Live in the Present.
Stay flexible because few things go as planned.
Last summer we traveled though out the Western US for three months, volunteering on organic farms, visiting friends and relatives, learning more about life and living out of our compact car. This summer we plan to travel for six months or more and our plan is to meet interesting people, have uplifting experiences and see new sights along the way, but I’m getting ahead of myself in anticipation of the adventures to come. Others may want to follow in our footsteps, so I’ll step back in time to last summer. This is the first in a series.
We’d planned to leave early on Friday but drove out the gate shortly after 10:00 am the following Monday. Our first stop was Rodeo, NM to take some more pictures for our www.smalltownswest.com website, which has since been replaced by www.newliferoadmap.com. Most of the pictures I’d taken previously, went with the text I’d written and Celinda was left with not much for her Rodeo story.
We got to Rodeo around noon and, after driving to the south end of town, we worked our way back north with camera and steering wheel in hand. When we got to the Rodeo Natural Food Store we found it was closed on Mondays. The yoga instructor was in and Celinda had a good talk with her while I wandered around taking pictures of what we had access to. From there we went north again and I missed a once in a lifetime opportunity to take a photo of a jackrabbit sitting and panting in the shade of the old Ford panel truck that advertises the Sky Gypsy Cafe.
We had planned to stop the first night in Rimrock, AZ at our son and daughter-in-laws to visit with them and the grand kids. They’d all come down with the flu a few days before and we neither wanted it, or wanted to take it down the line as we traveled on. We stopped long enough to talk for a few minutes out on the patio, give the kids the toys we had brought and then get back on the freeway headed north toward Flagstaff.
Our first choice for the night, after scrapping the Rimrock stay, was Williams, AZ a few miles west of Flagstaff. When we got there we found it was their tourist season, when people go there to get out of the heat of the desert below, and prices had gone up about forty percent. Our credit card company had placed a possible fraud hold on our card, which complicated matters at the gas station. We later found out it was because one of the gas pumps where we’d gotten gas a few days before leaving had to be programmed more than once and that automatically trips the red flags for fraud or stolen cards. It made things difficult, but we’re glad they take those precautions.
We stayed in Selligman, AZ after dodging eighteen wheelers who wanted to do 75 mph in the one lane, 45 mph, road construction zones. They must know that the highway patrol doesn’t often frequent those places at night. At one point, we had to pull in between a couple of large red pile-ons and onto the new pavement on the road closed side when one truck forced us off the road. Another was close behind and would have run us down if i’d swerved through the pile-ons and back onto the open side of the freeway. Being run down by an eighteen wheeler going 75 MPH can ruin your vacation.
The motel at Selligman wasn’t the best we’d ever stayed in with a phone that didn’t work and other things that looked to be quite low on the maintenance scale. We’d gone a lot farther than had been originally planned and, after fourteen hours on the road, we took what we could get.
The next day’s plan was to make it as far as we could, then crash in a motel before we crashed on the road. I’d never liked the road from the Arizona line, through Las Vegas, then north through the hot, windy and boring desert drive to Tonopah and on to Fallon, NV. It was our shortest route and the one we’d chosen, but not because of it’s scenery. As it turned out, it was quite pleasant, with the exception of Tonopah where I still lack a good experience. It was almost windless and with the AC on high, not as hot as I remember the last trips. There aren’t many opportunities for taking photos though, nothing but a sixty foot black strip with a white line down the middle that stretches to the horizon. Even with the mountains between Safford and Payson, AZ, the climb to Flagstaff and the AC running full time since leaving home, we got mid-forties in the MPG department. Most was freeway speeds, except when dodging trucks in 45 mpg construction zones.
We left Selligman a little after 8:00 am following an attempt at rousing someone in the motel office to tell them about the defective phone, other problems and to register our displeasure. No one was there, maybe because of past experiences with unhappy customers.
We ate at a casino in Nevada where the food was good and the prices right. We don’t gamble so we were probably a loss for them. A man and his son, who were in front of us in the restaurant line, had hurried across the lobby with handkerchiefs held over their noses to avoid as much cigarette smoke as possible. The restaurant was clean and smoke free and we wished we’d been able to make the extra distance so we could have stayed in the casino hotel at half the price and with probably twice the service.