JoeBlog

And we are off!  I had serious doubts we’d be awake enough but so far so good.  I’ve found you tend to sleep a lot deeper (and therefore wake more refreshed) if you are exhausted when you go to bed.  Imagine that!

Today’s plan is:

Get some real donuts that both Sarah and I can eat.  Ronald is the man! 

Hopefully, if we are ahead of time enough stop at the Mad Greek Restaurant located in Baker, CA in the middle of the desert.  I hear they have awesome strawberry shakes.

Tour the NASA Goldstone Deep Space Communication facility.  Out geek out part of the trip

Hook up with my friend Brett who lives in Southern California, north of San Diego.  Visiting Brett before he transfers back to the Midwest was the inspiration for this trip.

The day started out with a really yummy breakfast for both of us compliments of Macy’s European Coffee house & Bakery.  Sarah had the vegan waffles with fruit topping and I, the biscuits & gravy.   My biscuits were nice and crunchy like they should be and the gravy, with i don’t think had any real meat in it, had a great sausage gravy taste.  Very stick to the ribs meal:

We liked Flagstaff alot.  It had a very cosy small mountain town feel to it.   There were a ton of people using bikes to get around.  Sarah said it seemed to be a very ‘green’ town:

Our first stop was the Sunset Crater National National Monument.  The crater means volcano so this was part of the volcano system (i think the last one that erupted) that created all the mountains in this area.   The park featured places where lava had flowed and solidified into a jumbled area of twisted rock.   This photo is at the base of one of the volcanos.   It looks inviting.  Only a 1/2 mile to see the crater.   What i found out was that this was a 200 ft 1/2 mile climb up a very steep grade.  We don’t have steep grades in Indiana (at least in Camby).  I did make it to the top.  Sarah got pretty winded too.   The high altitudes kept us breathing pretty heavy and the old ticker was going a mile a minute.   I think i got enough exercise to hold me for a couple of months:

So far so good

At the top, you can see where the remains of the crater still, after hundreds of years, has kept things from growing:

We weren’t the only ones to make it up to the top:

What was pretty neat was you could see the results of the eruption as the sides of the surrounding landscape still has the marks of the blast on everything that faced the blast.  Very cool to think about it but i wouldn’t wanted to have been there at the time.

I’m going to have to cut this short as it’s time to leave.    I’ll post up some grand canyon pictures once we get settled in Vegas (maybe .. I’m thinking now that the hotel may not have internet access).

So on tap for today .. Hoover Dam and perusing Las Vegas.   We won’t be out too late as we have a real real early morning tomorrow to make our appointment at the Goldstone facility.

What a day!    On Day 3, Monday, we visited the Petrified Forest National Park and Meteor Crater putting about 260 miles on the odometer (including the walking at the park).   We had Walnut Creek National Monument on the todo list but they were closed by the time we got there (missed it by 30 minutes).   We ended up spending the vast majority of the day at the Petrified Forest.  And wow, what a place for this Indiana boy.

Our day started with a breakfast for Sarah (which is really hard to find) at the Flying Star Cafe. 

Sarah had the Vegacado which is described as

Breakfast casserole with scrambled tofu, green chile, onions, red peppers, black beans, organic brown rice.  Smothered in your choice of chile & melted cheddar jack cheese.   Of course she left out the cheese to make it diet compatible

With full belly, we head out towards Flagstaff.

You just don’t get this view in Indiana

Here we are entering Arizona where that daylight savings time junk is summarily rejected like it should be

Here are a couple of Petrified Forest Park pictures (that in no way do justice to the visuals of standing on the rim of the canyon):

I found this charming and touching.   There was this really nice guy out looking at the park with his dog.  Kind of a guy and his pal kinda thing:

This guy blew on a motorcycle, in motorcycle overalls, and we think was from Quebec:

Later in the day, as we were leaving Meteor Crater we saw him driving in.  He was on the same tour we were

Sarah is really on me to leave for breakfast.  On tap today is the Sunset Crater, Wupatki National Monument, the Grand Canyon and our helicopter tour.

We made it to Albuquerque.  Lot less of a drive than yesterday.   In fact we got here too early to check into the hotel.   To kill time we had a late lunch at El Patio, a Mexican restaurant that was on the Sarah-compatible list.   After that we got checked in and headed out to ‘Old Town’ to do some shopping.  Sarah did the shopping, i did the waiting.   Oh yea .. it rained pretty hard, tho quick, while we were there.  Apparently that doesn’t happen very often.  We’ve been in awe of the landscape with is just a bit different than the home stomping grounds of Indiana.   Some amazing views … i just hope some of the pictures turn out.

Of course we have pictures to post but my computer is being a little stingy about connecting up to the internet so that’ll have to wait till i can get a good connection.  Sarah’s laptop is working just fine so i hope its not going to be an ongoing issue.

Tomorrow we have quite the todo list.  We’ll bail out of here early, drive through the Petrified Forest National Park, visit Meteor Crater, and Walnut Canyon National Monument and end up in Flagstaff, AZ for the night.

We rolled out about 3 pm EST.   We ended up traveling 371 miles for the day.   As i mentioned before it was pretty smooth sailing until we approached St Louis from the east.  Traffic just stopped,  most of the time going 0 MPH (which doesn’t get you much anywhere).  According to the GPS markers i put down (yes, I’m that dorky)  we stopped at 6:18 and finally got out of it at 7:47, traveling about 4.3 miles between those times.   This was our first glimpse of the arch, just a bit before we hit traffic:

Once we got close to the Mississippi we saw an exit for another bridge across (the MLK bridge) so we took that.  We figured we could navigate to the diner we were headed to for dinner.   Here’s that sweet non-crowded bridge and a shot up the Mississippi (looking North):

As we got across, we had to travel north a bit before we could go south and Sarah took this picture of the arch that she thought turned out pretty good:

Once we got turned around we drove thru downtown St Louis (which wasn’t crowded at all) towards our food destination.  We weren’t expecting this at all but we drove by a huge brewery:

With this little guy guarding the corner (or maybe he was just drunk):

A couple minutes later we made it to the Shangri La Diner where we had scoped out Sarah compatible food.   She was especially interested in the Vegan Pulled Pork Sandwich.    We’ll have a review of the diner in a later post!

Got to go!    Time to head out for Day 1 which will take use from central Missouri,  thru Tulsa and Oklahoma City, to almost the Texas border.

I think we are done packing.   I’m sure there will be all kinds of last minute stuff that crops up tomorrow.

I’m pretty tired.  Its been a busy week finishing up the floor tiling so that we didn’t come back to a complete mess.  

Here’s a snapshot of the current gas prices out there in the US:

So now we go to bed, wake up, do the half day at work thing and then hit the road!

2 days before we leave on the road trip.   I thought we had really caught a break on gas prices.  I was really expecting a spike in prices before the 4th of July holiday.  I was pretty enthused that the price levels remained steady to even going down a bit.

That trend was not to last   This week, just before our departure, we got about a $0.40 per gallon spike here in Indiana and it looks like the prices rose generally throughout the area of our travel.   Oh well.

Click here for some info on the price spike.  Hopefully we’ll get through the trip before anything that’ll cause serious price spikes happens (hurricanes, etc).   Here is a list of the price trends across the country.

We should be fine however as we used $4.00 per gallon as our budget number so as long as the average is lower than that we are good to stay under budget.  Here’s to the ‘02 Sable getting great highway gas mileage!

One of the first cost we have to account for for our trip is the gasoline cost. For a 6000 mile journey those can add up just by number of miles. Plus we anticipate pretty high per gallon costs this summer as well.

We figured the options are as follows:

1. Use the Focus
2. Use the Taurus
3. Rent a vehicle
4. Borrow a vehicle

Option 1

The Focus is pretty small so we don’t think it would be a good fit for the 16 day trip. We wouldn’t be able to carry much stuff and its a tight fit even if its not packed to the gills. It gets very good gas mileage so it does have that going for it. It would be fun to drive on some of those windy California roads however!

2005 Ford Focus Facts

Option 2

The Taurus has been the workhorse vehicle for these sorts of things. We’ve driven it to Florida a few times and a loop up to Toronto and back via New York. We think the gas mileage will be fine (in the 26–27 mpg range on the highway). Size wise it’d be a tight fit to get everything in there. I’m not sure the seats would be comfortable enough for 16 days of a ton of driving. Also, for the Grand Canyon portion of the trip the higher the vehicle clearance the better. At 88,000 miles its getting up there and there have been some electrical issues lately (which hopefully will be fixed today!). We think it would work in a pinch but we have some reservations.

2001 Ford Taurus Facts

Option 3

Option 3 is renting a vehicle. This really opens the door for a lot of different vehicles. I tend to know Ford vehicles so thats what I’m comfortable renting. We decided we’d use a little bit of the vacation budget to try out some candidate vehicles. The downside to the rental option is it obviously costs money to rent a vehicle and the bigger the vehicle the more the rental fees. Allowed miles doesn’t seem to be a problem, apparently unlimited miles means unlimited miles. I’ll cover the evaluations in a later post.

Rented so far:

• 2008 Ford Edge
• 2007 Ford Freestyle

Option 4

Option 4 is borrowing a vehicle. We didn’t go into this trying to bum a vehicle off anyone as we are budgeting enough that a rental would be feasible. My brother offered up an ‘02 Ford Sable with a bit more miles than my Taurus but without the maintenance red flags. My mom has been kind enough to offer her ‘04 Expedition. I’ll post about the evaluation in a later post.