road Trip - part 1 - Arizona

Tuesday, August 5, 2025

 
I got home from the high adventure with the youth on July 19, spent the week working and then on Friday July 25 I hit the road and was in Justin and Kira’s pool Friday afternoon.

I spent Saturday with Lisa and Ben’s kids and then on Sunday morning we packed Lisa and her stuff into the van and headed north to the W C Lybbert family reunion in the mountains above Ogden.

One of Lisa’s responsibilities while Ben was gone was to feed Ben’s chickens. A day or two before I got there she was out feeding the chickens and she noticed that one of the chickens was just lying there unable to stand up. It was one of the smaller chickens so Kira and Lisa decided that the chicken was either 1) on the bottom of the pecking order and had been paralized, 2) was dehydrated and needed some water and electrolytes or 3) it had contracted Marek's Disease. Lisa took the poor fowl into the house and set it up in shower to keep it away from the dogs and to simplify clean up. She kept the it alive until Sunday morning. We had planned to clean up the mess if the chicken died but unfortunately it didn’t die until Sunday morning. At that point we had no time. Poor Ben and Sharley came home to a dead chicken in their shower. Sorry Ben.

We spent Sunday night in St George with Alycia and her family and the trip was quite relaxing and fun. We had no deadlines so if we saw something interesting we just stopped and checked it out.

Our first stop was Wickenburg. It was a small town that has done a good job of becoming a destination town for European tourists looking for the old west. The downtown looks like it is right out of the late eighteen hundreds. I guess there are a lot of dude ranches in the area.

I loved this jail tree. Apparantley a lot of towns back then didn’t have a church or a jail. Instead of a jail they would just chain the guy to this tree.

Once I peeled mom away from this guy we headed down the road to Kingman.

Kingman is trying to make themself famous for being on Route 66. We went through the visitors center and then had lunch in an old diner that looked like it had really good food.

The French dip was OK but their onion rings were really good.

From Kingman it was on to Hoover Dam. It is an amazing piece of engineering but it is sad to see how low the waterline has fallen. Do you see the bathtub ring in that this photo?

If it falls much further then we are all in big trouble. Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and Mexico all draw water from the Colorado River and no one will agree on how the water should be distributed.

Everyone talks about reducing our water usage but even if all the big cities such as Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Diego used no water at all, it would make little difference. Most of the water is used by farmers and current laws don’t allow us to take their water. In fact, they are in a “use it or lose it” situation so they don’t even try to be more efficient. It would make a huge difference if we incentivised the farmers to use more efficient practices to irrigating their fields.

So much for my preaching. From Hoover dam we headed on into St George and stayed up way too late visiting with Alycia and Trevor.

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Many people think that the Great Wall of China and the Egyption pyramids are the most visible man made objects that can be seen from space. In reality, these are quite difficult to see from space. By far, the most visible man made objects from space are a network of green houses in Almeria province in Spain. They stretch over 40,000 hectares and shine like a mirror.

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