Packing Again

We will be moving into our "permanent" room this afternoon, so we are packing up everything and loading it into the car. The guest rooms are only a hundred feet away from the room we are staying in, but it's also about 70 feet of vertical cliff. The only way to get our stuff down there is to carry it armload at a time down a switch-back goat path that goes down the face of the cliff, or to load it into the car and work our way down the service road. Being fat, lazy, and not a goat, I chose the second option.

We wandered into town yesterday. Mayer ain't much and most of the other towns along 69 are even less. But we knew we would be OK when we got to Prescott Valley and Prescott: Walmart Superstore, Olive Garden, Chilies, Taco Bell, Burger King, and last but certainly not least, Dairy Queen. We're saved!!!! There isn't an Applebees or a Ruby Tuesday's, so we may not be completely out of the woods yet.

We've spent the last couple days mostly eating, sleeping, and wandering around the grounds. The place is a real maze and we are still trying to figure out how to get to a couple places. By building up the face of the cliff and continuing on up vertically from there, they have managed to cram a lot of usable square footage into a very small space. The disadvantage is that there isn't always a clear path from one place to another. The ongoing construction makes it worse by blocking the obvious path, forcing you to detour around through the complex.

We continue to be surprised by some of the general clutter and carelessness of at least some of the residents. Some of it is because everything is in temporary space and constantly being shuffled around. For example, the library is mostly a pile of cement dust-covered books because it just got kicked out of its previous temporary home into a new temporary home. But some of it there is just no excuse. Litter is hardly as bad as a normal city, but there is still enough of it around to be annoying to anal retentives. It wouldn't be quite so annoying except all the lecturing in printed materials about respecting the environment, then we have to drive through a literal junk yard of abandoned vehicles and equipment to get to our room. Whatever. I have a feeling we will be ruffling some feathers during Seminar Week. That seems to be my job in life.

Anyway, today we will kick off the actual work shop, so we'll probably have more interesting things to blog about soon. And pictures. I swear I'm working on it. Honest.