Here are some of the photos from the trip.
Tuesday 22 March 2011
Sunday 20 March 2011
Home again, home again, jiggety-jig
It's amazing how I lose the urge to blog the second I walk into my kitchen. This may be linked to the stupid mileage we accrue on the final day of these trips - I find it hard enough to communicate sentiently with the cat, let alone the Internet, by the time we actually get through the door. But I don't want it to be Monday yet, so let me at least wrap up the statistics.
Friday's stats:
Started driving: 05:50 MST (if you include our trip out to watch sunrise)
Finished driving: 22:25 MDT
Miles: 483
States: 2
License plates: 2 more - South Carolina and New Hampshire
Breakfast: Yavapai Lodge, Grand Canyon
Lunch: cookies on the road
Dinner: Cracker Barrel, Gallup, NM
National Parks visited: 3
Junior Ranger badges awarded: 4
Years since Sunset Crater erupted: 945 (ish)
Feet descended into Walnut Canyon: 185
Types of lava flow identified: 2
Saturday's stats:
Started driving: 07:28 MDT
Finished driving: 23:45 CDT
Miles: 826
States: 2
License plates: no more :(
Breakfast: Denny's, Santa Rosa, NM
Lunch: candy from the gas station
Dinner: Applebees, Mansfield, TX
Activities other than eating & driving: none (unless you count ignoring the rugby and staring at the super-moon).
Total trip:
Miles: 2703
States: 3
License plates: 47 - we missed Hawaii, DC, Delaware and Rhode Island. I refuse to be disappointed by that.
National Parks: 4
Number of family members keen to return: 4
Number of family members ready for school/work tomorrow: 1
Mike's favourite thing: the Painted Desert
Laura's favourite thing: the aptly named Grand View
Chris' favourite thing: staying in a Wigwam and the moon.
William's favourite thing: going down the canyons.
Saturday 19 March 2011
Backwards
Thanks to the magic of technology, I am writing this on the road. Literally, somewhere along the I-40, eastbound, just shy of Albuquerque and heading for Santa Rosa, New Mexico.
It's roughly ten at night. On either side, the desert is a flat black slick despite the light of the full moon high above us. It sits behind a veil of diaphanous cloud that stretches almost to the horizon. The boys are asleep behind us. Laura is driving. We are coasting along on the ceaseless thrum of our wheels on the road, over which we can just hear Flanders & Swan dropping another hat. The cabin is lit by orange dials and passing cars.
I love this bit. Even as a passenger I still relish the sense that we are making progress, chewing up miles and states and gradually, forcibly, bringing our destination closer.
Satisfying though this is, it can't and doesn't detract from the fun we have when we stop and look about. We managed to do a lot of this today as well.
We sauntered around a thousand year old lava flow at Sunset Crater, AZ. It looked freshly ploughed, an avenue of great chunks of clinker and black sand from which these beautiful Ponderosa Pines had sprouted.
And then we clambered around some similarly aged cliff-dwellings, hewn from the wall of the (modestly sized) Walnut Canyon by ancestors of the Hopi tribe of Native People. It was a strenuously peaceful walk: the cool stone weaves between the sunlight and the shadows of trailing trees. The only sounds, the wind and the caws of ravens.
But before all that we had to tear ourselves from a grander canyon. Long ago, in the dark, we got up, wrapped ourselves in all our clothes and set out to watch the sun rise over the rim. Funnily enough, in the dark the abyss isn't anywhere nearly as scary and I was able to perch happily on the low wall above the drop to wait for the sun to peep. The sky faded to grey and below us the rippling folds of rock gradually materialised from the murk, like leviathans swimming up from the depths. And then finally a needle of orange light pierced the gloom and the canyons burst into colour.
Thursday 17 March 2011
Return journey
I'm trying to ignore my ENORMOUS frustration at the fact that the internet works JUST FINE for silly blogging, but won't let me send the countless work e-mails that I've spend the last hour writing on my phone. There is a CONSPIRACY, I tell you.
It never really occurred to me that it might not be sunny. I knew it would be cold at night - we're well prepared (we actually had to buy William a new coat last week, as he just hasn't needed them in Houston - ah, well, it will come in handy again when we head back to the UK in June...). But I'd thought we'd have glorious sun and radiant colours during the day. So, try as I might, I'm disappointed that today was a palate of greys. Impressive greys, yes, but not what I'd planned. Turns out even I can't control everything. Though if it's everything apart from the weather and someone else's WiFi network, I guess I should stick.
This place is wonderful. Mike hates it (in a good way, I assure myself), but we'll be back. The boys have made us promise we'll trek to the bottom one day - I randomly suggested that I'll let them do it when they're 10 and 12. I will now spend the next four years in cardio-vascular training.
Actually, with Mike's proclivities taken into account as well, I think we'll raft in along the river. And it will be sunny. And there'll be 3G coverage by then. Perfect.
Down
I've never been good with heights, particularly, but I'm often okay. Good enough anyway to cope with the Empire State Building and castle turrets.
I can't cope with this. The thought of the spectacular drop off the side of the South Rim of the Grand Canyon is enough to turn my vital organs to jelly. Even here, at a relatively safe distance of a mile or so from the edge, I'm not comfortable. I may never be comfortable. Maybe just knowing it is there, behind me somewhere in the desert, will be enough to interrupt my sleep from time to time for the rest of my life.
My sense of scale, having already been tested by the journeys and vistas I have experienced around America, has now been tortured too. The canyon is ten miles across and more than a mile down. A mile down. A beautiful, magical, breath-taking mile down. But you wouldn't want to take the short cut.
Apparently people only fall very rarely, but you'd never believe it from the way people skip and prance around the paths, or swing their legs out over the precipice, just to have their photo taken. The wilful ignorance or denial of their own mortality is taken as a personal affront, obviously. It's bad enough that I have my children with me ("Dad, puhleese, I DO know what I'm doing"), but every step or pose struck by my fellow visitors is like a knitting needle jabbed straight into my jangling nerves.
I can't help it. People may only fall very rarely, but when they do, they always fall to their deaths. The potential is what terrifies me, the sudden irrevocable moment where a holiday turns to a tragedy. I am a big scaredy cat according to my kids, but I can't help but think that the Grand Canyon would be even more beautiful and amazing experienced from the bottom. The only way to find out is to come back here and walk down the cliffs of course, but I can't help but be convinced I would become happier with every step.
I can't cope with this. The thought of the spectacular drop off the side of the South Rim of the Grand Canyon is enough to turn my vital organs to jelly. Even here, at a relatively safe distance of a mile or so from the edge, I'm not comfortable. I may never be comfortable. Maybe just knowing it is there, behind me somewhere in the desert, will be enough to interrupt my sleep from time to time for the rest of my life.
My sense of scale, having already been tested by the journeys and vistas I have experienced around America, has now been tortured too. The canyon is ten miles across and more than a mile down. A mile down. A beautiful, magical, breath-taking mile down. But you wouldn't want to take the short cut.
Apparently people only fall very rarely, but you'd never believe it from the way people skip and prance around the paths, or swing their legs out over the precipice, just to have their photo taken. The wilful ignorance or denial of their own mortality is taken as a personal affront, obviously. It's bad enough that I have my children with me ("Dad, puhleese, I DO know what I'm doing"), but every step or pose struck by my fellow visitors is like a knitting needle jabbed straight into my jangling nerves.
I can't help it. People may only fall very rarely, but when they do, they always fall to their deaths. The potential is what terrifies me, the sudden irrevocable moment where a holiday turns to a tragedy. I am a big scaredy cat according to my kids, but I can't help but think that the Grand Canyon would be even more beautiful and amazing experienced from the bottom. The only way to find out is to come back here and walk down the cliffs of course, but I can't help but be convinced I would become happier with every step.
Grand by name...
As we entered the Petrified Forest this morning, the ranger asked if we'd been before. Mike replied no, and then corrected himself, saying, "oh, actually, Laura has". I protested it had been thirty years, but he exclaimed, "Welcome back!" with a broad smile. "Not a lot's changed!".
My parents spent three weeks driving us round the west coast of the US in 1983. I remember it was 1983 because it was my job to buy the newspaper which would reveal the results of the general election - and I had to ask a passer-by for help because I couldn't believe the three-inch thick tome was all one copy...
That was Yosemite, where I also drove my bike into a tree. I also remember fondly playing Dungeons and Dragons with my brother in the back of the car as we drove to Hoover Dam. But I have no memory of the vistas of either location. My only memory of the Petrified Forest was a disappointment that it wasn't a Wizard of Oz style haunted wood (Logs that are made out of stone, oh my!). So are formed the neural synapses of an 8-year old on the trip of a lifetime. I'm not expecting too much from the boys...
But the Grand Canyon was different. I remember the hotel room with the log fire, the chipmunk eating crackers, my dad getting us all up for sunrise. I remember the geology museum, the native American crafts, the semi-precious stones. I remember the view, the air, the sheer scale. And I remember swearing I would come back.
Today we watched the sun set from the very same geology museum. I can't wait for tomorrow.
Today's Stats:
Started driving: 08:10
Finished driving: 17:15
Miles: 242
States: 1
License plates: 45 total - 6 to go.
North Dakotans traveling to the Grand Canyon: enough :)
Favourite placenames: Two Guns, AZ, swiftly followed by Twin Arrows, AZ.
Newly sworn-in Junior Rangers: 2
Deserts and Forests
I'm losing my ability to think coherently. The desert is dazzling and endless; it fills my mind as much as my vision and as a consequence, words and thoughts I previously relied upon are leaking away.
This morning we took in the Petrified Forest National Park here in Arizona. It's a bit special. The desert is literally littered with semi-precious stones, like agate and jasper, quartz and amethyst. Most remarkably, these minerals lie about the place shaped like fallen tree trunks. The trees were part of a swampy tropical forest two hundred and twenty-five million years ago. They fell and became submerged in a mineral-rich sludge ejected from volcanoes. The trees sucked the silicate inside themselves where it crystalised. Eventually the tree trunk's living tissue became replaced by stone and slowly the landmass rose and became eroded, revealing the petrified trees. You really couldn't make this stuff up.
Eventually, when we have sufficient Internet, I'll post pictures. But for now you'll just have to believe me: it is hauntingly and gobsmackingly beautiful.
Then there were the views across 'The Painted Desert' -sweeping vistas of pink rock and dry green grass, as bright and colourful as any spring meadow. The air is the purest in America apparently and allowed us to see the tops of the San Francisco Peaks, a mere one hundred and twenty miles away.
Several hours later, having ignored the first signs for Los Angeles, we were climbing the shoulders of those mountains, driving up out of Flagstaff and into a living forest of silver birch and Ponderosa pine. At eight thousand feet (three thousand higher than the Petrified Forest) there was snow on the ground. The simplicity of green pine needles and white snow was restful after the colours of the desert, but we were soon heading back down again.
There was just time to arrive at the Grand Canyon itself and have a shufty at the rim before bed.
First impression? I'm terrified.
This morning we took in the Petrified Forest National Park here in Arizona. It's a bit special. The desert is literally littered with semi-precious stones, like agate and jasper, quartz and amethyst. Most remarkably, these minerals lie about the place shaped like fallen tree trunks. The trees were part of a swampy tropical forest two hundred and twenty-five million years ago. They fell and became submerged in a mineral-rich sludge ejected from volcanoes. The trees sucked the silicate inside themselves where it crystalised. Eventually the tree trunk's living tissue became replaced by stone and slowly the landmass rose and became eroded, revealing the petrified trees. You really couldn't make this stuff up.
Eventually, when we have sufficient Internet, I'll post pictures. But for now you'll just have to believe me: it is hauntingly and gobsmackingly beautiful.
Then there were the views across 'The Painted Desert' -sweeping vistas of pink rock and dry green grass, as bright and colourful as any spring meadow. The air is the purest in America apparently and allowed us to see the tops of the San Francisco Peaks, a mere one hundred and twenty miles away.
Several hours later, having ignored the first signs for Los Angeles, we were climbing the shoulders of those mountains, driving up out of Flagstaff and into a living forest of silver birch and Ponderosa pine. At eight thousand feet (three thousand higher than the Petrified Forest) there was snow on the ground. The simplicity of green pine needles and white snow was restful after the colours of the desert, but we were soon heading back down again.
There was just time to arrive at the Grand Canyon itself and have a shufty at the rim before bed.
First impression? I'm terrified.
Wednesday 16 March 2011
The Beyond
I must be tired: I have written up a lovely day in a sneery, grumpy way and this will not do. So we shall start again and I will say that the road was good and that the landscape was amazing; that Santa Fe was charming; that even the scary truck stop and the kitsch nostalgia of 'historic' route 66 were pleasant distractions along our way. Yes, even the novelty motel cones of Holbrook, AZ, in which I am writing this, are perfectly lovely.
We started in Tucumcari, NM. In the night, the panhandle prairies had turned to a kind of desert. The morning was bright and chill, the sun shining on a dry landscape of yellow grass and pink rock, dotted with thousands of scrubby green bushes.
We set off, the sun behind us, and the road climbed amongst the mountains of New Mexico, red or black, sometimes even flecked with snow.
We had a few hours in Santa Fe. It's a charming place. The narrow streets are jammed with boutiques, galleries and restaurants. We crashed the jolly Catholic cathedral (built in the 19th century although the city is 400 years old) and pointed out all the saints and transubstantiation to the boys before retiring to a nearby crêperie. If that's not japes, I don't know what is.
Then it was back onto the interstate and foot down all the way into the most remarkable landscape I've yet seen in America. Almost a desert, certainly a desolation, it made yesterday's panhandle plains seem like Piccadilly Circus. Utterly empty, just pale white scrub and occasional distant cliffs of dark red stone. The horizon was so impossibly far away that it seemed ridiculous not to see a glint of sun on the ocean beyond it. But there is no end, the land simply continues, forever.
How did people cross this void? I can't imagine making this trip without an iPod, let alone before the inventions of road or rail. We are passing through this abominably vast landscape, hurrying to move on to the next stop. Trying to cross it on foot or by wagon must have been a feat of psychological endurance more than anything else; surely those seemingly infinite spaces would have ground relentlessly away at certainty and perspective, until you went mad?
In Santa Fe there was a gallery of paintings by Georgia O'Keefe and one struck me in particular. A bold composition of horizontal layers of blue and black, it is called 'The Beyond'. She painted it in 1972, when she was in her eighties.
Even before this afternoon's drive, it seemed to me to be a flat landscape: a black foreground with dark bands of turbulent blue cloud above it. In the middle is a very narrow line of almost white light, as if the setting sun were knifing through a low break in heavy clouds. The colours are cold, almost funereal and it is difficult not try and guess which 'beyond' she saw in those dark skies and those vast horizons.
It is a hopeful painting I thought, not about endings and finalities but about moving on, moving through. Beyond this great space, beyond the setting sun, there'll be another, bigger, wider, emptier. It never ends, not with the desert, not even with the ocean.
A movie set
We are staying tonight at the original Cozy Cones motel. For those of you not Pixar-literate, this is the motel owned by Sally, the purple Porsche, in Cars. In real life, the rooms are wigwams rather than traffic cones (ok, they're sort of octagonal concrete shacks with a small en-suite), but that's just poetic license. The Cars team spent a week in town with story boards and cameras - the story of Holbrook, AZ, once a major town on the major road to California, is exactly that of Radiator Springs.
We started today on a wild goose chase for that road - a sign for the historical route 66 led us off the I-40 but then abandoned us. The famous road has been subsumed by freeways or out-of-town boulevards, and following it now requires something more than googlemaps and an eye on the road signs. Even the website of the official supporters' club only offers to sell you a map - there's nothing online.
We gave up and turned back to the freeway, but found the road later completely by accident on an unscheduled detour to Santa Fe. One day we'll "do the route" (our waiter tonight asked whether that was our plan - I don't know what world he lives in where English people with two small boys pop over to do that in March, but it's probably quite a good one). This time the end justifies the means and we'll stick to the multi-carriageway in order to get to the canyon. But it's nice to explore and support just a couple of places.
Nowhere at the motel is Cars the film mentioned - though over a dozen classic cars are parked around the lot. It's not mentioned on their website. Hence we can roll up to this place which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, at 5.30pm in Spring Break and help ourselves to what isn't even their last wigwam. They're missing a whole magic-show of tricks - I'm told that the bed and breakfast which is used as Miss Hooley's fictional home in the BBC's Balamory is booked over a year in advance solely on the basis of its on-screen fame (and of course Miss H herself is never actually there...). The cafe at the bottom of the street (mentioned in the Cars credits for its chilli, they told me proudly) has a small case of memorabilia, provided by John Lassiter on his last trip through, because he was so surprised at how little they had. None of this is mentioned outside the building.
As we left, we were told about the railroad station we'll drive past tomorrow, where Geronimo apparently started his final journey after his surrender. Again, I'm sure we could have driven straight past without the slightest idea.
I can't say I'm sad about the lack of branding - the sense that one simply wouldn't have come here if one didn't already know (how English is that?!). But, as it did in the summer, panic strikes - what gems are we simply driving straight past?
Today's Stats:
Started Driving: 07:45 MST (Daylight Saving)
Finished Driving: 17:10 MST (Standard)
Miles: 465
States: 2
License plates: 9 more for a total of 39. 12 to go.
Breakfast: Super 8, Tucumcari, NM
Lunch: French Pastry Shop, Santa Fe, NM
Dinner: Joe and Aggie's Cafe, Holbrook, AZ
Favourite place name: Continental Divide, AZ
Trains seen: dozens. More than I've seen outside a station since arriving in this country.
Status of body-clock: so screwed up we might even make sunrise at the canyon.
Scary gas stations: several
We started today on a wild goose chase for that road - a sign for the historical route 66 led us off the I-40 but then abandoned us. The famous road has been subsumed by freeways or out-of-town boulevards, and following it now requires something more than googlemaps and an eye on the road signs. Even the website of the official supporters' club only offers to sell you a map - there's nothing online.
We gave up and turned back to the freeway, but found the road later completely by accident on an unscheduled detour to Santa Fe. One day we'll "do the route" (our waiter tonight asked whether that was our plan - I don't know what world he lives in where English people with two small boys pop over to do that in March, but it's probably quite a good one). This time the end justifies the means and we'll stick to the multi-carriageway in order to get to the canyon. But it's nice to explore and support just a couple of places.
Nowhere at the motel is Cars the film mentioned - though over a dozen classic cars are parked around the lot. It's not mentioned on their website. Hence we can roll up to this place which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, at 5.30pm in Spring Break and help ourselves to what isn't even their last wigwam. They're missing a whole magic-show of tricks - I'm told that the bed and breakfast which is used as Miss Hooley's fictional home in the BBC's Balamory is booked over a year in advance solely on the basis of its on-screen fame (and of course Miss H herself is never actually there...). The cafe at the bottom of the street (mentioned in the Cars credits for its chilli, they told me proudly) has a small case of memorabilia, provided by John Lassiter on his last trip through, because he was so surprised at how little they had. None of this is mentioned outside the building.
As we left, we were told about the railroad station we'll drive past tomorrow, where Geronimo apparently started his final journey after his surrender. Again, I'm sure we could have driven straight past without the slightest idea.
I can't say I'm sad about the lack of branding - the sense that one simply wouldn't have come here if one didn't already know (how English is that?!). But, as it did in the summer, panic strikes - what gems are we simply driving straight past?
Today's Stats:
Started Driving: 07:45 MST (Daylight Saving)
Finished Driving: 17:10 MST (Standard)
Miles: 465
States: 2
License plates: 9 more for a total of 39. 12 to go.
Breakfast: Super 8, Tucumcari, NM
Lunch: French Pastry Shop, Santa Fe, NM
Dinner: Joe and Aggie's Cafe, Holbrook, AZ
Favourite place name: Continental Divide, AZ
Trains seen: dozens. More than I've seen outside a station since arriving in this country.
Status of body-clock: so screwed up we might even make sunrise at the canyon.
Scary gas stations: several
Tuesday 15 March 2011
The Other Edge of Texas
We didn't do much that was new today, but we did break some new ground eventually, once we had peeled ourselves off of the familiar Dallas road and struck west towards the panhandle. Everything changed after that.
Before then, the journey had all been previously seen bits of Texas. Houston glowered under dark skies, the towers of downtown broken and smoking with cloud. As we inched our way out of the city, the morning grew darker and the sky pressed lower, eventually fragmenting into a ferocious storm in which both thunder and lightning were lost above the vicious rain that fell like beads against the windscreen.
Houston weather that we were glad to leave behind - it stayed, tangled in the city, and we broke free of both. The sky lightened, the sun came out. We drove through the trees, a mixture of green leaves and bare limbs, blossom and brown, all the seasons jumbled as usual.
By the time we'd reached the Dallas/Fort Worth conurbation, we'd been driving for five hours. It passes quickly enough. The roads were quiet, as were the boys in the back, and we coasted along.
After lunch we took a new road. Fort Worth, with its own distant towers and thickly applied frontage road stores, dissolved under the sunshine. We headed north-west towards new places, strange yet familiar sounding: Wichita Falls, Amarillo.
The trees were gone too, replaced by a messy rise and fall of grass and pasture. Like the jumbled trees, the grass was also confused, blending between scrubby brown, bright green and faded yellow. It began to feel very different. The fields were oddly ornamented with small nodding donkeys, or rusted brown boxcars.
Suddenly we were way out, somewhere else.
The towns changed as we went, strung out along the road like knots. Some, like Decatur, announced desperately there was more to see if only we'd stop and look. Others, like Memphis or Claude, seemed to have fallen long ago into a dusty despair, tattered and tiny. They all felt isolated, as much from each other as from anywhere else, and some even had their 19th century ribs poking through their modern trappings. With their General Stores and local banks, these were clearly old western towns. One, Clarendon I think, even had a small stone square Sheriff's office, with iron bars across the windows and patrol cars tethered up outside.
And now, around these dusty islands, the grass became a great ocean of pale green. The land and sky stretched and stretched, pulled impossibly far in all directions, skewing perspective so that objects, the odd silo or wind vane, looked either too close and vanishingly small or, like the silhouetted combines, enormous and distant. The sun began to set, sucking colour from the world as it settled before us, bright and menacing and low in the sky. We stopped for dinner in Amarillo, but before we could see anything of it, night fell abruptly, like a dropped curtain.
We had nearly gone far enough. Another hundred miles or so down the road was the border with New Mexico. We ploughed through the darkness. The boys grumpily tumbled into sleep in their seats. Outside the beautiful, ghostly desolation of the plains was lost, replaced with eerie fields of flashing lights.
We crossed the border into Mountain Time and allowed the last few miles to roll away until the jolly lights of Tucumcari rose over the brow of a hill.
I know absolutely nothing about this place other than that we are leaving it first thing in the morning.
Before then, the journey had all been previously seen bits of Texas. Houston glowered under dark skies, the towers of downtown broken and smoking with cloud. As we inched our way out of the city, the morning grew darker and the sky pressed lower, eventually fragmenting into a ferocious storm in which both thunder and lightning were lost above the vicious rain that fell like beads against the windscreen.
Houston weather that we were glad to leave behind - it stayed, tangled in the city, and we broke free of both. The sky lightened, the sun came out. We drove through the trees, a mixture of green leaves and bare limbs, blossom and brown, all the seasons jumbled as usual.
By the time we'd reached the Dallas/Fort Worth conurbation, we'd been driving for five hours. It passes quickly enough. The roads were quiet, as were the boys in the back, and we coasted along.
After lunch we took a new road. Fort Worth, with its own distant towers and thickly applied frontage road stores, dissolved under the sunshine. We headed north-west towards new places, strange yet familiar sounding: Wichita Falls, Amarillo.
The trees were gone too, replaced by a messy rise and fall of grass and pasture. Like the jumbled trees, the grass was also confused, blending between scrubby brown, bright green and faded yellow. It began to feel very different. The fields were oddly ornamented with small nodding donkeys, or rusted brown boxcars.
Suddenly we were way out, somewhere else.
The towns changed as we went, strung out along the road like knots. Some, like Decatur, announced desperately there was more to see if only we'd stop and look. Others, like Memphis or Claude, seemed to have fallen long ago into a dusty despair, tattered and tiny. They all felt isolated, as much from each other as from anywhere else, and some even had their 19th century ribs poking through their modern trappings. With their General Stores and local banks, these were clearly old western towns. One, Clarendon I think, even had a small stone square Sheriff's office, with iron bars across the windows and patrol cars tethered up outside.
And now, around these dusty islands, the grass became a great ocean of pale green. The land and sky stretched and stretched, pulled impossibly far in all directions, skewing perspective so that objects, the odd silo or wind vane, looked either too close and vanishingly small or, like the silhouetted combines, enormous and distant. The sun began to set, sucking colour from the world as it settled before us, bright and menacing and low in the sky. We stopped for dinner in Amarillo, but before we could see anything of it, night fell abruptly, like a dropped curtain.
We had nearly gone far enough. Another hundred miles or so down the road was the border with New Mexico. We ploughed through the darkness. The boys grumpily tumbled into sleep in their seats. Outside the beautiful, ghostly desolation of the plains was lost, replaced with eerie fields of flashing lights.
We crossed the border into Mountain Time and allowed the last few miles to roll away until the jolly lights of Tucumcari rose over the brow of a hill.
I know absolutely nothing about this place other than that we are leaving it first thing in the morning.
Off we go again!
Houston, TX - Tucumcari, NM
This almost doesn't count as a road trip. We've only got a week till the kids are back at school. We nearly didn't come. But, well, the pressure is always on over here, in a way that is new to me. It's not just that there's so much I want to see. The fact that I've never been to Lincoln or Leeds Castle never rankles - I know I'll get there one day. But every Goodnight TX or Truth or Consequence NM issues a constant challenge. If somehow, suddenly, we found ourselves back in Blighty, I would be frustrated (well at least narked) that these gems had somehow escaped our attention.
So, we start with the big fish. Last summer nailed several of them - and we're still faintly astonished that we even attempted the feat, let alone actually enjoyed it. So are a lot of our American friends - the refrain "you've seen more of America than we have" is not unusual and always a cause for pride. It's given us a potentially dangerous sense of security - and the concept of 3000 miles before Monday seems completely manageable and almost normal.
If we're lucky, we'll manage just two days at the Grand Canyon. Two days more than we could afford by any other means of transit, and (who knows?) maybe the only two days the boys will get there till they return under their own steam in thirty years' time, as I am doing now. I have no hesitation.
As it happens, we'll get two hours more than I planned for. For a start, I always fail to plan for the time zones. As I've remarked before, they are little advertised, and my poor human brain always forgets which way is up if I think about it for too long. So, on crossing the border out of Texas (at LAST - we took perhaps the longest possible route, up through Fort Worth and Amarillo), suddenly it was 8.3o again and we looked set for a reasonable arrival time.
More confusingly, we save another hour when we cross into Arizona. No time zone there - nothing so prosaic. No, Arizona tried Daylight Saving once, in 1967, and didn't take to it. "We have quite enough sunshine as it is," seemed to be the reaction, and, claiming an energy-efficiency that pre-dates the year, they enacted a state-wide exemption from the following year which they've never really discussed rescinding.
Now, of course, the amount of sunshine doesn't change with DST, and I've always been told that it's more cost-effective to leave your thermostat on constant than to attempt to cool just when people are in the house (it's not like heating - you need your AC on at night almost more than you do during the day). I prefer the theory which says the change was due to the then State Senate Majority leader. He owned drive-in movie theaters, and rumour has it that he nearly went bust in 1967 as the late light and heat meant he couldn't start his shows until 10pm - far too late for country folk...
To add to the confusion, were we to head to the Navajo Indian reservation (in the NE corner of Arizona), we would find that they DO observe Daylight Saving Time (which, to my mind, lends credence to the stranded-at-the-drive-in theory). Having said that, entirely enclosed within the Navajo reservation is the Hopi reservation - and, you've guessed it, they DON'T. We may give them a miss (though I'd be keen to see whether my iPhone could keep up with it).
People do strange things to time when they're in power. Remember Chavez in 2007? Here's a link, for those of you not temporally obsessed.
Stats for the day:
Started driving: 08.10 (CST)
Finished driving: 21.17 (MST)
Miles: 687
States: 2
License plates: 31 (still no North Dakota)
Breakfast: Denny's, Huntsville, TX
Lunch: Chilis, Fort Worth, TX
Dinner: Cracker Barrel, Amarillo, TX (what a trio of American cuisine)
Favourite sign: "Seymour 51 / Plainview 129"
This almost doesn't count as a road trip. We've only got a week till the kids are back at school. We nearly didn't come. But, well, the pressure is always on over here, in a way that is new to me. It's not just that there's so much I want to see. The fact that I've never been to Lincoln or Leeds Castle never rankles - I know I'll get there one day. But every Goodnight TX or Truth or Consequence NM issues a constant challenge. If somehow, suddenly, we found ourselves back in Blighty, I would be frustrated (well at least narked) that these gems had somehow escaped our attention.
So, we start with the big fish. Last summer nailed several of them - and we're still faintly astonished that we even attempted the feat, let alone actually enjoyed it. So are a lot of our American friends - the refrain "you've seen more of America than we have" is not unusual and always a cause for pride. It's given us a potentially dangerous sense of security - and the concept of 3000 miles before Monday seems completely manageable and almost normal.
If we're lucky, we'll manage just two days at the Grand Canyon. Two days more than we could afford by any other means of transit, and (who knows?) maybe the only two days the boys will get there till they return under their own steam in thirty years' time, as I am doing now. I have no hesitation.
As it happens, we'll get two hours more than I planned for. For a start, I always fail to plan for the time zones. As I've remarked before, they are little advertised, and my poor human brain always forgets which way is up if I think about it for too long. So, on crossing the border out of Texas (at LAST - we took perhaps the longest possible route, up through Fort Worth and Amarillo), suddenly it was 8.3o again and we looked set for a reasonable arrival time.
More confusingly, we save another hour when we cross into Arizona. No time zone there - nothing so prosaic. No, Arizona tried Daylight Saving once, in 1967, and didn't take to it. "We have quite enough sunshine as it is," seemed to be the reaction, and, claiming an energy-efficiency that pre-dates the year, they enacted a state-wide exemption from the following year which they've never really discussed rescinding.
Now, of course, the amount of sunshine doesn't change with DST, and I've always been told that it's more cost-effective to leave your thermostat on constant than to attempt to cool just when people are in the house (it's not like heating - you need your AC on at night almost more than you do during the day). I prefer the theory which says the change was due to the then State Senate Majority leader. He owned drive-in movie theaters, and rumour has it that he nearly went bust in 1967 as the late light and heat meant he couldn't start his shows until 10pm - far too late for country folk...
To add to the confusion, were we to head to the Navajo Indian reservation (in the NE corner of Arizona), we would find that they DO observe Daylight Saving Time (which, to my mind, lends credence to the stranded-at-the-drive-in theory). Having said that, entirely enclosed within the Navajo reservation is the Hopi reservation - and, you've guessed it, they DON'T. We may give them a miss (though I'd be keen to see whether my iPhone could keep up with it).
People do strange things to time when they're in power. Remember Chavez in 2007? Here's a link, for those of you not temporally obsessed.
Stats for the day:
Started driving: 08.10 (CST)
Finished driving: 21.17 (MST)
Miles: 687
States: 2
License plates: 31 (still no North Dakota)
Breakfast: Denny's, Huntsville, TX
Lunch: Chilis, Fort Worth, TX
Dinner: Cracker Barrel, Amarillo, TX (what a trio of American cuisine)
Favourite sign: "Seymour 51 / Plainview 129"
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