“Road Trip – Week 3”
It was time to head home to McKinney on Monday. Tower 23 (named after the nearest life guard tower) served us very well for overnight accommodation on Sunday – thanks D for organizing such a great room and view. Konos surf bar right next door fixed us up with an amazing breakfast burrito – easily enough for a family – and coffee for the road. We took the southern border route to Flagstaff, Arizona. This gave plenty of opportunity to observe the much touted border wall. The VW Passat did a great job of making the climbs up to 7,000 feet and back down.
We checked into the Flagstaff Marriott Courtyard (looked more like a ski lodge) in the early evening and enjoyed some Grimaldi’s pizza and salad delivered to the hotel.
Tuesday was our long driving day. We had one fun stop just off Interstate 40 and the old Route 66 in Winslow, Arizona. You may have heard the Eagles/Jackson Browne song “Take it Easy”, with the third verse:
“Now I’m a-standin’ on the corner in Winslow, Arizona
With such a fine sight to see
It’s a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford
Slowin’ down to have a look at me”
It turns out that corner is well celebrated with a park, statues, live music and exhibits.
They even have a flat bed Ford parked alongside (no girl inside):
The audio book of “Where the Crawdads Sing” kept us company as we traversed the mountains, mesas, and then wide, flat open spaces to Amarillo. We were most certainly road weary on arrival at the downtown Courtyard – this one is part of the “historic” collection and is a remodeled downtown bank building. It certainly has a lot more character than most. Only in this kind of rural location can you stay in a corner suite with wrap around windows for $102.
With only 5.5 hours of driving left on Wednesday, we were able to enjoy a more leisurely start. The local breakfast taco joint got us set up with breakfast and we were off on the road again. We made it to the house around 6pm to the beeping sound of a smoke detector. Diana located it in my office – the worst possible location as it’s 20 feet up and set back from the wall. Thankfully she’s a lot more stable and agile at the top of the ladder than I am and soon had the battery replaced. I think I read somewhere recently about 10 year life smoke detector batteries – but we didn’t have any of those on hand and would have gone nuts from the beeping before they arrived.
After that excitement, the only chores left were to put water in the pool and replace a broken sprinkler head – all the full joys of home ownership and leaving town for a while.
We had been looking forward to having Wash and Zoe, and their owners Brad and Jocelyn, come and visit us for a while. They arrived on Friday evening and stayed with us overnight, leaving late Saturday afternoon.
You can see Wash and Zoe, named after characters in some sci-fi series, are a couple of gorgeous Irish Wolfhounds. After checking out every room on arrival, they settled right in for the stay. We took them for a walk up to Zin Zen after dinner and can see how much work it is to own such beasts – a constant stream of folks asking what kind of dogs they were. Here’s a couple of shots to give perspective on just how large they are:
Thankfully they are a couple of very sweet and gentle giants. It was so nice to have company for the first time in 4 months. And I think I have clearance to order one up.
Will was busy taking pictures of his car and then “photo sphere dream weaving them” with some fancy AI software to make these great images. Apparently he takes 5 to 10 individual pictures and weaves them together to create these. Quite the artist.
My book on the road trip was “All Adults Here” by Emma Straub. This is a very enjoyable ensemble family drama, set in small town Connecticut. Three generations of Stricks play out their lives in quite different fashions, and it’s all very enjoyable and engaging.
“The older Astrid got, the more she understood that she and her parents and she and her children were as close as people could be, that generations slipped away quickly, and that the twenty-five years in between her and her mother and the thirtyish years in between her and her children were absolutely nothing, that there were still people who had lived through the Holocaust, which had happened less than a decade before she was born, but which her children had read about in their history textbooks. It happened before you could blink. Her children had been children, and now they were adults; they were all adults here, now.”
Some music that I enjoyed on the trip. First a classic Rory Gallagher blues boogie:
Then something completely different from the inimitable Muscle Shoals musicians:
And finally some classic Texas driving music:
Please remain patient and kind with everyone!