[BLOG] The American Road Trip: Grand Canyon Edition
As with most young men they feel the need for a right of passage that is the road trip across America’s great south west, but few have the courage to make the trip with their mother. One problem with the start of this trip was the fact it was planned; nay to the idea of throwing caution to the wind and journeying out into the world with a dream in your heart and $5 in your pocket.
The Plan:
The itinerary for this leg of the trip is to leave Plano, TX ASAP after work on Friday, hopefully 3:00-3:30 P.M. in an attempt to beat some of the traffic that floods out of the area starting at 4 o’clock on Fridays. From there, the expedition would head West by Northwest out to Amarillo and beyond on Highway 287…..for 800 miles. The next stop of the journey is planned to land us in Holbrook, AZ completely skipping over New Mexico. Holbrook is the launching point to visit the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest, and a possible short lay over before the final leg to Cameron, AZ and the Grand Canyon.
The Journey:
Leaving Plano, TX in the rain was nothing new for that week because of the almost constant sprinklings and down pours of frigid rain; however, this was an ominous overtone that would be the warning for the rest of the day. As we were driving out of the metropolitan area there was very little traffic to deal with and luckily no construction present any where on our travel roads. With any road trip tuneage is one of the key mixes that can make or break moods; our first choice was Chet Atkins Guitar Legend the RCA Years….big mistake. The real oldies cowboy melodies and faint audio leveling felt like it should have been something to enjoy while meandering down route 66 in a mint green Thunderbird and white walls.
His slow melodies and what seemed classically styled guitar picking carried us through what might be considered the start of the spring break pilgrimage to our first dinning experience of the trip, El Chico in Wichita Falls, TX. The experience here will set one of the games for the rest of the trip, find some freaking Brisket Tacos. Those who are not from Texas might not understand this but there is no way to operate any kind of eating establishment that says they can conjure their patrons a dish of Brisket anything and then simply allow themselves to let their inventory of said food item diminish to zero.
Leaving Wichita Falls with a mission to find some Brisket Tacos before the end of this excursion, we decide that if someone is going to listen to the first CD of Chet Atkins Guitar Legend it is required to listen to the second CD, which was slightly better but still no peach. A quick interjection, the drivers were switched so that I am in charge and driving this American expedition into the great unknown. This is also the leg where the trip starts to take a slightly more interesting turn of events and a little hazardous as well. Around 8:00 P.M., the sun had already set, the weather started to get a little worse with the rain coming down a little harder and nearly straight into the windshield. The rain was just a precursor because as the temperature dropped, what dropped from the sky did as well; it changed from water to freezing rain into snow. Originally I am from Ohio and have seen winters with large amounts of snow on the ground and skied in white out condition but I left before I was old enough to drive. Therefore, the first driving experience I would have with snow conditions would be at night on a highway in the middle of the Texas Pan Handle, +15 to driving skill DING. Driving through snow that appears to be coming straight into your windshield has a strange mesmerizing effect because of the light reflected by the precipitation and the strange loss of speed reference, it is a strange feeling when the speed indicator reads 70 MPH and it seems the vehicle is rolling along at 20 miles an hour. For the next 3 hours, roughly, I followed a man with a plan in a van. His plan seemed simple drive fast enough to clear the storm in a timely fashion and not run off the road. The plan was holding fast and seemed ready to bear fruit at any minute when the snowy downfall increased, the left lane was full of slush and snow, and everyone’s speed one the highway was stuck between 30 and 40 MPH.
There was a point where I passed a sign that read Amarillo 49 miles and it took an hour and a half to reach the sign that said “Welcome to Amarilloâ€. Side note: Geist is not something to listen to when heavy concentration is required for hours due to all of the odd sounds that are throughout their songs. Once Amarillo was reached we found a hotel, the Drury Inn, which had one room left on the sixth floor, the smoking floor. The hotel was fairly nice by appearance and in most part actually was except for the walls having no sound proofing as well as the hallways being made so every sound was amplified and echoed down their length. In the morning we awoke to find more than a sprinkling of the snow I had driven through still on the ground and everything around it. Looking out from the 6th floor I really understand the quote Johnny Depp used in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: It was like the wave that was the great American Dream crashed upon the rocks of the desert here in Las Vegas and the waste was the only thing left beyond it. There was truly nothing to see beyond the limits of the town. The only way to tell humans were still here was by the sparsely populated highway and the power lines stretching off into infinity.
A quick and pleasing breakfast was had, though not filling, before attempting to leave when my mother realized she left all of her paperwork in the room and we had to turn around to retrieve it. Just outside of town there was a copy of the motif used in Car Stonehenge, half a dozen spray painted junk cars front end first half way buried in the ground. Then just past this strange apparition on the landscape there was a cattle feed lot sitting on the side of the highway with lots stretching almost a quarter of a mile down the road and hundreds of yards back where they ended some place out of view behind the roll of the hill. This would be the last “hill†we would see before the flat prairie land giving way to the broken land of mesas and breathtaking landscape views.
Pretty much everything was the same from then on. There was a partial day stop to see some ancient trees that were transferred into stone and have slowly been pushed back up to the surface of the desert, which was once a massive flood plane. Also in this area was a glimpse of a portion of the Painted Desert, part of the region with colorful sedimentary layers that have been exposed by erosion. A quick jaunt further down the line placed us on the rim of a crater that is claimed to be 1 mile wide but claims of its circumference were just over 3 miles, to me means 3.0something miles and does not place the diameter of the crater at or over 1 mile.
The final and most notable stop before the Grand Canyon was in Winslow, AZ at La Posada. Some might know of the Eagles song that has a line telling about standing on a corner in Winslow Arizona waiting for a girl in the back of a flatbed truck, I stood on that corner and saw no girl a coming. The restaurant though was truly amazing because of the art strewn around the extravagant building, rail line that passes just past the fence, and the array of different people that stayed there over the years. Just to name a few: Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Prince Akihita of Japan, The Duke, and Albert Einstein. Interesting enough there was a listing along with the photos of the famous persons that had stayed there and Einstein was number 42.
The Grand Canyon in my mind is nothing more than a big hole in the earth and once you spend some time looking at it from the view points that the national park has provided its patrons as they take their driving tour of the area it appears that way. The road into part of the Grand Canyon park shows you one area of the Canyon from several different positions, so you are repeatedly viewing the same thing over and over only from subtle variances in viewpoint. Besides the views around the rim of the Canyon we took the Kaibab trail partially down to the floor of the canyon which was extremely enlightening because it gave a greater perspective on the size and what the Grand Canyon has to offer its visitors. Once the masses were left behind and only the occasional hiker quietly trickled past you were left with never ending views and the quiet Zen that can only be found in the middle of the wilderness where you can truly be alone with yourself and Mother Nature. The trail itself is a long set of switch backs and almost never ending stairs. The farther that you progress down it the more you realize you are alone because the regular day hikers call it quits right after they get started down the trail. A three mile trek down this trail will get you roughly a 4th of the way to the bottom. The full trek is something that I desire to cover and possibly more, there were several groups that we passed that were headed out for several days where just the trek down to the river and bottom levels was just the beginning. Before I left though I checked off one requirement of this road, purchase a snow globe of the canyon.
The Plan:
The itinerary for this leg of the trip is to leave Plano, TX ASAP after work on Friday, hopefully 3:00-3:30 P.M. in an attempt to beat some of the traffic that floods out of the area starting at 4 o’clock on Fridays. From there, the expedition would head West by Northwest out to Amarillo and beyond on Highway 287…..for 800 miles. The next stop of the journey is planned to land us in Holbrook, AZ completely skipping over New Mexico. Holbrook is the launching point to visit the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest, and a possible short lay over before the final leg to Cameron, AZ and the Grand Canyon.
The Journey:
Leaving Plano, TX in the rain was nothing new for that week because of the almost constant sprinklings and down pours of frigid rain; however, this was an ominous overtone that would be the warning for the rest of the day. As we were driving out of the metropolitan area there was very little traffic to deal with and luckily no construction present any where on our travel roads. With any road trip tuneage is one of the key mixes that can make or break moods; our first choice was Chet Atkins Guitar Legend the RCA Years….big mistake. The real oldies cowboy melodies and faint audio leveling felt like it should have been something to enjoy while meandering down route 66 in a mint green Thunderbird and white walls.
His slow melodies and what seemed classically styled guitar picking carried us through what might be considered the start of the spring break pilgrimage to our first dinning experience of the trip, El Chico in Wichita Falls, TX. The experience here will set one of the games for the rest of the trip, find some freaking Brisket Tacos. Those who are not from Texas might not understand this but there is no way to operate any kind of eating establishment that says they can conjure their patrons a dish of Brisket anything and then simply allow themselves to let their inventory of said food item diminish to zero.
Leaving Wichita Falls with a mission to find some Brisket Tacos before the end of this excursion, we decide that if someone is going to listen to the first CD of Chet Atkins Guitar Legend it is required to listen to the second CD, which was slightly better but still no peach. A quick interjection, the drivers were switched so that I am in charge and driving this American expedition into the great unknown. This is also the leg where the trip starts to take a slightly more interesting turn of events and a little hazardous as well. Around 8:00 P.M., the sun had already set, the weather started to get a little worse with the rain coming down a little harder and nearly straight into the windshield. The rain was just a precursor because as the temperature dropped, what dropped from the sky did as well; it changed from water to freezing rain into snow. Originally I am from Ohio and have seen winters with large amounts of snow on the ground and skied in white out condition but I left before I was old enough to drive. Therefore, the first driving experience I would have with snow conditions would be at night on a highway in the middle of the Texas Pan Handle, +15 to driving skill DING. Driving through snow that appears to be coming straight into your windshield has a strange mesmerizing effect because of the light reflected by the precipitation and the strange loss of speed reference, it is a strange feeling when the speed indicator reads 70 MPH and it seems the vehicle is rolling along at 20 miles an hour. For the next 3 hours, roughly, I followed a man with a plan in a van. His plan seemed simple drive fast enough to clear the storm in a timely fashion and not run off the road. The plan was holding fast and seemed ready to bear fruit at any minute when the snowy downfall increased, the left lane was full of slush and snow, and everyone’s speed one the highway was stuck between 30 and 40 MPH.
There was a point where I passed a sign that read Amarillo 49 miles and it took an hour and a half to reach the sign that said “Welcome to Amarilloâ€. Side note: Geist is not something to listen to when heavy concentration is required for hours due to all of the odd sounds that are throughout their songs. Once Amarillo was reached we found a hotel, the Drury Inn, which had one room left on the sixth floor, the smoking floor. The hotel was fairly nice by appearance and in most part actually was except for the walls having no sound proofing as well as the hallways being made so every sound was amplified and echoed down their length. In the morning we awoke to find more than a sprinkling of the snow I had driven through still on the ground and everything around it. Looking out from the 6th floor I really understand the quote Johnny Depp used in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: It was like the wave that was the great American Dream crashed upon the rocks of the desert here in Las Vegas and the waste was the only thing left beyond it. There was truly nothing to see beyond the limits of the town. The only way to tell humans were still here was by the sparsely populated highway and the power lines stretching off into infinity.
A quick and pleasing breakfast was had, though not filling, before attempting to leave when my mother realized she left all of her paperwork in the room and we had to turn around to retrieve it. Just outside of town there was a copy of the motif used in Car Stonehenge, half a dozen spray painted junk cars front end first half way buried in the ground. Then just past this strange apparition on the landscape there was a cattle feed lot sitting on the side of the highway with lots stretching almost a quarter of a mile down the road and hundreds of yards back where they ended some place out of view behind the roll of the hill. This would be the last “hill†we would see before the flat prairie land giving way to the broken land of mesas and breathtaking landscape views.
Pretty much everything was the same from then on. There was a partial day stop to see some ancient trees that were transferred into stone and have slowly been pushed back up to the surface of the desert, which was once a massive flood plane. Also in this area was a glimpse of a portion of the Painted Desert, part of the region with colorful sedimentary layers that have been exposed by erosion. A quick jaunt further down the line placed us on the rim of a crater that is claimed to be 1 mile wide but claims of its circumference were just over 3 miles, to me means 3.0something miles and does not place the diameter of the crater at or over 1 mile.
The final and most notable stop before the Grand Canyon was in Winslow, AZ at La Posada. Some might know of the Eagles song that has a line telling about standing on a corner in Winslow Arizona waiting for a girl in the back of a flatbed truck, I stood on that corner and saw no girl a coming. The restaurant though was truly amazing because of the art strewn around the extravagant building, rail line that passes just past the fence, and the array of different people that stayed there over the years. Just to name a few: Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Prince Akihita of Japan, The Duke, and Albert Einstein. Interesting enough there was a listing along with the photos of the famous persons that had stayed there and Einstein was number 42.
The Grand Canyon in my mind is nothing more than a big hole in the earth and once you spend some time looking at it from the view points that the national park has provided its patrons as they take their driving tour of the area it appears that way. The road into part of the Grand Canyon park shows you one area of the Canyon from several different positions, so you are repeatedly viewing the same thing over and over only from subtle variances in viewpoint. Besides the views around the rim of the Canyon we took the Kaibab trail partially down to the floor of the canyon which was extremely enlightening because it gave a greater perspective on the size and what the Grand Canyon has to offer its visitors. Once the masses were left behind and only the occasional hiker quietly trickled past you were left with never ending views and the quiet Zen that can only be found in the middle of the wilderness where you can truly be alone with yourself and Mother Nature. The trail itself is a long set of switch backs and almost never ending stairs. The farther that you progress down it the more you realize you are alone because the regular day hikers call it quits right after they get started down the trail. A three mile trek down this trail will get you roughly a 4th of the way to the bottom. The full trek is something that I desire to cover and possibly more, there were several groups that we passed that were headed out for several days where just the trek down to the river and bottom levels was just the beginning. Before I left though I checked off one requirement of this road, purchase a snow globe of the canyon.
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