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.
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