Right now, I should be standing dead in front of the stage at the Amphitheatre in Oklahoma City. Soon Nelson should take the stage, and I’d suffer through them, and through Frampton, and then Styx should take the stage and life would be good.

But I’m not. Because they cancelled the concert due to severe weather warnings.

Last night we saw gorgeous lightning storms south of us as we rode in, and it did rain heavily this afternoon. But the tickets say “rain or shine”, and it was barely sprinkling by the time we got to the venue. I have to admit, it was a weird place: no sign, no obvious entrance, and almost no parking (the lot was for a YMCA building). Wacky. Anyway, we did go down to the stage to harass Keith for a brief moment (“All the way from California for this?”) and then wandered through where the busses were parked, although I realised that the bands would have been long gone.

So now we’re curled up in the hotel room, watching “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” (which I’ve wanted to see—I do like Kate Hudson). We contemplated a movie, but we feel like staying in, so we can get an early night and an early start in the morning (we’ll probably hit inclement weather along the way). We’ll walk over to Bennigan’s after the movie’s over and get a snack, and then snuggle with a book or more TV. Or something…

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Time is doing strange things, or maybe we’re moving through time strangely. Yesterday it felt like we’d been gone forever, and today I keep thinking, how can it be Thursday already?

Let’s see. Sunday night we stopped in Kingman, AZ, for gas and Ken decided he’d had enough. Since he’s the only one who can drive the bike, he gets to call those shots. There was a Motel 6 in sight with a café next door, so all of our needs were met.

Monday I realised that I don’t like Arizona. It’s hot and dry and windy and uniformly tan. Only tan, no other colors. We stopped in Flagstaff for lunch. Flagstaff wasn’t the quaint mountain town I was expected, but the main street was pleasantly rustic. We tried to find a brew pub listed in the GPS, but ended up at an Irish pub that mostly played rap too loud. My Rueben was quite good, though, and Ken said is Irish stew was as well. We spent that night in Albuquerque, at a hotel with wireless so we could clean out our In Boxes.

I thought Monday was windy, but it had nothing on Tuesday. Oy. New Mexico is prettier than Arizona, though. Flagstaff was surrounded by pines, and there are buttes and red clay and yellow and purple flowers.

We got up and went to Petroglyph National Monument—which was amazing. Thousands of petroglyphs, impossibly old and yet still intact. And they were everywhere—we’d take two steps and spot three more. There were three trails, and we decided not to hike the 35-minute one, given that we were in our riding suits and it was already hot at 9 a.m., and we did have somewhere to be that afternoon. We did the 5-minute trail first, and realised that it wasn’t nearly 5 minutes of hiking (more like a minute if we didn’t stop)—it takes longer because you keep stopping to look and point and take pictures and try to figure out what the symbol is. We also did the 15-minute trail. Pictures to follow at some point.

At only a dollar to get into the park, I can’t believe how clean the area is—no trash, and only a little graffiti (and in one case, they left the graffiti as a comparison to the petroglyphs, with the most polite “people who write graffiti are assholes” sign nearby).

Then we got on our way, and discovered that New Mexico is flat, with lots of cows and way too hot. We headed down to Clovis, a small town of 30,000 people, which is only there to support an Air Force Base, to visit our friends Margaret and Simon, whom we knew in Britain. We hadn’t seen them, or their now-7-year-old son Jacob, in 3+ years, and we were really looking forward to hanging out with them.

These are the type of friends whom you don’t see for years, and yet you start talking like you’re just picking up the last conversation you had. We went out for ribs, then came home and just talked and talked. The next morning, same thing, except we went out for breakfast. Finally, reluctantly, we had to get on our way. That pretty much catches things up. We got into Oklahoma City, found our hotel, ate dinner at the Bennigan’s next door, and fell over asleep.