Baby Diapers

We had a nice weekend. Monday we had a little snow. Roads were OK, but we decided we didn’t want to go to Yoga, because we would be driving back too late. I called the Red Pueblo Museum to see if they would be open any time during the weekend. They said they would start a private tour in a few minutes. We were welcome to join in. So we did. Having a tour made all the difference. There is no signage. If we had just walked in and looked around, we would not have known what we were looking at. This museum has privately collected Indian artifacts. They have a lot of things one just doesn’t see in a more formal museum. Here is a picture of baby diapers. The one in the upper right is “fully loaded”.

Fancy Moccasin

The other picture is of a moccasin. The picture shows the bottom of the moccasin. The heel on the left is worn through. It’s hard to see in this picture, but the bottom has several fancy patterns — triangles, rectangles, and diagonals. It would make a distinctive footprint in the sand. It’s just like owning handmade Italian shoes today.

Since we were close to Kanab with no hard deadlines for going home, we went to a Mexican restaurant for dinner. Its reputation is excellent. We found it to be good, but not excellent. Tuesday we did our communion service and breakfast in Kanab. Then we did our online Christmas shopping. Wednesday we did chores and goofed off. I wanted to take a bike ride, but it was too close to freezing. I decided to stay home.

Today we rode west to Hurricane. I got my last Arizona haircut. (I never found a good barber in AZ.) We visited a silver mine ghost town. There were a lot of boom mine towns in UT in the late 1800s. This site was overlooked because everybody “knew” it wasn’t possible to find precious metals in sandstone. A story is told of an assayer who had a reputation for always finding precious metals in anything that was brought to him. A sandstone grinding stone was made in this area, fell off the wagon, and broke. The men decided to submit pieces of the grinding stone to this assayer as a joke. He said there was silver in the sandstone. They ran the man out of town, and he was never heard of again. Many years later, they found out the assayer was right. We enjoyed listening to this and other stories the docent told us.

We go back to work tomorrow. Danita and I will swap off manning the visitor center desk and offering fort tours. Realistically, that means we will spend out time sitting in the visitor center, because there are very few visitors this time of year. We check out Tuesday. We’ll drive to Paige, AZ Tuesday afternoon. Wednesday we travel through Fredonia, AZ and on to Gallup, NM. Fredonia is an important point of our travels, because that’s where we got off the 2-lane roads and pick up I-40. I-40 is reputed to follow the route old US Highway Route 66. We’ll even have the opportunity to see some of the old 66 roadside Americana.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.