3/15 The Marriott Inn was pure luxury. I laid with the overstuffed pillows an hour or two longer than usual. I crossed the desert valley that surrounded Kayenta and continued on my north eastern route. Snow capped mountains began to reveal themselves behind the red rock formations. Traffic was better, in part because it was a week day, but also the towns are getting smaller. A Navajo woman led her sheep across the patchy vegetation and dirt. Scenes like these are helping me grasp how big and diverse America is. There is a good chance the white collar worker from California will never meet the Navajo Shepherd one state over, yet we all come together as one nation.
A man zoomed by with a jacked up truck and a trailer full of four wheelers and yelled, “ride a horse”. I gave him creative points at first, but of course it was the only subject I thought about for the next five miles. I decided Ruby was better than any horse. She rarely misbehaves, never asks for food or water and is always right in-front of me no matter how fast or slow I’m traveling.

Mr. James Brown was my contact in Dinnehotso. I found him at work in his office. He was the principal of the Dinnehotso Boarding School which has an enrollment of 160 Kids. About 26 students still live on the grounds during the week which left a whole building open for me. They use the building as a storage facility now and it was full of random items: desks, computers, books etc. I was lucky to find an old mattress that seemed to be the victim of an angry child. I dragged it into the shower room where the heater was located and set up my indoor camp. This area gets some crazy dust storms which is easy to observe by the amount of dirt under the window sills. As I wrote in my journal I started to regret moving in by the heater. I was wearing nothing but my running shorts and was sweating more than on a noon day run. I eventually realized what I was using for a reading light was actually the heat lamp for the showers.