We left yesterday, stopped for lunch in Phoenix with Abby and Brendan, making it to Kanab, Utah last night. I had forgotten what a nice drive it is, rising through the rocky country on Route 17 north of Phoenix until Flagstaff, then through the reservation on Route 89. There is some landscape at the beginning of that portion that looks like the blasted pits before the gates of Morder, but soon the red mesa rises up, and you follow along west of that, wondering what is at the top of those high cliffs, with bolders the size of houses strewn down from them.  On previous trips we had stopped in Page, Arizona, but that’s a bit of a dump. Kanab was much nicer, set among glowing red cliffs, with a decent restaurant, the Rocking V. The hotel we stayed in was the Victorian House, a rather ghastly renovation but perfectly comfortable and with very nice people. There we discovered the Mormon corkscrew, courtesy of the hotel clerk (see my Facebook page). It consists of a screw, a screwdriver, and a hammer. You screw the screw into the cork and pull it out with the hammer. (He didn’t like it at all when I called it the Mormon corkscrew.) The next day we continued on 89 through a countryside of sculpted colored rock formations, green cottonwood valleys, and meandering streams. Crossing over to I-15 we saw the billowing clouds of a wildfire on a ridge west of the freeway. When we arrived, we had the pleasant surprise of being moved from the Carriage House to a 2-bedroom apartment in Park Station, at the bottom of Main Street and very nice.