When the dotted yellow lines are closing in

Knoxville, Cleveland, Knoxville, Washington (12/21-12/30):

Google puts the drive from New York to DC at 227 miles and three and a half hours, so our 33,852 mile/122 day drive was considerably out of the way. In total we hit 48 states and 44 national parks, a few dozen motel 6s, several state parks and national forests, a half dozen breweries, and a raccoon. We somehow avoided the po-po for the entire trip, and while going through 2 cobalts, 2 sonatas, 2 focii, a corolla and a budget truck, had no car trouble outside of a door that wouldn't close in new orleans. So, a few bests and worsts of the country:

Top five national parks:
1. Wind Cave, SD - we nearly skipped this to go to the Badlands instead, and we never did go to the cave. But it, along with neighboring Custer State Park, was one of the best parks we visited for wildlife, with lots of buffalo and pronghorns hanging out by the road. And Custer had the burros and beeping prairie dogs too.
2. Olympic, WA - Rainforest, and as good a beach on the Pacific Ocean as you could want.
3. Bryce Canyon, UT - Maybe the most geologically interesting, the hoodoos are unlike anywhere else we saw.
4. Great Sand Dunes, CO - There was just so much sand.
5. Saguaro, AZ - Cacti.

Yellowstone/Grand Teton would probably be the best park to spend a week at, with Yosemite close behind, but the five above are the ones that seem to stick out.

Top five states:
1. New York - for the city if nothing else, but the finger lakes and Niagara put it over the top
2. Colorado - all four parks are worth seeing.
3. Minnesota - the north country is delightful.
4. Missouri - St. Louis and KC were better than expected.
5. Washington - nice parks, nice cities, and Seattle seems a bit less silly than Portland.

Top five cities/towns:
1. NYC, NY
2. Duluth, MN
3. Missoula, MO
4. Mitchell, SD if just for sheer ingenuity. (I would LOVE to meet the guy who one day said, "Hey guys--wait, I've got an idea. What if we build a giant palace out of CORN?)
5. St. Louis, MO

Worst state:
1. Florida

Worst park:
1. Hot Springs, AR


And with that, we're settling down (for a little bit).

Browns 41, Chiefs 34

Kansas City, MO (12/19-12/20)

We really liked Kansas City when we passed through at the beginning of the road trip way back in September, but we didn't have a chance to do much more than drive through before heading on. With tickets to the Browns-Chiefs game on Sunday, we arrived early Saturday afternoon so we'd have time to explore the city a bit. We had dinner and drinks at a microbrewery in Westport, a trendy area of the city. We shopped a little in Country Club Plaza, an outdoor mall of upscale shops near Westport, before watching some football on TV.

On Sunday, we watched football for real in person, in just about the most exciting game you could hope to watch. While neither of the teams are exactly the best that the NFL has to offer, lots of points and some broken records on the Browns side kept the game exciting. The Browns extended their winning streak to 3.

Texas

Carlsbad NM to Alpine TX via Carlsbad Caverns and Guadalupe NP (12/15)
Alpine TX to Fort Stockton TX via Big Bend Ntl Park (12/16)
Fort Stockton TX to Austin TX (12/17)
Austin TX to Wichita KS (12/18):

Back when we were young road trippers, one of our first stops was Mammoth Cave NP in Kentucky, where the rangers gave us a tour and mentioned several times how their cave was bigger than Carlsbad Caverns. Mammoth Cave may be bigger, but Carlsbad has more impressive formations. Unlike Mammoth, you can actually visit the cave on your own without a ranger-guided tour, which we also appreciated.



We spent awhile at the caverns, which only left us a little time to visit Guadalupe, a Texas national park not far from the caverns. Turns out that was plenty of time because most of the national park is also designated wilderness area, which means there are no roads, etc, so it's largely inaccessible unless you're ready to do some more serious exploring, which we had neither the time, equipment, or initiative to do. The visitor center at least had wifi.



Post-Guadalupe, we headed through the Big Bend region of TX, which is probably the least populated place we've been through. There are only a handful of small towns and absolutely NOTHING on the highways in between them...except outside of Marfa TX, we inexplicably passed a Prada storefront. And not just some shack where someone spray painted Prada on a piece of wood and nailed it to a shack. It was dark, so we didn't get any pictures, but some googling provides the explanation for the weirdest Prada location ever.

After a night in Alpine ("In the Alps of Texas"), we swung through Big Bend National Park, on the Mexican border. It was a pretty perfunctory swing-through, as Brad has given me his cold, and I was sick and didn't feel like hiking. We drove north from Big Bend, passing little except tumbleweed and border patrol agents, sleeping in Fort Stockton, a rather unfortunate little town, except for this road runner:



The next day we visited Austin, where we were armed with suggestions from my friend Rebecca as to places to go. Unfortunately, I was still sick and not up for much, so we satisfied ourselves with pizza and football (though, that seems an appropriate way to spend time in Austin). We're now on our way to Kansas City, a favorite from earlier in the trip and the location of the Browns next Sunday showdown.
-M

Contact

Socorro NM to Carlsbad NM (12/14):

Sunday night before bed, we heard some light thudding on the window and found a cat outside trying to get in. He looked non-feral enough, so we let him into our hotel room to run around for awhile. We fed him some granola and gave him some water and sent him on his way.



Contact was one of my favorite books when I was younger, and I liked the movie back in the day as well, so on Monday we took a detour through rural New Mexico to the Very Large Array, or VLA. It's 27 radio telescopes on a plateau and there's a visitor's center and walking tour. They're very pretty and symmetrical sitting there in the middle of nothing. We were underneath one when they moved it, and they move a lot faster than you'd think.



After that, we headed across New Mexico, driving through Roswell, which is less alien-y than I expected. There's some alien stuff around (the Toyota dealership has a 75 foot inflatable alien in front of it and there are a couple museums), but it's mainly just a normal town. Somewhere south of Roswell, we crossed that invisible line that marks the south, and we stayed the night in Carlsbad, which is more Texas than New Mexico. People here are nice, except for the hobo who screamed "I hope you both die!!!" at us. You can't win them all.

-M

I'd echo everything you say...

Flagstaff to Flagstaff, via Grand Canyon (12/11)
Flagstaff to Willcox, via Saguaro National Park (12/12)
Willcox to Socorro, NM (12/13):

We decided to make Flagstaff one of our rare multi-night cities, joining Cleveland, Knoxville and Las Vegas, as it is well-positioned near both Petrified Forest and the Grand Canyon. So we headed north to the Grand Canyon, still riding the high of the Cleveland victory, and made our way through quite a bit of snow to the park. The canyon itself is fine, and by all means grander than Black Canyon CO and King's Canyon CA, and maybe grander than Canyonlands UT, though Bryce Canyon UT gives it a run, Bryce is smaller but its hoodoos are pretty good. We didn't hike much on account of the snow, instead heading back to Flagstaff, swinging by Target and spending the rest of the day in our motel 6.
Saturday we headed south, coasting into Sedona where mystical vortexes are said to enhance one's energy. We didn't feel the vortexes and weren't that into the psychics, so we split for Saguaro National Park, which is the first time either of us had seen cacti, not little window-box cacti, but giant 50 foot cacti that look exactly like you'd find in a 5 year-old's drawing of the desert. So we hiked around the cacti until sunset, then made it to Willcox for the night.
Sunday we drove to Socorro New Mexico, setting us up for the VLA in the morning. We got a growler from the Socorro brewery and are watching the Giants lose as we both Consult.
-B

Grand Canyon:


Grand Canyon snow:


Sedona, no vortexes here!


Cactii

At first I was afraid, I was petrified...

Kingman AZ to Flagstaff AZ via Petrified National Forest (12/10):

We drove across the state of Arizona today. The middle of the state was assaulted by some crazy snowstorm, so there was about a foot or two of snow on the ground in Flagstaff. There were some patches of ice on the interstate, but the roads were mostly clear. There wasn't any snow in the eastern part of the state where the Petrified Forest National Park is. We saw the Painted Desert and looked at some trees that looked like quartz. Then back to Flagstaff where we saw the Browns defeat the Superbowl Champion Steelers to lock in their second win of the season in a bar with a surprising number of Cleveland fans (also a fair number of Steelers fans, who are not a friendly bunch).

It's been kind of slow going since Vegas. The past couple of days have been nicer than the couple of days before, but we're sad we haven't been able to camp except for one night at the very beginning because it's been so cold (I think the low tonight, for example, is 7). But the boost provided by the Browns win plus leaving southern California and the anticipated warmer weather should propel us through the rest of the southwest.

-M

This is petrified wood!


Brad makes a friend:

London Bridge is still there

Twentynine Palms CA to Kingman AZ via Joshua Tree and Lake Havasu City (12/9):

We visited Joshua Tree in the morning, hiking a 4 mile trail to an abandoned mine in the mountains. The trail was covered in icy snow, and we haven’t hiked for a while, so it was a little hard, but it was nice to get back at it. There are flat expanses filled with Joshua trees and these mountains of tiny rocks.

Joshua Tree was nice, but we didn’t really enjoy most of southern California, so we were happy when we made it to Arizona. Our first stop was Lake Havasu City, which back in the 1960s bought London Bridge from the city of London for a couple million dollars and relocated it to Arizona for another few million dollars. So now London Bridge sits in the middle of the desert, and the city has done a really good job building up a nice walkable waterfront area with lots of restaurants. The bridge itself is quietly stately (I was expecting something like the wildly colorful Tower Bridge), but I didn’t get any pictures because it was pretty dark. We're big fans of little towns putting up crazy sights to attract tourism (see Corn Palace; also World's Largest Ball of Twine), so in appreciation we added a little bit of money to the economy via the purchase of microbrews and a flu shot for myself (just regular, they wouldn't give me h1n1).

We drove on a bit, stopping in Kingman for the night, where we had our first In and Out Burgers.

-M

Down Old Mexico Way

San Ysiedro to Twentynine Palms CA via Tijuana (12/8)

After we were thwarted by the rain yesterday, we woke up only a stone’s throw from the Mexican border and walked over for the afternoon. To enter Mexico, you go through a couple of turnstiles, but there are no checks of any kind to enter the country. We were short on time, so we headed for the tourist area and walked around for a couple hours. We found a low-key restaurant (the one that didn’t have a bunch of people outside trying to get us to come in), sat watching a soccer game, and quickly took in as many stereotypical Mexican foods as possible: chips and salsa, tacos, huaraches, a margarita, aqua fresca, and we were even treated by the owner to a sample of tequila. At passport control on the way back, we were one of the few Americans passing through and attracted a bit more scrutiny, but we made it back without any problems.

Then…we headed back east for the last time (!). We drove through the desert, stopping at a rather run-down motel in Twentynine Palms, which lays at the entrance of Joshua Tree National Park. I was expecting a laid-back hippy-ish sort of town, but the largest Marine base in the US in located outside of the town, so there were more crewcuts than dreadlocks at the local pizza joint.
-M

SoCal

Ventura, CA to San Ysida, CA (12/7):

A quick trip to the Channel Islands National Park Visitor's Center allowed us to technically check the Channel Islands off our national park list. The islands themselves are only accesible by boat, which was not running today, and we didn't really want to spend any more time hanging around in the area, so we'll have to make it to those islands sometime in the future.

The goal had been to spend the afternoon in Tijuana, but we underestimated (misunderestimated?) how far Ventura was from LA and how far LA was from San Diego. There was also a heavy downpour, so we spent the day driving, stopping just short of the border and staying on good old American soil for now.
-M

The Land of Race Car Ya-Yas

Bakersfield CA to Ventura CA (12/6):

Happily, Bakersfield did not smell like manure in the morning. Today's agenda was Los Angeles, and we started in Burbank (strip malls, big box stores) at a sports bar so Brad could watch the Cleveland-San Diego. Strangely, San Diego did not seem to be the hometown team, as there were almost as many Cleveland fans as there were San Diego. Most people seemed to be interested in the Cowboys-Giants game instead (go Giants!!) We then stopped by Hollywood where we walked about 2 blocks before we realized we weren't going to be able to muster much enthusiasm for the stars and hand prints in the sidewalk (though, there were a lot fewer hand prints than I thought there would be). We then headed to Ventura on the coast where we had Thai food. Our visit to Los Angeles is probably the equivalent of a visit to New York that only involves Times Square, but I'm confirming my feelings that this isn't a place I would want to spend any substantial amount of time.
-M

A Hazy Shade of Winter

Ridgecrest CA to Bakersfield CA via Sequoia/King's Canyon NP (12/5):

Ridgecrest improved a bit in the morning as the light revealed pretty-ish mountains in the distance. It was not improved by someone trying to burst through our door early in the morning, but luckily we had put a chair in front of it to prevent just such a thing. We headed north through the San Juaquin Valley, which does not have a lot to recommend it. Other than orange groves, it was kind of a desolate wasteland with lots of haze (pollution, I think) everywhere. In fact, I can't actually confirm we were in a valley because we couldn't see far enough for the mountains.

Our destination for the day was Sequoia/King's Canyon, two national parks right beside each other in the Sierra Nevadas. The parks are even more impressive in that they rise out of the nuclear winter of the valley. Sequoia contains a sequoia named General Sherman, the world's largest tree by volume. King's Canyon has a canyon that we didn't really see because it was getting dark and General Grant, a giant sequoia that was presidentially declared to be the Nation's Christmas Tree (not to be confused with the National Christmas Tree in DC). Brad and I walked on a tree and drove through a tree before heading back south, stopping in Bakersfield for the night, which smells like manure.
-M

Leaving Las Vegas

Las Vegas to Ridgecrest CA via Death Valley National Park (12/4):

We have had a great time in Las Vegas, though we didn't really think of ourselves as Vegas-type of people. We've been really surprised at how cheap Vegas can be (at least for us). When we were first making road trip plans, we figured we'd breeze through Vegas because we wouldn't be able to afford being there for much longer. When we looked at hotel prices (assuming that we'd have to stay far away from everything), we were shocked to find rooms in a Strip hotel/casino were the cheapest rooms we'd seen anywhere in America--about half of what we normally pay for a room. We figured there had to be a catch (expensive parking, weird fees), but so far so good. Although our hotel isn't quite at the same glamor level as some of the other casinos, we lucked out because it seems to be the "budget" casino. For example, most of the other casinos have $5 minimums on blackjack hands, which makes a dent in your money pretty quickly, but at our place you can play for $1. Obviously, Vegas gambling can be murder to a bank account, but Brad and I are both pretty conservative financially, so there's no real danger that we're going to go overboard.

We played the slots a bit too, though only the penny slots because the slots have terrible odds, so we didn't want to put too much into it. I won $20 at New York, New York (which we promptly cashed in and left--take that casinos!) We also were net positive (by $.02!) at Bellagio.

After four nights in Vegas, we left for points west. Our intended activity for the day was Death Valley, but we got a slow start in the morning and had some errands to run before leaving Las Vegas (cue Sheryl Crowe). We didn't make it to Death Valley until late afternoon, so we didn't have time to do anything beyond drive through, but the scenery was quite beautiful and way more mountain-y than I'd expected. Also unexpected was how un-desolate it is. We saw plenty of other cars, everything was well-signposted, and the distances didn't seem so far away. I'm sure it has quite a different feel in the 130-degree summers, but for now we can feel the hubris of modern travelers conquering the desert in our well-stocked Hyundai.

We're spending the evening in an out-of-the-way southern CA town that lacks charm. Surprisingly, it feels weird to be back on the road again. We spent 4 nights in Vegas, which is the longest amount of time we've spent in a single place since September. After having that nice little break in a plush room, it's hard to go back to roadside motels and not spending more than 15 hours in a place. Luckily, we've saved some of the most exciting parts of the road trip for this Southwestern sojourn since over three months on the road is starting to grow tiring.

Viva Las Vegas

Las Vegas (12/1 - 12/3):

In deference to local customs, we won't be blogging our four nights in Las Vegas.
-B

I got 48 states but Alaska ain't one

Springdale UT to Las Vegas NV (11/30):

En route to our date with Lady Luck in Las Vegas, we took a detour to Hoover Dam. When we first started talking about taking a road trip, the Hoover Dam often came up on the list of places to visit that would justify taking a road trip. It is in fact impressive, but it is also just a dam. There's a visitor's center (which we skipped because it was $$$), and you can walk across the dam and look down on it. From what we could tell, there's no place to look at it from straight on, so it's hard to get a full sense of it. It was also pretty crowded, and we only spent a little time there before heading onto Vegas.

View from the dam:


More on Vegas will follow in the coming days, but upon arrival, we were pleasantly surprised to find our hotel room to be large and comfortable. It was crazy cheap, so we were expecting a hovel, but it's probably about the nicest room we've had on the trip.

And finally, we reached a major milestone today: the road between Utah and Vegas passes briefly through Arizona, which marks the 48th state that we have visited on the road trip. We'll be passing back through Arizona in a couple weeks, but we've officially hit all the states in the continental US since September (and overall, since we've both been to Hawaii, we only have Alaska until we've visited every state in the Union.)
-M