This is the last day of an epic adventure that begins in Monument Valley. Over the past week, we’ve driven more than 1,600 miles, seen a ton of amazing sites, and had a good laugh along the way, where our lives become even deeper entwined by spending a honeymoon together. But all great things ultimately come to an end and rejoin the cycle of change, decay, and renewal. The four of us will change, and our friendship will change, but how much we didn’t know on this excursion into the old West, we will grow older, and finally, we will effectively become different people.

For Caroline and me, this is our second visit to Monument Valley; the first one was some years before with my mother-in-law Jutta. We’ll return to every single location we visited on this trip in the coming years and always remain astonished that we are so lucky to have the opportunity to do so. Sadly, this corner of America grows more and more out of favor with the population of the United States as they no longer find the Old West as intriguing as previous generations once did. Today though, we were celebrating being able to share with Ruby and Axel a place that we found special and full of a character worth treasuring.

Looking at the map we were traveling with, Caroline spotted a national monument called Canyon De Chelly, and seeing we felt we could afford the detour, we went. Ruby is seen here trying to muster the guts to look over the sheer wall that drops straight down.

It’s funny looking at these photos 22 years after we made this trip and seeing our younger selves. While I can know the people we were and the enchantment of seeing such iconic places, we are no longer that young and sometimes troubled couple figuring things out. There’s a calm of togetherness and contentedness we grew into over the years, and while here in the year 2020, as I finally place these old photographs taken before the age of digital images into my blog, we are in a plague situation that in some ways seems easier to be dealing with than learning who we were back then.

Little did we know that the following year Ruby and Axel would move to America, and in getting situated, they would stay with us a while before the lack of opportunity in Arizona drove them to find their good fortune in San Francisco, where they thrived. It was the year 2000, following a trip to Yellowstone, that whatever bonds had us enjoying each other’s company for the previous 7 or 8 years would fray, and we’d all move into the realm of distant memories of one another. For a time, though, we shared a solid moment of discovery, and that was priceless.