THE LAST STOP

I've lost everything. My keys, my wallet, my knife, my wallet, my hat, my mind, my aloe, my home and my wallet. Not really but half the time I don't know where I've put anything in this damn R.V. so I guess we'll say I misplaced them. Even time. Right Now I'm in northern Arizona which is literally on it's own time plain. Walking from the Hoover Dam Nevada side to the Hoover Dam Arizona side takes an hour in a second. It really puts time in perspective and it's fun to ask someone on the bridge "Do you have the Dam time?" They love it. Especially the german tourists. 

See, Nevada is on Pacific Standard Time but Arizona is on Martian Standard Time, so at 6pm Nevada time, Arizona chooses to be 7pm even though the next state over is New Mexico, which goes back to Pacific Earth time which goes back to my point of what's the Dam time? I think I've lost my Dam mind...See?  I read that Mars isn't this horrific flaming red bouncy ball planet but actually looks pretty much like the Arizona Desert with dry, arid orange flats leading to dry rusty orange mountains that outline a pale basic blue endless sky. I've been saying the desert feels like an alien planet this whole time. Now it makes sense.

So here we are on Mars, we crossed this great big crazy concrete Dam and walked another day further in to the middle of nowhere and we've gained an hour of light and lost an hour of the day at the same time and confusing as this is for me to understand it seems that things tend to go that way. As Andy would sing, one of our best friends back in New York, "The more things change...The more things change."  There's a give and take to everything and most of the time you're either the give or the take and you're too caught up in life to see what is right in front of you. A.J. Keeps quoting Kesey saying "You're either on the Bus or You're off it". I'm on the road and Im staying on it. 

I can feel this push and this pull, as we all secretly do, but it's becoming suddenly clearer when I'm walking. From my body straight to the winds, to the sky and the earth, to the Sun, the Moon and the Stars. From my mind to the plains, my heart to the Gods. It is everything ancient cultures would sketch on stones and temples and build sun dials and anamorphic statues and celebrate and have ceremonies instead of convoluting into writing. It is what we all know and can't explain so we fight it and ourselves and each other to pass the time instead. Drama us a great distraction. It's the black and white, Yin and Yang, the push and the pull. And if you don't believe me ask Mr. Einstein. He'll be back in 50 years to explain everything I have been talking about when his time machine finally starts working in 1945

So after walking another eight miles through the Martian wasteland this morning we reach The Last Stop, literally, a brand spanking new Roadhouse on Rt. 93 called The Last Stop, just 50 miles from the Grand Canyon and Hoover Dam on either side and boy do they have the best Dam burger in the world. It's a wacky place, muraled left right up and down with cooky character drawings of Jack Nicholson riding a Harley or the Terminator arm in arm with The Blues Brothers staring you down and John Wayne saying Hi on the rest room stall. But it has a sense of Humor to it and the staff is great and it's got the best Dam burger in the world! I had one for breakfast and made the poor mistake of not having another one for lunch. Dinner's coming up soon...

Its 3pm, we've already been in this place for two hours having a blast, telling old war stories with Mike the eccentric cook and Linda the PR/Waitress extraordinaire and Russ, the owner, pours us all another round of Grand Canyon Ale on the house. He tells me that he made sure to order the burger meat from everywhere across the country, testing Kobe guys and rib eye guys, north west south east and this and that, but all American. He sampled everything to see if it was the right stuff for the best burger but nothing was the best until, he found a private distributor with home grown free range cattle. Russ pays a good dollar for what he gets but it's the best Dam tasting meat out there. I don't eat much meat but when I laid my taste buds into that medium rare Last Stop Burger at 8:45am before walking, oh baby. Fueled for the day. I could tell that Bull had lived some good virile days in it's lifetime and that's something that isn't happening enough in America. 

You see Russ had a bunch of residential real estate all over the place but was smart enough to to get rid of most it before the Banks imploded a few years back and screwed us all in the pooch. So Russ takes his money that he managed to not lose in the housing crisis and buys a run down gas station-lot-ice cream stand and all the land that surrounds it. Trust me, it is the only thing anywhere out here aside from a few other run down lots but The Last Stop just so happens to be on the way to the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas in either direction. Well good old fashion American Entrepreneurialism ensues and thus Russ turned the shack into a Roadhouse with great food, souvenirs, gas, mini mart, R.V. Lot, outdoor concert venue Grand Canyon Tours and Grand Canyon Ales. The service, quality and workforce are impecable and wouldn't ya know it, instead of walking our planned 26 miles today we made it the first 8 and haven't gone any further than the bar since we hit The Last Stop. I should have known this would happen.