XCD Day 4: FNL & Busy OK

I've never watched Friday Night Lights, but Annie swears that we drove through the non-fictional town it was based off.  No, not Odessa, TX.  Panhandle, TX.  One of my closest high school friends now lives there with his wife, his two-year-old, and a baby on the way.  (If you read yesterday's post, you may notice a trend.)  I went to school with only 2 Hispanic families, all of them were close friends, and I just visited them both in the Southwest in consecutive days.  During high school, I had no clue I was 25% Mexican, but it's interesting to think about now.  Apparently I should move to Albuquerque and quickly pop out a toddler and get another one in the oven.

This close friend has two great stories that immediately come to mind:  1) the time that we were hopped up on No-Doz for most of a weekend until I crashed in his car in the driveway of some good friend's clutched furiously to a water dildo, and 2) rolling his drunken ass out of the back of his van and down to the beach at some god-awful hour so that he could continue throwing up, and then leaving him there when it started to rain, convincing myself that I'd be back in an hour or so.  I woke up about 4 hours later and drove down to see if he was alive still.  He was missing.  So I drove to his house where he had apparently ended up.  Some neighbors called the cops thinking that we murdered someone and left the body to float away in Lake Erie.  Turns out that his mother would have been much happier with a drunken mess of a son, as opposed to one brought back by the cops half-dead from being drunk and soaked in rain and left outside.  Not my brightest moment.  (Btw, you still owe me like $70 for all those football tix you ditched on.  And where are my band CDs?)

Day #4

The town of Panhandle, TX, was both comically small and desolate.  There were streamers hanging from store windows celebrating the local high school football team.  It was almost spooky, in a ghost town kind of way.  As far as I can tell, this is the only road aside from the surrounding neighborhood:

Brick road is kind of cool, but that is literally all there is to this town.

When I picture Texas, I picture oil, steer, and San Antonio.  I do not picture cotton agriculture, which is apparently what this region survives on.  Craziness.  It had almost an air of New Mexico to it, but I still felt like some tall, shadowy figure was about to bound around the corner with a giant belt buckle and an even larger cowboy hat.

The rest of that day's drive was uneventful, until we decided to stop.  We typically have an idea in our head where we are going to stop that day.  You have to have some idea in the southwest, or you'll end up driving sleepily in one large span of highway between two 'cities'.  We had decided we would stop in Weatherford, OK.  Not quite to OK City, but close enough.  Plus, I have a good friend from Michigan whose last name is Weatherford.  It seemed like a sign.  Well, Weatherford had one hotel that took dogs, they had only one room left, and it was kind of expensive.  So we pushed on.

But then the next city didn't have anything either.  So we started making phone calls.  Nothing in Bridgeport, Hinton, or Geary.  So we pushed on to El Reno, OK.  As we were driving there, I thought about how I would be able to update my Facebook status with something witty like "Driving for 4 days, still in Reno!".  (There's a Reno, NV, where we started.)  I didn't get the chance to, though, because El Reno was also booked up.  Annie started to freak a little, but I told her that we could just stay in OK City, since I heard it was kind of cool.  I made it up, but it helped a little.

We finally found a place in Yukon, OK.  It is just on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, and we couldn't believe how much further we had traveled than we originally intended.  Just because no rooms were available.  This leads to the biggest question of the whole trip:  why the fuck was Oklahoma so busy?  There's nothing there.  Nothing.  Maybe OK sucks worse than NM.  Fucking Oklahoma.  (Your saving grace is that you have a musical named after you.  Count your blessings.)

And Bdubs (#3 if you're counting) for dinner in Oklahoma City to watch Michigan Basketball,
~RoB

XCD Day 2: Grand Canyon & Twinkly Eyes

We didn't make a ton of progress on the 2nd day, but we had planned not to.  I had never seen the Grand Canyon, and our Boys in Blue were playing in the Sugar Bowl, which would have to be viewed at a Bdubs with one of my favorite humans, Twinkly Eyes.

Day #2 (there's a loop through the Grand Canyon behind the 'B' bubble)

We started the day by driving from Henderson, NV, to Flagstaff, AZ.  We checked into our hotel and left one of our cars there.  We combined into Annie's SUV, and we drove off to the Grand Canyon National Park.  We really liked Flagstaff.  It felt a lot like Lake Tahoe, and that's the quickest way to Annie's heart.  We drove by the Flagstaff Nordic Ski Center, and it made me wish there was more snow so that we could ski there.  We certainly didn't get any skiing in at Tahoe this Winter.

I was expecting to be underwhelmed by the Grand Canyon.  Let's be honest, I'm not the biggest outdoors person.  Plus, anything that is so highly regarded by everyone has to be viewed with some semblance of an unimpressed eye.  However, it was honestly pretty cool.  We were allowed to walk Angel along the rim with us.  People were climbing everywhere, which was kind of surprising.  I thought there would be rails and viewing platforms everywhere.  There weren't many, and Annie was playing protective mom in not letting me play around.

Ok, there were some rails, but they weren't very restrictive.

We also got to go see some Native American ruins.  I almost tripped over them.  They were the lamest thing I've ever traveled to see.  Some stones left in the ground that make the formation of a foundation.  Wow.  So interesting.  Except not at all.  Moving on.

We drove around the south rim until sunset, then we rushed back to the Bdubs in Flagstaff for the Sugar Bowl.  Yes, Bdubs #2 for dinner.  Worth it, just to see Twinkly Eyes.  For those unfamiliar with Twinkly Eyes, picture wholesome perfection in a tall, blond, blue-eyed male.  His name would be Twinkly Eyes.  He had the unfortunate circumstance of standing next to me in band for an entire year, and I think I hit on him daily.  He's too nice to say anything about it.  And he is exactly the same now, 5 years since the last time I saw him.  Oh yeah, Michigan won, too, but it wasn't the most spectacular of football games during that 24-hour span.   It felt pretty damn good to win a BCS game, though!  ("Sparty tears taste like Sugar!")

Bdubs is a primary source of nutrition at this point,
~RoB

Cross Country Drive Day 1: Nevada

Annie and I drove from Tahoe City, CA, to Lexington, KY, convoy-style in two separate cars over the course of 7 days.  We departed her parents' house at about 7:30am on January 2nd, drove around the north half of Lake Tahoe, and headed down through Nevada toward Las Vegas.  I have never been all the way around Lake Tahoe, but the first part of our drive was spectacular.

Day #1

Once we were in Carson City, and the rest of Nevada stretched out in front of us.  We planned the first day to be the longest, since we were well-rested after 2 weeks of celebrating the holidays at snow-less (but Zumba-full) Tahoe.  Before that, we had packed our cars full of stuff in Oakland and sent the rest of it with movers.

Nevada kind of gets a bad rep for being awful to drive across.  Honestly, I've seen worse.  The drive from L.A. to Vegas is awful.  Nothing I've seen yet compares to the god-forsaken drive across South Dakota (which I did as part of my previous cross-country trip from Michigan to California in 2008).  Throughout the whole drive, you have mountains in the distance on both sides, so it makes for an interesting terrain to drive through.  Plus, I got to drive by Yucca Mountain, which holds a special place in the hearts of nuclear engineers throughout the country.  I also went by Area 51.  How many people can say that?

It wasn't perfect, though.  We weren't really on a freeway.  I mean, why would they have a freeway running between the 3 most important cities in NV?!  So, if at any point we were stuck behind someone going 20 mph below the speed limit.  We were stuck behind them for good.  Annie refuses to pass people.  Let's also point out that you have to stop and go 25 mph through the 4-5 random towns along the drive.  Towns filled with nothing but modular homes.  After this trek, I'm forced to wonder what percentage of the population of NV resides in a modular home.

Finally, we finished our drive just past Las Vegas.  I begged Annie to let me go to the Forum Shops at Caesar's Palace.  It holds my favorite chocolate place ever, Max Brenner's, and she didn't let me.  I'm so deprived.  We ate at Bdubs for dinner, since we wanted to catch the last of the BCS Bowl Games.  They didn't have anything good left to cook, but we survived.

That's Day 1 of the XCD,
~RoB