Day one. Trip mile 0.

Launch day. May 31, 2010. Trip mile 0.

In a few hours we’ll head north on hiway 95, hang a right at I-40, and continue on to Flagstaff where we’ll be spending the night at Fort Tuthill Community Park.
En route we go through the town of Williams, named after Bill Williams. There’s lots of stuff around here named after good ol Bill: a river, a mountain, a town, and who knows what else. It bothers me that Bill’s folks couldn’t come up with a different first name. Not much imagination there, reminds me of that one-time UN secretary Boutros Boutros-Ghaly.

“Well, Martha, what should we name our baby boy? Let’s see, our last name is Dip: let’s keep it simple and stay with that. We’ll call him Dip Dip, aka Double Dip. Now, how about a middle name? Hey, I got it: Dip. We’ll nickname him ‘3D.’ If he’s slim of stature, we can call him Dipstick. Hope he doesn’t stutter.”

Sorry, readers, I do get carried away at times. Stupid-ass names are one of my pet peeves and that’s because I myself have one of those ambivalent first names, one that’s more often used on the fairer sex than not. I’ve always hated it and don’t use it. So, I can empathize with Bill and a boy named Sue and whoever else has been saddled with names that guarantee them endless taunts and harassment in the early school years.

So, who was Bill Williams anyway? I Googled him: well known trapper and scout in the mid 1800s. Care to guess what his folks gave him for a middle name? Would you believe Sherley? Good grief! Double Bill-ing wasn’t bad enough? Okay, here’s the scenario: I’m a judge and Bill Sherley Bill is in my courtroom, charged with two counts of murder one. He finally took a shotgun to his folks in retribution for the lousy names. My verdict: justifiable homicide.

The first leg of our trip will take 3 weeks, destination Minnesota. We’ll be visiting several national parks and monuments along the way, the first of which will be Petrified Forest NP in northeast AZ. From there we head to Window Rock to see the famous rock itself and to visit Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police.

If you’ve read Tony Hillerman you’ll realize, of course, that we won’t actually see Jim and Joe, they being fictional characters. Tony was (he died in 2008) a prolific best-selling author who wrote 18 mysteries featuring Chee and Leaphorn. I’ve read most of them and so has Trish. It’ll be kinda neat to be at the scene of the crime – so to speak.

Gotta hit the sack now so I’m ready to shut down the house and put the pedal to the metal later this AM.