Journey Through the Desert
It’s Scottsdale Western Week! There are lots of events happening in town, many of them free, that your family can experience. But one stands out as unique and rare, even for a cowboy town like this: the ride of the Hashknife Pony Express. And this ride happens to present a great opportunity to connect with your family, your desert home, and your Bible!
The Hashknife Pony Express is the oldest sanctioned pony express in the world, and amazingly, they still deliver mail, just like they used to in the 1800s. They do an annual ride from Holbrook to Scottsdale as a part of Western Week, delivering 20,000 pieces of mail that are hand-stamped as having been delivered “Via Pony Express.” This year, the messengers leave Holbrook on January 31 and will arrive in Scottsdale on February 2. Their schedule is posted online - you can watch them arrive in town, and you can even mail something if you get it to a post office in Scottsdale or by 4pm on the 31st!
The Hashknife ride provides a striking reminder of how much easier travel is today than it once was. The ride down from Holbrook will take the messengers two days (they won’t be riding the whole time, of course), but only takes about 3 hours by car. We can draw a similar comparison for some of the notable journeys taken in the Bible: Mary and Joseph’s 90-mile walk from Nazareth to Bethlehem took somewhere between 4 and 10 days; today that trip is a two-hour car ride. We don’t know exactly how far the Magi traveled to visit Baby Jesus, but some estimates are around 800 miles – the equivalent of driving from New York City to Chicago. A long day of driving, to be sure, but much easier than weeks, perhaps months, on foot or camel.
Your family can dive into these, and other biblical journeys, using a Bible Atlas like the one we have in the Sunday School classroom or using this website as a starting point. Compare the distances and travel times determined by biblical scholars with the directions available on your preferred map app, and marvel at the effort and determination needed to travel across the desert in those days.
You can also experience that effort firsthand, albeit on a smaller scale. Drive somewhere relatively close by, and then make the same trip on foot, or on bicycles, or maybe even on horseback if you have access to horses. Appreciate the connection with nature that slow travel methods provide, and the incredible access to the world around us that is only possible through fast travel. The Magi could never have imagined seeing so much of the world in such a short time!
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