Onward to Arizona, Part 3

I believe this is my longest delay ever. I started writing this almost 2 months ago and just decided to finish it up today. Guess nobody expected any different at this point, so let’s get on with it!

When Money and I originally planned the trip down, we decided that we would try to stop in at least a couple cool places to make the trip more entertaining. Of course, that was when we had planned to leave Saturday morning, which was even later revised to late Friday night. Instead, we didn’t leave until Saturday afternoon, which offered much less stopping time. We weren’t exactly on a schedule, but we had to get there by Wednesday, and once we started driving, we just kind of wanted to keep going. Plus, we could maximize the time he had to hang out in Arizona before having to hike the Grand Canyon. So instead of stopping in any specific locations, we just drove as long as we could every day and tried to take pictures of random stuff along the way.

Since we were so far behind and it was already so late in the day, we knew we wouldn’t get too far on Friday and decided that St. Louis would make a great first stop. One of the things we really thought we needed to get a picture of was the St. Louis Arch, which I had never seen it before and Money had actually been inside. Once we got close enough to it, I pulled off the expressway so we could stop and try to get a decent shot of it. This seemed like a good enough idea, except for one tiny little problem; I got off in East St. Louis.

Now, those of you who had never been to East St. Louis may not realize what a big problem this was. There’s this common conception that Detroit is the worst city in America, which I think is a pretty fair thing to say, but they are not without their competition for the title. East St. Louis is a very, very close second. We stopped for all of 10 second to grab some failed shots of the Arch and the city of St. Louis before we decided to get the hell out of there. The problem was, there was no simple way back on to the expressway, so we were left driving blindly around to try and get back on. We had maps and a GPS to go off, but, surprisingly, that didn’t help much. We found some really seedy strip club in the middle of nowhere (where someone yelled something about our lights, more on that later) and drove for a few minutes before we found a better place to turn around. We did manage to get back on the road and grab some shots of the Arch on the way past, which turned out much better.

Money’s Dad was nice enough to give us a ton of AAA maps and information to help us along the trip so we were able to call ahead and reserve some low-priced hotel rooms. This saved us some time looking it all up and saved me a ton of money on hotel rooms. We actually made it about an hour past St. Louis to St. Clair, which was good enough for the first night and managed to find a pretty decent hotel room for under $40 a night. It even had free Wifi Internet and a continental breakfast.

One interesting thing to note was that we were in the Bible Belt at this point. I really didn’t even realize it (even with all the St. cities) until I saw a billboard across the street from our hotel that read “Pornography Destroys”, found an open Bible in our room with some kind of religious-toned note welcoming to the hotel framed and hanging on the wall. Being an Atheist, I was fairly amused with all of this. It was just after midnight and After moving all of my possessions into the truck and trailer and again into a large box truck and running around getting everything sorted out, we were pretty exhausted and both passed out right away.

In the morning we got our breakfast, iced up the cooler and hit the road. We decided we should stop and grab some drinks and food for on the road before we set in for a whole day of driving so we stopped at a Walmart off the expressway. This wasn’t an ordinary Walmart though, it was instead the smallest Walmart ever. It was seriously smaller than some of the CVS or Walgreens stores I’ve been in. We picked up some soda, juice, sunflower seeds, bandaids and Neosporin. Why the medical stuff? Well, during all of the moving I managed to rip the skin around my fingernails up since I wasn’t wearing any gloves and I was in a lot of pain. The ointment and protection really helped out with that, but it was still really hard to use my fingers for much. Sadly, I have no pictures of that, but they didn’t stop hurting for a couple days. Anyway, once we had what we needed, we just kept driving.

Just like the day before, I started the driving and cruised through it all until I was too tired and let Money take over. Our next stop was Amarillo, TX, so we had a lot of hours ahead of us but it really only took us through the rest of Missouri and Oklahoma. Oklahoma had nothing to see, but they did have toll roads in the form of turnpikes. Much like Illinois, their toll roads were some of the worst paved roads I’ve ever driven on. The roads around the major cities weren’t any good either; very poorly paved, huge potholes all over and they didn’t seem to have any idea how to smoothly connect pavement to bridges.

Of course, before we even made it to the toll roads I needed to get gas, but I kept holding out for a place to get lunch as well before the border. I managed to pass up the last gas station before the turnpike since the roads were really poorly marked. The problem was, we really only had small amount of gas left and there was no indication where the next gas station was. We ended up getting off the toll road at the first stop we could (about 20 miles in) and driving some 2 miles away to the gas station at the exit. We were unbelievably close to running out of gas, and while we did make it, it was a really bad introduction to the state.

We gassed up, grabbed some gas station food there and ate in the truck. There was a farmer selling apples across the street so we picked up some Red and Golden Delicious apples and hit the road again. Oklahoma really only had 2 things mentioning, besides the fast that the state is really boring and I don’t ever want to go back. For one, their dirt is red….. I mean REALLY red. It’s like looking at dirt on Mars, which makes their farm land look absolutely alien. In addition to that, they have a ton of wind farms. Really massive wind farms with really massive windmills on them. It’s a pretty cool sign to see mile after mile full of these lazily spinning blades generating power. We even managed to see a few of their parts being trucked around the area.

Texas wasn’t that much more exciting than Oklahoma, but their roads were paved much better and they didn’t charge us to use them. We ran in to some rain the night we left Oklahoma and made it in to Texas. The hotel we found wasn’t anything special, but they again had Internet and a free breakfast and the room was cheap. Again, after a long day of driving, we both passed out pretty quickly. We would have checked out the area a little, but it was raining and pretty ugly outside so we just went to sleep.

In the morning, the sore throat Money had been nursing for the past couple of days was feeling really bad, and since he was going to be hiking the Grand Canyon in less than a week he decided to have it checked out. He found an Urgent Care up the road and had a doctor check him out. He ended up having some kind of infection for which he got some meds. The overall plan for the day was to make it to Flagstaff, AZ and fill the prescription in Santa Fe, NM. The day started out a little rainy and dreary still, but by the time we crossed the border into New Mexico it warmed up, the sky was clear and it turned out to be a beautiful day.

New Mexico was also where I started to get really excited for the move. This was where the terrain started looking like Arizona; flat desert with huge mountains in the distance. We even started seeing cacti. I love this type of landscape and for the first time during the entire trip, it started to sink in that I was finally moving to where I wanted to be.

Sante Fe was a pretty cool little town, buried in the middle of the mountains. It was here that we stopped to fill Money’s prescription and grab some lunch. We decided to eat at a chinese buffet that was listed in the AAA guide book. Of course, where we got there, we discovered that they moved to the other side of town. No matter though, we still made it, just got to see more of Sante Fe that we wanted to. We filled the prescription and headed on, enjoying the terrain the whole way through.

When we made it to Flagstaff, it was 32 degrees outside. Of course, neither one of us really packed anything for such cold weather, thinking we were home free in the south here. When we got to town, we looked up places to get dinner and found the Beaver Street Brewery. I felt like relaxing with a beer so the place sounded perfect. We found a hotel pretty close and planned to make the trip over by foot. I wore a hoodie and my motorcycle jacket since they were both accessible, money just wore a couple of fleeces. We were both pretty cold. It was worth the walk though; both the food and the beer were pretty great. Money got pretty drunk on two beers too, which he still blames on the altitude.

The next day we saw the worst of the mountains on the trip as we descended into the Phoenix area. It wasn’t that bad though, and we were in town by early afternoon. We met up with Michelle, Klye’s girlfriend, at a local Whole Foods to pick up the key to my new place. Klye went and picked it up the previous week since I was unsure when we were getting into town and didn’t want to show up and find out that I couldn’t pick my key up; he was always available. We had some lunch, thanked her for helping out and headed to the new place!

Money and I spent a few hours unpacking everything from the truck. Everything, that is, but the motorcycle. Much like I had to ride it up in to the truck I knew I was going to have to ride it back down. I originally thought I could walk it down backwards, but once I measured up the ramp and the width of my stance, it was clear that it wasn’t going to happen. In order to ride it down the ramp, I needed to turn the thing around inside the back of the truck, and of course, the bike was several inches longer than the truck was wide. I ended up taking the whole rear fender off and it still just BARELY fit!

I will say that the bike looked pretty cool without the back fender on it. If I ever get around to building up a custom bike or even giving this one a facelift, that’s definitely the look I will most likely go with.

The next few days I was running around the area in this giant 16 foot box truck. Running to Walmart to pick up things for the apartment, hitting the thrift store to find a replacement handle for a pot lid (and I found an EXACT match too, which was awesome), grabbing dinner in the tiny lot of Los Dos Molinos (best Mexican in the state), driving way out to Mesa to meet Money’s Aunt and Dad at Oregano’s for the best pizza in the state, we did it all in the bigass Penske truck. The day I was going to return it, some punk kid tagged the side of it with a magic marker, but when I returned it, the guy said it was no problem.

So, I guess that wraps up the story of the trip. I’ve been down here for a little over 3 months now and I am still very happy I moved out here. I’ve met a lot of new people through other people I knew out here and I’m joining some organizations and such to try and meet some more too. Next month I’m going camping and hunting some Javelina with some friends out in Safford and in the coming months I’ll be riding down to Tombstone with some of my other friends. And come March, I’m sure I’ll see some other faces from back home down here for spring training. As a bonus, it’s been below freezing and snowing pretty consistently since the holidays back home, and it’s been absolutely enjoyable down here; sunny and in the 70s and 80s during the day. Needless to say, I’m happy I made it!