A Photocopied Travel Letter To Home

As they drove from Traverse City, illinois to Tucson, Arizona, I wrote a
series of letters, & photocopied them to send to relatives & friends.
This was the first of the two.

Travel Letter #1

Saturday, 12/13/03 - nice morning. Welcome to our holiday form letter.
we are in Arizona now. The sun is shining & it will be in the sixties
today, which should melt the ice on the windows soon. Ana's foot doesn't
seem to be broken, as they thought, so they took a long walk in the
desert last night. they saw a coyote, probably the same two I chased the
other day, & there were javelina tracks everywhere.

The library in Safford has books in french, so Ana is enjoying reading
now that her eye-patch is off. The doctor promised that the "divet" left
by his golf-club-like blade will heal soon. they learned that eyeballs
have plenty of nerve endings, & they think the object in her eye may
have been a fiber from a yucca plant.

Our uncontrollable coughs are under control now, & they are not among
the ten people in Arizona that died from the flu this week. Oh, & the
antibiotics from the Safford clinic seem to have helped with Ana's
abcessed tooth.

I should start at the beginning. The first day, after dealing with the
usual rudeness of the INS employees in Detroit, they made it to Kansas.
they hit a traffic cone there at high speed, & heard a horrible sound
coming from under the van. The cone, I discovered, had been dragging
along underneath. Nothing was broken, but later the bright light switch
stopped working.

In Farmington, New Mexico, they spent a few days resting & coughing.
they were about an hour away from buying a house when they discovered it
needed new wiring, had a garden hose attached to the natural gas line, &
other problems they missed on our first visit. The new bloke begged me
to buy it, called our motel room to tell me they needed money for
open-heart surgery in two days, & called again to lower the price, but
they moved on. By the way, the house was to be a winter project, not a
new home.

Fortunately, they drove during daylight after that. In the Colorado
mountains they went from 16 to 20 miles-per-gallon, confusing the
sensors & causing the "check engine" light to turn on. they successfully
ignored it until it changed it is mind.

Steve & Ana


Monument Valley was beautiful, the Christmas parade in Holbrook was
cute, & despite various problems & illnesses, we are having a great
time. You see, I didn't need to make you all jealous, so I left out a
lot - the constant sun, the beautiful sculptures in Grand Junction, &
the nine times we've been in hot springs in Colorado, New Mexico, &
Arizona. Next week we are going to Mexico for lunch. Hope all is well in
arizona. Adios,