Day 1
The start of the trip began at an unusual time. We left at 1:15am on Thursday morning the 19th from San Luis Obispo (a little later than planned) and drove straight to the Grand Canyon. Fortunately, we missed ALL of the LA traffic by doing so! On our way through the vast desert we also missed the heat wave that has been terrorizing the area by traveling through the night. One way we have been passing the time is through our "book club" that we have started. Right now there are only two members. Donna has been the "voice" of the book as she reads it aloud to Corey while he drives. Highlights are looking up GRE-type vocabulary from the book in a dictionary. Members get extra points if they can closely define the words before looking it up. (yes, it is quite a nerdy club, but one member hopes to gain high test scores from the game and for the other member, it is making her "more-smarter"!) We are twenty percent through the book (thanks for the book loan Sarah C!), but we have a feeling we will have a bit more time to finish it off with hopes to move on to another.
Going out to the Grand Canyon we got to see some very old friends, the Flintstones. They were in good spirits and were quite a welcoming site after such a long drive.
This was Corey's first time seeing the Grand Canyon and Donna's 2nd time. It was beautiful... and pictures will never capture the vast depths that you see when you look out over the eroded land! Erosion never looked so good!
$25 and 25 minutes later we were off to Flagstaff to meet up with friends, Matt, Jessica and new addition, Laura Jane Brown. (the Kepners were out of town for the summer) Along the way we saw some crazy looking indians about to battle, but we left before things got messy.
We also saw the smallest (and cutest) chapel we have ever seen along the side of the road. We ate lunch at a place called El Capitan—where Matt had a burrito the size of his small child. (he could not finish it off and get the additional 15% off, but he has a few left over meals from it as he says. "All you gotta do is heat it up!")
Our time with them was brief as we headed back out on the road for a 13 hour overnight drive to Oklahoma City, passing through New Mexico and the very top of Texas. New Mexico was a pretty drive—seeing the red bluffs that deepened as the sunset. 24 out of the last 28 hours have been spent driving! (don't worry friends/family, we are going to slow down the pace for the rest of the trip and hopefully get more sleep than just 2 hour shifts in the passenger seat!)
At 2am Texas time, Corey was entertained by lightning storms while he was driving. At 3am, both feeling a bit exhausted, we were cheered up with our experience at the Love's Gas Station. We saw the World's Largest Bubble Gum Jaw Breaker, saw two real-life cowboys (spurs, dirty white hats and dressed head-to-toe by the Wranglers brand), our sales clerk had a fe-mullet and the male sales clerk was trying to talk us into liquor-flavored energy drinks...all to the background of twangy country music. Corey did end up getting a energy drink—a Starbucks double shot drink. He downed it in less than a minute and was quite surprised at its effectiveness—as he was bouncing around, Donna got to experience, with fright, a double shot version of Corey's crazy self! Yikes!
–Arizona was desert *(although from Grand Canyon to Flagstaff was similar to New Mexico)
–New Mexico had lots of reddish rock jutting up out of the ground
–Texas was dark (we drove that portion through the wee hours of the morning!)
On a side note, we have all seen the Maximum speed limit signs—but some states also have a MINIMUM speed limit posted! CA needs to pick up on this idea! And the big rigs over here have been FLYING! Well, not literally flying, but they were passing us when we were doing 80 MPH in a 75 zone! And it's the big 18-wheelers!!
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