Day 32 - Phoenix and into California at last

Miles Driven Today: Aout 405

The excitement to play with the cousins this morning proved to be too much for one of my girls as C woke up at 4am, 5:30am, and then again at 6:30am asking if she could go downstairs and play with them yet. My niece and nephew are early risers, but my girls typically are not. With all the time zone changes and varied bedtimes and wake-up calls, hardly any of us are getting a good night's sleep anymore anyways.

The kids all played together while Eric got ready to go to the funeral and Jaimee and I talked about what we would do for the day. It was such a senseless reason for that officer to die, made even more upsetting by the fact that he was so young himself and he had little kids at home. There would be a huge procession in his honor today (10 miles of patrol vehicles) on the way to the memorial service as the city grieved for the second day in a row, following a local firefighter's funeral yesterday.

After Eric left, we packed up the kids and headed to a local coffee shop for breakfast.

My three girls with my niece and nephew together in the center

We had decided to visit the Musical Instrument Museum, one of the attractions I had looked at for this area and one that Jaimee said was highly praised by the locals. It was about a 30 minute drive from her house, but it was well worth the drive. I wouldn't exactly say it was a kid-friendly museum, but it was certainly somewhere an adult could spend days gazing at the collection of instruments and the accompanying videos, and I would very highly recommend it to anyone who loves music or anthropology, or is even mildly interested in either. When we entered, the museum gave us a set of headphones with a receiver box. Throughout the museum there were instruments from each country and a TV screen that was playing a series of movies featuring those instruments. When you walked near a TV, the music from that video would come onto your headphones. It was an awesome way to enjoy the music and allowed them to pack the countries in tightly without distracting people in different areas, even if it was a little disorienting to walk through the museum and hear music in your ears, only to try to figure out which country around you it was coming from.

The first room of the museum acted as an introduction to the instruments that were to follow, and took some time to compare the similar instruments from around the country, like these lutes.

And these guitars

The center one in the glass case was from 1590, built in Lisbon, Portugal

The guitar collection included acoustic and electric guitars of all shapes and sizes, as well as a couple of harp guitars.

so cool!

The next room over had an introductory movie and a collection of some of the biggest and smallest musical instruments in the world, like these two stringed instruments

not as tiny as your tiniest violin, Mom, but close!

They even had giant musical instruments hanging from the ceiling!

The museum was separated by continent and then had displays by country. Although they were all fascinating, here are a few that I took photos of. We had to speed through the last couple of continents because the kids were getting restless, but Jaimee and I could have stayed here all day!

 crocodile noisemaker from Burma

 These women from Vanuatu were actually playing music using the surface of the water. It was one of my favorite displays. The sound of the rhythms they made together were so cool!

 This was one of C's favorites - a drum from Mexico made with rattlesnake tails resting on a cow skin hide. It says the tails buzz like a snare on the drumhead when it's played.

 And this was another one of her favorites. I'm not sure why she took such a close-up picture, but it's actually a drum made of allligator skin, also from Mexico.

 this recycled instrument display highlighted the people who take whatever leftover materials they can find and make very elaborate musical instruments out of them

 We wondered why some artists, like this guy, were chosen to represent the US, Canada, and Europe, instead of other artists. Their choices were head-scratchers sometimes

 an old-time parlor

 the Rock and Roll area

 bagpipes and accordions!! - who knew there were so many varieties?!

By this time, we had to throw the kids a bone, so we took them down to the Experience Gallery to make some music of their own. Jaimee and I were blown away by the 5,000 instruments from more than 200 countries in the main museum, but the kids just wanted to bang on something.

 my nephew on the big drum

 K on the guitar (she actually has been asking to learn how to play)

my niece on the giant gong

Everyone love the working nickelodeon, but no one loved it quite like my nephew!

After we thought they had had enough time playing the instruments, and just before they fell apart from hunger, we made a quick beeline through the Artist Gallery via the Mechanical Music Gallery. The latter was a smallish room with instruments that played themselves, like music boxes. But the Artist Gallery had a collection of instruments and costumes from a very random assortment of famous musicians. Some of them made sense, I guess.

 John Denver's beloved guitar

 Taylor Swift's area (she got two walls, like Elvis)

 Steve Vai's triple-necked guitar

part of the Elvis collection

And we found one more really cool thing in the Artist Gallery - one of the actual 2,008 drums that played at the 2008 Olympic Opening Ceremony in Beijing.

After a quick stop in the gift shop where K picked up a slide whistle and C got a pan flute (so she can be like Puck, of course!), we headed out to lunch to refuel before we all fell apart. We decided on BJ's, which is a favorite of my girls and we made sure to finish off the meal with some Pizookies and beignets.

Once we were back at the house, all the kids played together some more and played with their uncle's dog, Kima.

 A and Kima

 E's line-up of cars and trucks

 the girls playing some kind of wild animal game

the only boy playing alone (but I get the feeling he likes it that way)

Not too much later, it became clear that it was time to go. We had hotel reservations in southern California for this evening and the friendliness and emotional stability my girls enjoyed today was deteriorating rapidly as the early morning (and the last 30 days) started catching up with them again.

Cousin-love, aren't they adorable?

 I left Phoenix, heading out into the highway craziness leading up to Memorial Day weekend. The witty message "Drive Hammered, Get Nailed" blazed on the LED light boards on all the highways here, no doubt encouraged by the recent death of the local officer who was hit by a drunk driver.

The evening started out pretty uneventful as I began the 5 hour drive to Ontario. But a short time after I headed into the middle-of-nowhere, my 'Maint Reqd' engine light came on. I was hoping it wasn't anything too serious since on the Saturday night of a holiday weekend I wasn't expecting to get too much help out here in the desert. I was glad to see that the engine looked good and the coolant was still full. The car was riding just fine and the temperature was fine, so I topped off the oil (which was really low and very black), and headed back onto the highway hoping my assumption was right that it must be just a maintenance light for the oil change I needed. I was already more than 4,000 miles over my next scheduled change even though I had one just days before I left for the trip. My poor abused minivan - she's so tough!

In Southern California we hit a huge windstorm with steady winds at 25-30mph and gusts up to 50mph. This time we didn't avoid the wind and found ourselves tossed all over the road with the other cars out there. The trucks, motorhomes and trailered vehicles all bailed out for the evening and I noticed how weird it was to not see any of them on the highway anywhere. The rest of us toughed it out, driving with both hands tightly gripped on the steering wheel and trying to stay in our own lanes.

I was really tired by the time we made it to the Ontario hotel and the girls were already asleep. We dragged ourselves upstairs and collapsed into bed. We are so close now!

No sunset pictures tonight, but I did get a cool picture of the moon.

Day 31 - New Mexico to Phoenix, AZ

Miles Driven Today: about 405

Today we are all exhausted. At this point our trip has become more a task of dragging our bodies home than enjoying the sights around us. I know there is so much to see and do here in New Mexico, but I just don't have the energy. I don't feel too bad about it, though, knowing that we can come back here anytime because we're so close to home now. If I'm going to miss out on seeing the sights, it's better that it happens in New Mexico than Virginia.

And for every ounce of exhaustion I have, the kids have a ridiculous amount of stir-crazy energy from being cooped up in the car so much. So this morning we found the perfect compromise with them swimming at the pool and me sitting and relaxing. I knew this choice meant that we wouldn't get to see anything on the way to Phoenix including the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson that everyone's been telling me to go to for years (I'll get there someday - I know it!) and The Mini Time Machine which is a museum of miniatures, also in Tucson. We actually had about a dozen sights we would have liked to see in Tucson and Phoenix, but today I had no problem blowing them all off.

We ate lunch in a local Mexican restaurant called Andele! in Old Mesilla, New Mexico that had patio-only seating and a serve-yourself chip bar that A thought was pretty fun. And then we headed out for the 5 hour drive to Phoenix.

As I mentioned yesterday, Hwy 10 is so close to Mexico that each side has to pass through a border patrol checkpoint on the freeway, even if you didn't leave the US. The eastbound traffic had a station back in Texas, and we hit ours today. Even though they had dozens of video cameras set up all over the roadways, they didn't seem too worried about us and most cars were just waved through the station.

The view today is interesting, but in a different way. It seems like a lifetime ago that I was driving through the lush greenery of Virginia or the endless waterholes of Georgia and Florida, but now we find ourselves fully immersed in the desert. And as I consider the view around me, I find it ironic how well the area outside the car matches what's going on inside the car. The temperatures outside are reaching higher, while the temperature of the emotions inside the car grows with it. All around us were mini dust-storm twisters, whipping up and spinning clouds of dust around, not all that much unlike the short tempers that are springing up inside the car today. Clearly the girls are struggling as much as I am with this last leg of the trip. We either need to take a day to rest or hurry up and get ourselves home. Just three more days to go.

Signs all along the road warned of dust storms and potential zero visibility, but the twisters were all really small and were lots of fun to look at and watch for as they sprang up all around us and far in the distance.

 

Those things are a little tough to get a picture of, but thanks A!

 

Also joining us on the road again are the trains we haven't seen since the midwest. I know they've been out there somewhere, but today they came back alongside the road to accompany us again as we drive.

 

Crossing the Arizona state line, we cheated a bit and gained our last hour back a little early. Even though Arizona is in Mountain Time, they don't do Daylight Savings Time, so from Spring to Fall they have the same time as the Pacific states. It's such a shame we killed so much time in New Mexico because I forgot all about gaining this hour back so soon. We probably could have made it to one of the museums for a little while had we moved a little quicker. We actually got to the museum exit off the freeway 10 minutes before they closed for the day but we could have been here at least an hour or two earlier had we not given up on it so soon and dragged our feet so much.

 

 

overpass decorations in Arizona on one of our many pit stops along the way

 

Somewhere along the drive today I also noticed two other things. One was the realization that when we were driving across the northern states, many of the campgrounds weren't open yet for the season. Most didn't open until mid-May because of snow and cold temperatures. Today I saw a sign for a KOA down here, and their camping season is already over. The campgrounds are only open from September to April because it's literally too hot to camp here in the summer. So, we missed out both ways! I wouldn't have expected that.

The other thing I noticed was that we passed by a sign that noted the location of the Continental Divide. I remember passing a similar sign on Hwy 80 when we went east across the country, though the elevation was probably a bit different (this one was 4585 ft), and I wondered even then what the Continental Divide was. I joked with Jessey that we had somehow crossed something like the Prime Meridian or the center of the earth, but hadn't really given it much thought. Now that we had met with a second sign, my curiosity was piqued.

photo courtesy of Wikipedia

 

What I had crossed was the Great Continental Divide (there as several different divides in North America), and this one's the biggest, splitting the continent in half from Alaska to the southern tip of Mexico (actually it continues all the way to the southern tip of Chile in South America, but it's a separate continental divide down there).

 

So what is the Continental Divide? It is actually a hydrological divide, meaning it separates the water that flows into the Pacific Ocean from the water that flows into the Atlantic Ocean (and the Arctic Ocean in that very northern part). It travels more or less down the highest elevations of the mountain ranges and generally speaking, all rivers flow opposite directions from these points. I thought that was pretty interesting, especially where there are 'loops' on the divide line, where the water doesn't flow either direction at all, but just stays there, and where many mountain tops lay on the Divide and flow in two, or even three different directions to different oceans at their peak. Neat, huh?

 

Well, we arrived in Phoenix too late to see the cousins, but it was nice to visit with Jaimee and Eric for a little while before we went to bed. Eric had taken the day off work, because a fellow Phoenix police officer had been killed in the line of duty a week earlier and the funeral was tomorrow. It was a sad occasion, but I was still glad to be able to see him for a little while as he's sometimes hard to catch on my visits down here due to his night-shift schedule. Tomorrow we'll have a full day of visiting here before heading back into California for our final leg of the journey.

Day 30 - Texas to Las Cruces, New Mexico

Miles Driven: about 550

I was in the mood to cover some serious ground today. I was hoping to have a decent amount of time to spend visiting my sister in Phoenix, so I figured sacrificing some hours today would help to ensure that would happen, especially since we were crossing the empty expanse between San Antonio and El Paso. My goal was to make it to Las Cruces, New Mexico, and then to be in Phoenix by tomorrow night.

This morning it was grey and cloudy. In fact, it was so grey and so cloudy all day that I felt like it wasn't really daytime at all until the sun 'came out' around 5 or 6pm. Thankfully, this cloudy weather also made it feel much cooler outside, even though we spent a solid 8 hours in the car today. Once we left Kerr county, the speed limit on Hwy 10 went to 80mph. I'm pretty sure that's the highest speed limit I've ever seen (not counting Canada's km signs ;) The highway in Texas also greeted me with the cheery message that 1102 people had died on Texas roads so far this year. As I drove I wondered how often this sign was updated and how eerie it would be to watch the number climb as you drove knowing someone on the Texas roads had just died.

For lunch we stopped at a DQ. For some reason the kids were astounded that a DQ would sell hamburgers, chicken fingers, and even tacos. Back home they just sell ice cream. I thought it was odd that they sold steak fingers alongside the chicken fingers as well as a chicken fried steak sandwich. The kids pulled a small cup full of creamy white stuff from their chicken finger kid's meal bags and said, "What's this?" "It's gravy", I replied, as they stared at me like I was speaking some sort of foreign language. It was good with the chicken fingers - I tried it.

The kids' meals come with an ice cream treat, so while the girls enjoyed those, I worked on the blog a bit. A older man walked up to me in the parking lot and asked if we were headed home and where we'd been. He told me that they were from Florida and had just finished a vacation that took them to California. We were both on our way home in opposite directions and just happened to stop here for lunch. What a small world.

Once we left DQ, an alert came in on my phone's weather app:

 

Yes, that does say 80mph gusts and 2 inch hail. Luckily I was just at the southern tip of that wild weather and didn't see any hail, but the wind was still enough to make me feel like I was driving one of those kid's pull-toys with the uneven wheels that bobbles back and forth as it goes forward. We drove along in the bad weather for a long time but I got to enjoy some lightning even earlier than I had hoped. Based on all the road trips we did as kids, I knew New Mexico was the place for lightning and I was counting on NM to deliver some big sparks for me. So, I was even more excited to encounter it earlier, in western Texas. It came just in time, too. I was getting pretty tired from fighting the winds and the closest Starbucks was 3 1/2 hours away, so the lightning gave me something to do and watch for. We also turned on another audiobook, this one being a random grab from the library. The story was called The Whizz-Pop Chocolate Shop, and it was an excellent story that I would highly recommend to any kids out there. And it was really, really long.

 

We gained another hour while driving today, heading back into Mountain Time, so I treated myself to a sit-down dinner to relax for a bit before we finished the drive. We stopped near El Paso, where Hwy 10 goes so close to Mexico that you can see it on the other side.In fact, if you zoom in on the map, you can see that only 500 feet separate the highway from the Rio Grande in some spots. It's so close, in fact, that everybody on Hwy 10 has to go through a border patrol checkpoint when the highway curves back away from the border, even if they never left the country.

 

Right where the highway is nearest to the border, there is a shopping mall, and this is where we stopped for dinner. We marveled at the huge number of Mexican license plates in the parking lot and thought about how odd it seemed to 'head over to America' for dinner or to catch a movie for the evening.

 

The sun was setting as we neared the edge of Texas, and even though we still had a ways to go, I stopped to take some photos because I'm a sucker for a sunset in every state.

 

 

I also noticed (in my boredom) that Texas hadn't taken the time to line up their exits with their mile markers. They were close, but didn't quite match up. This wasn't really a big deal, though, until I reached the border and noticed that Exit 2 was at Mile Marker 3, and then a little while later at Mile Marker 2, they had already run out of exit numbers, so it was Exit 0. Oops.

 

We made it to our hotel in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and the first thing I realized when I went to unpack the car was that my pillow was missing. What is with me this trip?!? I must have left it at the hotel back in Kerrville. Guess I'd have to do without for the next couple of nights.

Day 29 - Louisiana to San Antonio, Texas

Miles driven today: about 415

One thing I didn't mention yesterday is that the people of Louisiana love their New Orleans Saints. It's the only football team in Louisiana, and a surprising percentage of cars, buildings and signs display the logo of these Superbowl champs. They even have Saints license plates available here. So, I guess it wasn't really a big surprise to wake up to breakfast in our western Louisiana hotel room and see this.

 

On the road today, the rain can't make up its mind. Like a tropical rainstorm, it's pouring one minute and then sprinkles to a stop. It reminds me a bit of when you rub your hands, clap them, pat your thighs and then stomp your feet to sound like a growing rainstorm. Have you ever done that? Whoever thought of that must have lived out here somewhere.

 

Not surprisingly, it's not difficult to find a Christian music station out here either. We even heard Christian music playing in the post office when we went to drop off some bills today. That one surprised me a bit. Someone would have had a royal fit back in Caifornia, I'm sure. Out here in eastern Texas they also have what they call no-cash tollways, which look like they might be paid carpool lanes. They run parallel to the freeway but have big signs saying you can't use them unless you have an EZ-tag. Sounds like the kind of place I would end up accidentally and get yelled at.

 

We've struck out on the sampling local food for a while now, eating instead at a favorite restaurant from home in Louisiana that turned out to be quite gross, and then skipping Louisiana food entirely because nobody like cajun or spicy foods (why, oh why didn't I think of getting some beignets??). I was convinced we were going to eat some 'Texas food' no matter what, so we stopped for lunch at a Texas Roadhouse to see what they had. (Please, if you're from Texas, don't attack me for thinking this is the best food Texas has to offer. I'm sure it isn't, but without any BBQ lovers in the car, we weren't set to be good judges of it anyway.)

 

We tried some fried pickles, which were ok at the first crunch but the sourness was a bit much after you chewed them for a while. They were much better with ranch, but I still only ate a few. K was the only one that would try them, and even then it was only because I gave her $1 to do it. She was also the only one who got something Texas-ish, with her bbq ribs. C and A got their chicken strips and mac-n-cheese staples, so they were no help. I had to pick up the slack and get a steak and shrimp dinner. When they found out it was our first time at a Texas Roadhouse restaurant, the manager brought us samples of the side dishes to try. The corn was fantastic, as was the mashed potatoes, and the steak fries were pretty tasty, too!

 

 

 

Even though it was really hot, the girls and I walked around outside for a little while looking for lizards. We didn't find any lizards, but they did find this cute little guy. He had shimmering gold metallic eyelids and he was quite sproingy, bouncing the moment you put him down on the ground.

 

 

Back in the car, we drove for a little while before eating some dessert we had bought the day before. Not a good idea. K had picked out this cool candy that was Reese's Peanut Butter Cups (one of her favorites) topped with other things. One had a chocolate chip cookie on top, one had M&M's, and one had an Oreo (though they didn't use the brand names). It looked tasty on the package, but after a day in the car in the hot Texas sun, it didn't look so pretty on the inside. K was a good sport though, and ate them with a spoon.

 

 Before

 After

Cause

 

We began to look for a place to spend the night tonight and realized we weren't going to be passing through more than one state today. Why is Texas so darn big? It was nearly 880 miles across on Hwy 10, and that meant that we'd be here for a least a couple of days even though we'd spent the night just outside the Texas border last night. My attitude on this trip back across the country is completely different than the first time. Even though we moved just as quickly going east, we had all the time in the world and we were fresh and rested and ready for adventure. Now I just feel like I need to hurry up and get home, and although we still have time to see and do things along the way, our deadline date is looming in my mind and stressing me out a bit.

 

Somewhere between Houston and San Antiono I realized that all around me looked just like the landscape back home. Even though most of the area west of San Antonio looks just like New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern Calilfornia, for some reason this little stretch reminded me so much of the hills and valleys, and trees and shrubs back home. In this area, Texas also has a frontage road that runs right alongside the freeway. There aren't many exits so you often find yourself driving on the frontage road for a while before you can turn or get back onto the freeway again. The tiny little lanes going back to the freeway from the frontage lane are quite narrow and nearly impossible to see, so I missed them now and again, even though I was trying to watch for them. There's also quite a few ghost towns along the frontage road, which I think are pretty cool with their abandoned, windowless buildings. Their facades definitely evoke some sort of Wild West fantasies when you pass by them.

 

We entered San Antonio in the later evening, but I was glad we had arrived before the sun set. I wanted to see the Alamo and Mission San Jose before it got too dark. I already knew they were closed for the day, but I still wanted to be able to see them. Sadly, Mission San Jose had big fences up and I couldn't really see anything from outside of them. We did get to hear the bells toll for 8:30pm, though.

 

 

From this mission, it was about a 15-20 minute drive to the Alamo. I had read all of the online reviews that said the Alamo was such a disappointment and that it was right in the middle of downtown, so I wasn't expecting too much. But I still had to go and at least say I'd seen it, and be sure for myself that it didn't have a basement down there. (that was for Jaimee - if you haven't seen Pee Wee's Big Adventure, then nevermind). While I can't be sure if it did have a basement or not because the gates were closed here too (maybe we'll never know!), I did snap a photo and then went across the street to the gift shop to buy the pin and magnet to remember that we had been here. It wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting from the reviews. It was actually pretty neat.

 

 

 

By the way, in case you're like me and don't know anything about the Alamo other than that you're supposed to remember it, I read a little bit about it before we got there so I could tell the kids what the big deal was about it, since it is supposedly the #1 tourist attraction in Texas. Here's the extremely abbreviated version: the Texas settlers were living in Mexico-controlled land and didn't seem to have a big problem with that until the leader of Mexico at the time took on a more dictatorial stance that the settlers didn't like. They rebelled against the Mexican leadership and started to break away. The Mexican leaders weren't a fan of the dissension so they sent troops to take back control of the area (including the missions, which had been turned into forts). The Mexican troops obliterated the Texan rebels at the Alamo, killing all of them (except a couple who were sent to other towns as warnings). Even though most Texans had been uninterested in joining the rebels to fight against Mexico before that, the slaughter at the Alamo was just what they needed to convince them to join the rebel army in droves - eventually gaining enough strength to ultimately defeat the Mexican army. So, even though the Alamo was a major defeat for the Texans, it was a memorable turning point because the desire for revenge ultimately led to Texan freedom. "Remember the Alamo" was shouted by the Texas army leader when they attacked the Mexican army at a later date (as in 'remember what you did to us at the Alamo'). And there's your history lesson for the day. ;)

 

All around the area of The Alamo, horse-drawn carriages were giving rides up and down the streets. This one was particularly cute because he was wearing a little derby hat and pulling a carriage that had LED lights in the shape of Cinderella's pumpkin-carriage.

 

 

We also saw this bird on the way back to our car although we don't know what kind he was. Do you? We had seen the same kind near the USS Alabama in Mobile but couldn't get a good photo then.

 

 

 

 

Our hotel was just a little ways from San Antonio, in a town called Kerrville, Texas. Tomorrow we would cross the sprawling emptiness between San Antonio and El Paso.