25/7: Mom’s friend Vladimiro the university professor picked us up at the airport in Phoenix together with his PhD student Daniel. But we barely had time to sleep, before it was time to get back on the road again. This time, we were bound north.
We had lunch at an Amish diner. I got sauerkraut. I love sauerkraut.
And for deser, I had a warm pecan pie. I’m ambivalent towards the American cooking in general – but they do know how to make pie.
Arizona is an odd place. Not at all as I expected it to be. At 2500 meters above sea level, they had a pine forest. And even high, gangly birches! Not at all the desert I expected.
And in the middle of this, a tiny chapel. A calm place, with a wall-sized window facing the forest.
And on the other side – the grass.
But then, eventually, the landscape turned back into the kind of dry steppe that I had been expecting. Beautiful, this too. The sparse vegetation makes the mountains so bare. Almost as if they were naked. Deserts are like striptease for geology nerds.
Katja Malmborg 