Jessica and I took a solo trip to test if we could tolerate each other without having referees on our sides. We are only about an hour and a half in, and so far so good. This was my first opportunity to try and ditch the kid when I told her I was going to leave her here at Montezuma Castle but reassured her that seeing it was a castle, a handsome prince would come along and rescue her so she could go off and live happily ever after. It didn’t work out; maybe I should have tried this when she was five or six.

I don’t get it either. Here we are at 3.5 hours stuck with each other in a car, and she’s still smiling. Maybe if I doused her in cold water, she’d freeze with that smile on her face, and I could pretend she’s always this pleasant. Should you be wondering where this latent hostility is coming from? While I post all these nice photos of Jessica and occasionally me in them, too, there are moments of hard friction. Nothing really surprising here as she is barely 17, and it’s the first time we’ve seen one another since she was about 12 or 13.

“Dad, why are we going to a volcanic crater?” I’m making a human sacrifice to the gods who are angry that belligerent young ladies make old men grow old too fast.

Okay, I’m heading to 7-11 to get us some beers; I’ll be right back. “You know I’m only 17, right? And it’s cold out here.” Being a father is not all that easy, apparently.

Seemingly stuck with her, I let her get back in the car.

You might be wondering by now just how many times in one year I can go to Wupatki and not get bored. I probably have another 30 or 40 times left in me.

Five hours into this rolling nightmare and I’d swear she’s looking even happier. This plan of mine to forever forego needing to be a father again is backfiring. I was certain that 20 minutes in a car with just her and I and she’d be hitchhiking to the airport to escape, but nope, she’s being a good sport.

I was like….stop looking at me; look at the Grand Canyon! She was like, “No way I don’t trust you as you already tried leaving me down the road at an old ruin, you threatened to toss me into a dormant volcano (that was dumb), so how do I know I won’t have an “accident” here at the edge of the canyon?” And then I was kind of caught and had to admit I’d been considering it if those old people would have left and there’d been no witnesses.

For lunch, I slipped my daughter some peyote. This is the inside of her mind while she was hallucinating.

That last comment about the peyote was a lie; I wouldn’t give a teenager a psychedelic, especially after we’d shared all those beers while driving here.

No time for humor here as this elderly Navajo woman is doing amazing work weaving a rug.

OMG, she’s laughing. If this ends up having been fun she’ll likely want to come back. What am I supposed to do?

No, it’s okay, that sign is for foreigners, I tell her. We’re Americans, and that means we can go out there. She’s trying to tell me without saying it out loud that I’m full of it; just look at her face. Hey, is that peanut butter stuck in your teeth?

In celebration of a day well spent where she didn’t cry and I didn’t have to cry inside, we took a break at the El Tovar and had hot chocolates. I explained to her that Caroline and I first enjoyed hot chocolates here for our honeymoon back in 1994 and that they were our favorites. She balked and said Caroline the Homewrecker should have choked on it. Just kidding. The truth is we’ve had a brilliant day where mayhem was the furthest thing from my mind; who knows what’s in a teenager’s brain, if anything?