From AZ, through NM to CO: Easter Sunday

The day began with a little reminder of why we celebrate Easter. We had touched on this on Friday as well; sometimes it’s tough for the kids to remember the significance of Good Friday as it is not a national holiday in the USA. Jake was quick to remind everyone of the importance of today, which I’m sure the others were relieved by – to be honest, they just wanted to dive into their Eater baskets! Everyone got a new DS game and some Cadbury’s Crème Eggs: yum, yum!

Once we’d packed up the camper and were generally ready to go, we hid lots of mini chocolate eggs and Crabby Patties all over the playground – it was a good job there were no other families around otherwise I guess we would have been doing a hunt from more than just our kids! They raced out of the camper in age order at 2 minute intervals, to give the younger ones a head start over, well, over Jake really, who naturally sped around and finished at almost the same time as the others. They were happy; love a good hunt!

Our day today took us past some beautiful rocky scenery – I know, more rocks, but honestly, they’re gorgeous! We crossed back over the border into New Mexico – back into MDT time zone – which now matches up with ‘Valentine’ time. We’ll be in the same time zone as our location for the next 3 weeks before we return to CA.

We hadn’t looked at the map too closely and too late, we realized that the couple of hours over lunchtime, we’d be driving through the Navajo Nation Indian Reservation, which was extremely barren and very much lacking in either towns or even anywhere to pull over and stop to make lunch. At one point, in the distance on the very straight road, we could see a spiraling cloud of black smoke. When we eventually got to it, we realized it was a ‘single-wide’ home that was barely recognizable as such and completely destroyed, so sad. Even as we went past, fire trucks were coming the other way; we could only imagine that they were coming from the closest town, which was miles away.

We finally stopped in Shiprock, obviously a place with large amounts of poverty. Even before Dave got out of the car, two beggars had come over needing money. It was heartbreaking to see the number of people there asking for handouts, good for the kids to be exposed to it though, we live a pretty sheltered life in our suburban neighborhood in PA.

Thankfully we were pretty close to Cortez at this point, which made for a quick arrival at the KOA. The owners were wonderful, so friendly, extremely informative and knowledgeable about the local area – we were offered plenty of ideas about how to occupy ourselves over the next few days. They had also prepared a little Easter egg hunt for the kids on the playground, which won the kids over immediately!