Day Seven: We are all Dineh

As I posted briefly, the tour ended up working out splendidly. But not before I almost threw up from the anxiety. I slept miserably Thursday night. At first I slept for three to four hours or so. But there were lights outside our sliding door/window, so when I woke up I didn’t believe that it was only 3:30 because it was light at the curtains. From that point on, I was waking up regularly every 15 to 45 minutes. (Mostly 15 to 20.) It was miserable. The alarm finally went off and of course the boys were still out stone cold. (And I do mean stone cold. The alarm clock said the room was only 71 degrees.) Daddy Doc had very efficiently laid out the boys’ clothes Thursday night. We each picked out our clothes, too. We packed away as many bags as we could and put them in the car before we went to sleep. When we got up, we showered and shined, finished packing and were heading to breakfast at 7:50, a full 15 minutes early! 

Remember my expectations issue? Yeah, the anxiety wasn’t getting any better. But the restaurant was empty! That’s a good sign right???

I forgot to mention earlier that MG woke up in a horrifically terrible mood. He was soooooo surly. He couldn’t decide what to have for breakfast. It took us much longer than normal to order – but not enough to justify the length of time it took to get our food!! There was a group of men who arrived at the same time we did. They ordered, had their food, and had eaten before our food had even arrived. Now, come ON. By the time our food arrived, I couldn’t eat because I was so anxious. I was worried that we would be late for our tour. If he arrived on time…

While we waited, I went to the front desk to check out. It was kind of funny because there was a situation where a woman was trying to get ahold of room 231 so the front desk was trying to call the room for her but it wasn’t working. The front desk clerk kept asking “What was the room again?” And I was answering for her: “231.”

Eventually, breakfast was eaten, MG’s mood was improved significantly, we all stopped to potty, and then we went outside to wait for our tour guide to pick us up.

The reviews I read were positive. The only complaints I’d heard were:

• He ran over time/Wasn’t on time

• Here was a tension between Adam and the other tour guides/tour guide companies.

• At the turnaround point of the tour, clients were heavily pressured to purchase expensive jewelry from his family.

There were a number of tour guides in the hotel parking lot looking to set up private tours. One asked us if we were waiting for someone. I answered “Yes, but I don’t want to tell you who because I’m afraid it’s your competition.” He laughed and said “Oh, Adam?” There was no hint of animosity. In fact, it became quickly obvious that everyone “knew” Adam.

Adam was just about on time. DD had gone to our car to get our National Park Annual Pass in case we had to pay a fee to get into the park. Adam got out of the Suburban and said “Hi, PerkyMommy” – by name! He DID remember my reservation. GOOD! I was feeling much better already. He was much more personable than he had been on the phone.

By the time I had CS’s portable booster seat in the car, DD was back. (We had his good 5-point harness booster installed in the PerkyMomMobile but we’d brought his easy to install more portable model for this tour.) Everyone climbed into the Suburban and off we went.

Our first stop was the Canyon de Chelly Visitor’s Center. There’s a form that they had to fill out that listed Adam as the Tour Guide and Daddy Doc as the Tour Leader. There was no fee involved. With that technicality complete, we were off.

The canyon floor is a somewhat dry river bed with extremely soft sandy silt. There were a few tours entering at the same time as ours. We all arrived at the first stop at the same time. I was taking very copious notes in my notebook!

I will probably dedicate another post at another time to those notes. Here’s a few highlights (for me anyway) –

Adam translated petroglyphs. Very interesting stuff!! I learned the story of my favorite image, kokopelli – the lizard playing the flute.

Adam has a very different perspective on the history of the canyon. While many claim that the people who built the cliff dwellings high in the cliff, Adam says that no, the reason that petryoglyphs and dwellings are so high is that at the time they were built, almost 1000 years ago, the floor of the canyon was higher than it is today – that erosion has dropped the floor to its current level. Well golly gee shucks, that makes a whole lot of sense.

Adam even claims that one of the carvings in the canyon is something he made when he was a child and that the floor in that area has already dropped several feet – that he did not use a ladder or stand on anything to make it. That one, I’m not so sure of… but it’s possible. (It’s not nearly as high as the others…)

I do admit that Adam spends a bit of time explaining why his tour is better than the others – that he knows more of the true stories of the canyon, etc. But I didn’t think it was annoying. There definitely was not any hostility between tour guides. It was clear that Adam is on very good terms with many people in the canyon. Every car we passed waved at ours and smiled, and vice versa.

Adam is a very peace-seeking personality. Or at least he comes across as that. He talks about wanting people to get along together. He talks about how many churches there are on the reservation and that they welcome them because it’s all the same creator.

(Duck Rock)

Adam uses the term Indian. He loves that term. He explained to us that the names Hopi, Navajo, Anasazi, etc, were given to them by Europeans, but that they like to be called “Dineh” and that we are ALL dineh (people). He likes being an Indian because it’s just a name – Columbus made a mistake – but it reminds him that he’s connected to all people on Earth, even the Indians in India. He also LIKES that teams are called “Redskins” “Braves” an “Indians”. He says that these teams are named for heroes and heroes are not weak. He sees these names as respectful, seeing the Indian people as strong heroic people!

WOW, huh?

I asked Adam if any of the rangers in the Canyon are/were Navajo. He said that about 90% of the rangers are Navajo but that wasn’t always the case. It used to be about 70% non-Indian rangers. In 1999, John McCain came to visit as senator and it was his initiative that started the ball rolling to get Navajos in the Canyon as rangers!

Ok, I’m stopping there. Oh wait, no.

At about 11:00, we got to Adam’s primary family homestead. Now, according to Adam, there were two vendors on his private property that were not allowed to be there, but that there’s no Navajo law to get them off the property. His claim was that their products were not authentic, they didn’t pay Tribal sales taxes and they were not authorized by the Health Department as his family’s booths were.

Now, I had come prepared for this segment of the tour. I figured that it was part of the cost of a private tour. (BTW, the private tour, because of the size of our family, actually cost just about the same as it would’ve cost to go on the “public” tour.) I figured I’d shop for SOMETHING I could justify buying from his family.

Well I don’t know why that reviewer thought that the jewelry was expensive. The first, most simple necklace I was attracted to? Yeah, 5 bucks. Uhm, only 5 bucks??

I ended up selected a lovely lovely necklace that I know I’ll wear a lot. (It was more than 5 bucks but if you ask me, $35 is not too much to spend on a piece of lovely jewelry, handmade, no less!) The colors go with the color palette that I regularly wear!! Adam’s wife Rita made it and I got a picture with Rita, too!

Then I went to his sister Aleta’s booth. She had fetishes and more jewelry. Aleta looked at me and said “We’ve met before.” Uhm, HOW? I’ve been in town for 16 hours… Then she said “At the Holiday Inn.”

I said: “Oh! You were trying to contact room 231!” HA HA!

Aleta had been trying to make a delivery to 231. That was her!

MG was attracted to a bear fetish with an arrowhead on its back. It symbolizes strength and the arrowhead means the bear will protect MG. He needs protection! HA HA! I eventually bought a pair of earrings from Aleta. I really liked a lot of the pieces on her table and could’ve dropped a lot of money there, LOL. The earrings were a whopping 10 bucks! Adam’s other sister, Tanya, was running the concession stand. She made fry bread – we split one order of fry bread and DD and I had some… Diet Pepsi! (It’s Aleta’s favorite, too, although they really have a very large selection of sodas.)

Tanya’s daughter Vanna was there and she and the boys played together. Vanna likes to pull leaves off the trees where worms have tried to form cocoons, and then peels back the cocoons. She showed my boys how to do that. The boys also played with their echos in the canyon walls.

The canyon was beautiful. The boys liked trying to come up with names for the rocks they saw, which amused Adam. SBS named one rock the “Manta Ray Rock” and Adam said he’d named a new rock! SBS was very proud.

Kitty Cat Rock:

The tour was awesome because I felt a connection to Adam’s family by knowing their names, hearing their stories and meeting them. I commented to his wife and sisters that if I were a Navajo woman, I would happily spend hours weaving blankets and making jewelry. Tanya was complaining that it was very humid in the canyon today. I thought it was just lovely under the trees. I said I’d love to just come and buy the supplies from them and have them show me how to make the jewelry. Aleta said that we could come camping on their site sometime. You know, if I thought she was serious, I might consider it!! What a trip that would be!

I wondered, though, how much we might have seen on another tour – if we might have seen MORE of the canyon. Every tour stopped at Adam’s property because there is a recreation of a ruin there at the canyon floor. It seemed that the other tours left a lot quicker than ours did and I wondered if they got to see more of the canyon than we did.

So after we got back to the hotel and grabbed some photos with Adam, we headed back to the Visitor’s Center. Now, Adam’s niece, Aleta’s daughter, is volunteering for the Park Service this summer and she passed us in the canyon in a Park Service Jeep. In the Visitor’s Center, we met her friend who had been in the Jeep with her. She got out the Junior Ranger Program brochures for the boys. We’d told her that we’d spent ALL morning in the canyon and really didn’t have a lot of time to spend finishing the program – might our time in the canyon help fill some of the requirements? She agreed so we were able to skip the part where it said “Go to two overlooks and look DOWN into the canyon! “ LOL

We filled out the forms and picked up some trash around the outside of the center. The boys all got their junior ranger badges (they were very generous to let CS have his – mom did most of the work!!) CS had a bit of a meltdown at the center. The boys got a 15% discount for being Junior Rangers and each big boy selected an activity book to buy. DD and I purchased a DVD about the Navajo Code Talkers of WW2. Adam’s uncle was a code talker. His cousin, per Adam, was the soldier (Marine?) who put the noose around the neck of Saddam Hussien’s statue when it was toppled in Baghdad. It was his grandfather who was the chief who brokered the Treaty of 1868 which gave the Navajo their Arizona reservation land. Canyon de Chelly didn’t have any patches or any of the t-shirts that match the collection of many of the western state monuments. We were VERY disappointed.

As we left town, we stopped to pick up some t-shirts. I picked out three shirts for the boys with Kokopelli on them. I love that little guy. I would love to get a Kokopelli wind chime to hang from my patio cover. I really would.

We left town and headed south. We decided to take a less direct route to Holbrook so we could stop at the Painted Desert Visitor’s Center. We stamped our passports, picked up patches, and got the… JUNIOR RANGER booklets for the boys. I love the bigger parks because they have multiple levels of junior ranger which give CS a much more age appropriate program to follow! We visited some of the park today – Newspaper rocks which are filled with petroglyphs and a Route 66 tribute/marker. Tomorrow we’ll see more of the Petrified Forest and CS will be able to finish his booklet pages. MG and SBS flew through their workbooks already. Having completed three previous programs in the region, (Wupatki, Grand Canyon, Chelly,) many of the activities are overlapping and so they already “know” a lot of the answers without having to spend time reading through visitor center displays.

A woman at the Visitor Center offered to take a picture of all of us. CS didn't want to be in it:

We finally left the Painted Desert and headed towards HOLBROOK.

I have to say that I have to adjust my comment that Reservations are depressing. It’s not just reservations. You know the scene in Cars where James Taylor sings – or rather laments “Main Street isn’t Main Street, anymore”? Yeah, welcome to Holbrook. And even when we were off the reservation, my there are some unattractive homesteads off I-40 in this part of the state…

Nonetheless, we turned on the video camera as we exited the freeway in Holbrook in search of our hotel. As we approached the WIGWAM HOTEL, MG was very excited to see it. “IT’S THE COZY CONE!” And then… we pulled in and said “Should we stay here?” MG: OH YEAH!

SBS gave us this look that said “Isn’t this the place that Oprah refused to stay in?”

Ok, no, he didn’t say THAT. I got nervous though. There is a section behind the Wigwams of standard, two story “motel” rooms. HOLY CRAP. PLEASE don’t tell me we have a motel room. We HAVE to have a Wigwam. DD came out of the office and tried to make an “Oh crap” face to psych me out, but I know him better than that and he started to let go a bit. We were in Wigwam Number Five.

We came over, opened the door and...

Ok. We are the greatest parents on EARTH because our sons are staying in a cement Wigwam tonight. We are MOST fortunate that God took care of us when we tried to get a reservation here for two nights and we only have one. Because it’s very… historical and kitschy and very cozy cone. 

And the carpet is really old and the room SMELLS. OMG. It really smells. CS walked in and said “I don’t want to stay here! It smells.” BOY HOWDY was he right. We turned on the a/c window unit, left the bags in the car and took off for dinner. 

We drove around Holbrook to get our bearings. Yeah, James Taylor/Cars/Boarded up motels, deserted streets.

I had printed up a reference from one of my Pixar Cars Credit websites for a diner in town. We decided to try it for dinner. We walked in and there was no one to really seat us. There were two women and a little girl at a booth near the door. One of the women eventually said “Sit anywhere you want, we’ll be right with you.” There was only one (cleared) table that would work so we grabbed it.

Dinner was awesome. It was Mexican/American, as is most of the restaurants in this town. We all ordered Mexican – the little boys had enchilada kid plates, Doc and I had combo plates, M had a fried tortilla with melted cheese and beef. There was one man serving every table in the place and he worked his butt off with a smile on his face! He was sharing Cars connections with us and offering us ideas of where to go after dinner. (There was a Native American Dancing thing at the civic center field across the street.) But what did we do? We looked at their scrapbooks. Their picture of the guy who played Sheriff, the Route 66 expert who advised Pixar. They showed us pictures of the “Real” Fillmore, a man they know and love. We saw the signed picture from John Lasseter, who has visited – in fact, the owners of the diner are in the bonus material of the DVDs! They showed us the signed picture from Disney Imagineering of all the Imagineers who came out to do research for Cars Land which will be opening at Disneyland in 2012. (The owner’s wife thinks it will be sooner. I told her probably not…)

They were soooo friendly. I asked if they would mind posing for a photo with our boys. They very gladly complied and THEN, they asked “Will you send us a copy of this picture? That’s how we get all the pictures in our scrapbooks, because people send them to us!”

WHAT? US? In their scrapbooks with Fillmore and John Lasseter??? Uhm, OK!

The mom of the granddaughters commented that the girls really wanted to go to Disneyland but they haven’t made it yet and she wasn’t sure when they would but she wanted to. I told her the name of a GREAT website she could go to, which would help her plan an affordable trip to Disneyland.

It doesn’t stop there. CS wanted a toy from the little vending machine thingie, but I was out of coins. I said “You don’t have any more quarters, CS” – the man directed us to TAKE one of their “Grab Bags”. They had a display of grab bags for $1. Each bag had a selection of toys from the vending machines in them. He just GAVE it to CS!!

And just like we walked away from Canyon de Chelly after our tour wih Adam, we felt like we had been blessed to be with this family for a small period of time.

On our way back to the motel, we stopped at Safeway for ice for the ice chest and some air freshener. Good thing, too. The room was WORSE when we returned. We decided that the culprit was the window a/c unit. We turned it off and sprayed the air freshener. It really DID help a lot. The problem is that there are two very small windows in the Wigwam. If we could open the door that would help a lot, but there are bugs. It’s very cool outside but there’s just not much airflow through the room. Oh, and SBS just saw a spider. We’ve told them that I killed it with a tissue. I didn’t. I tried. Twice. It wouldn’t die. It’s disappeared now. And CS is on the sleeping bag on the air mattress. (This is the first night he’s used the air mattress but I really didn’t want his Grandma Church Lady blanket or his pillow on this floor…

We are the greatest parents on EARTH. 

(BTW, there are no three pronged outlets so I can't even recharge the laptop...)

(Oh wait, MG doesn’t think so. He just threw a fit about how miserable his life is because  we’re mad at him because he’s wrestling with his brother instead of going to sleep. Yeah, welcome to parenting a 9.5 y/o genius primadonna. Private Tour of Canyon de Chelly, The Cozy Cone/Wigwam Hotel, the John Lasseter Diner – as part of his two-week vacation – his life is pretty damn miserable all right. We’ve informed him that if our family vacations suck so bad, we will do him a favor and leave him at home when we go to Walt Disney World. )

We are the greatest parents on EARTH.

Lordie. There’s a cricket on the floor by my bed now. DD’s trying to kill it.