Flagstaff

We were in complete agreement that Flagstaff was one of our favorite towns we'd both been to but never visited together. Sarah recommended the Monte Vista Hotel in the historic downtown district and booked us the whimsically themed "Air Supply" room--an upper floor corner room with a sky-blue ceiling decorated with gilt plaster cherubs cavorting among handpainted and vaguely animal-shaped white clouds. We arrived in time to spend a long, cool, late spring evening just meandering around town, window-shopping at storefronts and sampling a few dishes and brews. We had planned to stay just the one night, but days of continuous travel caught up to us and we crashed in the next day, spending the morning holed up, listening to the mournful howls of the freight trains that form the sonic backbone of Flagstaff. That afternoon Mark spent mostly strolling from shop to parkbench to shop to parkbench. (Mark rests a lot. He's a cloudmonger from way back.) Sarah went photo hunting, first in the room itself, shimmering with strange light, and then around town, where she caught up with Mark, which is, after all, rarely a difficult thing to do. Four days back on the continent and there's still a slightly haunting feeling that we're almost revenants in this country, floating about and scudding from town to town, hot valley to chilly mountain, on our way to Telluride but in the aimless sort of way that clouds tangle as they travel, passing through uncertain forms and vaguely suggestive shapes like those on the ceiling of the Monte Vista. Next stop, Mark's favorite of all tiny canyon towns . . . Ouray.