Sunday, August 16, 2009 3:27pm

US-70 Eastbound toward Arches National Park.

We stopped for lunch at Mom’s Café, which was featured prominently in the road food guide that I downloaded onto my Kindle. There are a couple of places on the way where you have to make a turn to stay on the 50, which probably would have got us lost (driving so fast that we missed the sign for the turn) if it wasn’t for my lovely GPS. Mom’s has a sign painted on the side of the building, which was built in either 1876 or 78 (the menu seems to disagree with one of the framed articles on the wall). Either way, it’s been known for home cooking since about 1926. They have 4 framed and enlarged checks on the wall from February 7, 1947, but I’m not sure why. Martina has the chicken fried steak (very good, esp. the white gravy that comes with it) and I have the patty melt, light on swiss cheese (my pathetic attempt not to be too unhealthy). Everything is great, including the “scone” we share for dessert—in Utah, that’s a circular patty of friend dough, served with honey butter. I only have a few bites, as this dish is clearly a one-way ticket to obesity-and-heart-attack city. We get Mom’s Café (and other assorted Utah) postcards and write them out, go over the Atlas, call and make sure the hotel in Grand Junction knows we’re not coming until 8 or later. There are several patrons who look like fellow travelers; families with middle-school-aged children, wearing hats and fanny packs and carrying cameras. Some older bikers sit behind me. The waitress is still learning the ropes and is kind but not exactly thrilled to be there; she has red hair that looks like it’s been dyed with black streaks, and purple eyeshadow, and I can’t help feeling a bit sorry for young people living in towns like this. Whenever we travel through the really huge, gorgeous houses near the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, Martina and my mom wonder what those people do to be able to afford those houses. And whenever we go to a place like Austin, Nevada, or Salina, Utah, I wonder what those peopledo to have to stay in that town (or what they don’t do). Not that anyone is putting a gun to their head…except economically. And the young people have no choice, which is why I feel sorry for them. It must be hard. And boring.

We leave Mom’s and drive down the “main drag”: a video store (I wonder if the tapes are VHS or DVD), a ballet school, a boutique with women’s purses on display in a range of animal prints. One-story houses with neatly manicured lawns, kid’s bikes strewn across some of them, and plenty of American flags. Two housewives sit on adjacent front porches and survey the scene while smoking cigarettes and talking on the phone.

We fill up again (I spring for the 87 octane at $2.66 a gallon instead of the 85 at $2.56, hoping my car will be good to us for it). The 70-E gets pretty spectacular in a couple of hours. Vast, VAST landscapes that fill up your entire 180-degree view. The rock grows pinker and pinker until it’s almost red against the blue sky. The formations grow higher, some lone columns defiantly projecting upwards. Martina has to pee at just the right time; we exit at a “View Area” that gives us an incredible panorama of the rocks, it really looks like a movie backdrop. They quickly descend at the same point where the road cuts through them, and on both sides they shoot up towards the blue sky. A giant landscape awaits on the other side; plateaus of multi-colored stone and the shifting grey shadows of the clouds dotting the horizon, which just seems bigger out here. It is breathtaking. Beautiful and incredible. As we approach Arches National Park on the 191, some of the rock is turquoise-colored. The sandstone columns of Arches are mammoth, so richly colored and smoothly sculpted that they could be sandstone Crayolas (“burnt orange”? “desert red” “sun-bleached tangerine”?). We see many “precariously perched” boulders (that’s one of my classic expressions for which my sister makes endless fun of me, because I don’t just say something like “err, it’s about to fall”). A majestic landscape.