A Road Trip to Remember: #AVMTour Recap Part Six

Previously on the Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Tour… The girls and I saw the world’s largest animals–blue whales, off the coast of San Franciso–and the world’s largest vegetables–redwoods, the tallest trees, and sequoias, the most massive trees. To complete the Tour, we set off for the Grand Canyon, the world’s largest, well, absence of minerals.

Of all our adventures out West, it was the drive to Arizona that worried me the most before we left. Google Maps told me that it was more than nine hours from our hotel near Sequoia National Park to the town of Williams, Arizona, just south of the Grand Canyon. Could the girls and I handle a nine-hour car ride… without a DVD player? We’ve driven eight hours to Grandma’s house a few times, but we always had a DVD player in the car to help pass the time.

Should I try to break up the journey over two days even if that meant less time at the Grand Canyon? After much time with Google Maps and Roadside America, I decided to go for it. We would get up early that Thursday morning, drive hard all day, take a few pit stops along the way, and arrive in Williams that night. That would give us two full days in Arizona, enough time to visit Bearizona (the best-named wildlife park ever) and see lots of the Grand Canyon.

I found the perfect hotel for us in Williams, booked a room, and then realized that this particular hotel would make my drive-all-day plan a bit harder: Check-in at the hotel closed at 9pm. (The hotel is a small one, run by a husband and wife, so they don’t staff their front desk overnight.) I did the math, and if we left early enough, made good time on the road, and limited ourselves to only a couple of hours of pit stops along the way, we would have no problem getting there before the front desk closed for the night.

No problem. Because road trips always go as planned, right?

We got a great start that morning. “Great” being relative here, in that we only left an hour later than I had planned. But getting two little girls dressed and fed and packed takes some time. We had arrived in Three Rivers, California, well after dark, so it was nice to see the drive back to the main highway in the daylight. (Sidebar: We checked out of the hotel at the same time as three twentysomething women who left in a Mustang convertible. I felt old.)

We turned south and headed for Bakersfield, California, which I had targeted for our first pit stop, not because we had time to take in the classic Bakersfield sound this early in our road trip, but because Bakersfield was the nearest city with a Radio Shack. I had filled up the memory card on my DSLR and needed a backup!

Having only been on the road for an hour, the girls were doing well. Hannah had already started playing Scribblenauts on her Nintendo DSi, which, I soon learned, she can play for hours. Lily was content to watch Hannah play when she wasn’t gazing out the window, and I was happy to listen to music and watch the farms go by, so we were good to go.

The first fun pit stop of the trip came about an hour later in the small town of Tehachapi, California. Thanks to Roadside America, I learned that a local artist had carved a variety of funny faces in trees throughout the city park. I didn’t tell the girls why were were stopping, I just pulled off the highway and followed GPS Kate’s instructions to the city park. I was hoping the girls would spot some of the carved trees from the road, but no luck, so I told them what we were looking for and had them search the park. Once they spotted their first carved tree, they ran all over the park, looking for more, laughing the whole time.

The park was beautiful, the weather was great (hooray for low humidity!), and the girls loved running around looking for funny trees and playing on the playground. They even made a new friend with a little boy (maybe three or four years old) who joined in our game of “shark.” (It’s played just like tag, but instead of being “it,” you’re the shark and get to make fun shark noises.) It was with some reluctance that I told the girls it was time to go!

The town of Tehachapi is located at one end of Tehachapi Pass, which connects the San Joaquin Valley (where we started the morning) to the Mojave Desert (where we were to spent most of the day driving) across the south end of the Sierra Nevadas. It’s apparently very wind along the Tehachapi Pass, because it’s the location of the second largest wind farm in California. I had seen a few really great photos of the wind farm online the night before, so I was determined to get a shot myself. I found a pull-off that was the perfect place to photograph the wind farm, but I spotted it only after I passed it. So I drove to the next exit, turned around, then drove back to Tehachapi to get back on the highway and reach that pull-off. I was pretty happy with the shots I got (and Lily had fun taking pictures with her little kids camera), but I lost at least twenty minutes of drive time thanks to the backtracking.

Losing that time made me go through the math again to see how we were doing with regard to our 9pm goal. Given the amount of driving GPS Kate said we had left, we still had maybe three hours of pit stop time to play with. With an hour for lunch, a couple of fun pit stops, and one or two gas stops, we were doing fine.

Then it occurred to me that Williams, Arizona, might be in a different time zone.

That was a little scary.

A search for “Williams Arizona time zone” confirmed my fears: Williams was in the Mountain time zone, not the Pacific time zone.

I had just lost an entire hour.

I didn’t panic. We could still make it to our hotel by 9pm local time. But it meant that it would be tight. Sorry, singing road in Lancaster, California, no time for you! (Grooves on the road play the William Tell Overture when you drive over them at 55mph.) Ditto, Giganticus Headicus, the 14-foot-tall Easter-Island-style statue Walapai, Arizona. Both roadside attractions were at least 15 minutes off our route. No time for detours now! We did get to see the airplane graveyard in Mojave, California, from afar, but it’s closed to the public, so that’s the best we were probably going to get, anyway.

With the girls still entranced by Scribblenauts (and me occasionally instructing them to look out the window at least occasionally to see the very different landscape), we headed on to Barstow, California, for lunch. It would be a late lunch, but we had healthy snacks in the car (no more upset stomachs, please!) and it would be worth the wait. Roadside America had informed me that there’s a McDonald’s in Barstow that’s built inside a series of old train cars.

When we arrived, Hannah thought it was the best McDonald’s ever, trumping the McDonald’s with giant hamburgers and french fries decorating its facade that we had seen in San Francisco earlier in the week. Lily wasn’t quite as impressed, but she had fun sitting inside a retrofitted train car while she snacked on her Happy Meal.

The clock was ticking, however, so we got back on the road and headed out. I probably rushed the girls a little here. I certainly felt rushed. GPS Kate told me we had another 315 miles on I-40 ahead of us, and I knew we would need a couple of pitstops for gas and bathrooms along the way. I was beginning to get worried that we might not make our 9pm/8pm deadline.

I started to feel better once we got on the road, however. The drive from Barstow to Needles, California, went by quickly. I was loving the landscape, so different from Middle Tennessee. (Sorry, no pictures! I had to drive!) And the girls started listening to the audiobook I had downloaded, The Secret Zoo, which was not as well-written as I had hoped, but had enough animals in it to keep the girls entertained. (I had hoped to listen to the first Harry Potter book during the drive, but J. K. Rowling has priced that out of my audiobook price range!)

After two hours driving across the desert, I was glad to the green valley of Needles, California, which lies along the Colorado River–and the California-Arizona border. As pretty as the Mojave Desert is, I was grateful for a little more civilization. I thought about stopping in Needles to let the girls go to the bathroom, but neither of them had asked so I rolled through town. The next town was Kingman, Arizona, about an hour away. And I really do mean “next.” There’s nothing but desert between Needles and Kingman.

Naturally, about ten minutes outside of Needles, Hannah said she really needed to go to the bathroom.

That wouldn’t have been a problem, except that it was during our drive through Needles that I started looking at the temperature gauge on our rental car. The car had a fancy digital readout which gave the exact temperature of the engine’s cooling system. It read 186 degrees, which seemed hot to me, but what did I know? When I exited the interstate to find a bathroom for Hannah, however, the temperature climbed to 205 degrees. Again, I don’t know anything about cars, but I do know that water boils at 212 degrees. I figured 205 was trouble. I had visions of us pulled over by the side of the road with steam coming from our car, waiting for help in the middle of the desert in 110 degree heat.

In spite of all my worries about not making it to the hotel in time that night, I decided to head back to Needles to get help. We didn’t have any time to spare, but losing our hotel reservation seemed like less of a disaster than getting stranded in the desert. Turning back made sense, but it felt like defeat. All my efforts to finish our nine-hour drive in a day were for nothing.

We soon found a gas station with a garage, and I went in and told the grease-covered man behind the counter about my worries. Bless his heart, he was as kind and generous as a mechanic can be. Very politely, he asked me if my car’s digital dashboard had indicated anything about overheating. I said no, realizing that a car sophisticated enough to tell me the exact temperature of its inner workings would be smart enough to warn me if it was in danger of overheating. He said that I should be fine, that my car probably had a cooling system that would kick in if the engine temperature got too high. But he also gave me the number of a towing service I could use if I broke down.

Actually, the mechanic couldn’t find anything to write with, so he tore the towing service page out of his phonebook. I’m looking at it right now, sitting on top of my stack of AVM Tour memorabilia. I know he probably never used his phonebook–who does these days?–but I accepted his small sacrifice with gratitude. I was even more thankful for the reassurance he provided to someone not used to driving in the desert. He could have been mean to the dad from Tennessee who wandered into his gas station, but he treated me with kindness.

Feeling a bit better about our prospects crossing the desert, I decided to call the hotel in Williams and let them know that we probably wouldn’t make it that night. Remember the day before, when I called the horse stables in Sequoia National Park to tell them we were running late? And how that worked out just great? Lesson learned: Call ahead. The proprietor of the Williams hotel asked me where I was (“Needles, CA”) and said that I would probably be okay. Wheels turning, I asked him what time zone he was in. It turns out that Arizona is in the Mountain time zone…

…but they don’t do Daylight Savings Time.

I had just gained an entire hour.

After I got off the phone, I told the girls that we hadn’t had our family prayer for the day. (My goal for the trip was to have a family prayer every morning before we went off on our adventures.) We prayed right there in the parking lot of a gas station in Needles, California, and thanked God for His provision. He had led us to a friendly mechanic who gave me much-needed information, and He had arranged back in 1967 for Arizona to opt out of Daylight Savings Time. More importantly, He had taken away the worry and stress that was keeping me from enjoying this road trip with my kids.

The rest of the trip went smoothly. We saw the giant golf ball house in Yucca (Good news! It’s for sale!), enjoyed the stunning desert views of western Arizona (again, no pictures–had to drive!), and even had time to stop for dinner in Seligman, inspiration for the town of Radiator Springs in the Pixar movie Cars. The girls absolutely loved Seligman, but not because of its Route 66 connections. In fact, the girls hadn’t heard of Route 66 before this trip, but they had seen Cars, and Seligman, knowing how to keep the tourists happy, has a number of Cars lookalikes all over town.

We had dinner at Delgadillo’s Snow Cap Drive-In there in Seligman, which was as full of Route 66 kitsch as you might imagine. Actually, we got our food to go, because night was falling and we were yet again running short on time. I’m glad we had a little time in Seligman, and I’m glad I got to enjoy its charms with my girls. They took pictures and video of everything, and were just thrilled to see the cars from Cars all over town. What a wonderful end to our epic road trip.

However, it wasn’t quite over yet. As it turned out, we didn’t make it to our hotel by 9pm that night. But we were close, and the wife of the husband-and-wife team who run the hotel waited for us. Our room at the Grand Canyon Hotel in Williams, Arizona, was our reward for a very long and occasionally stressful day on the road. The hotel is the oldest in Arizona, and it might be the most charming, as well. We stayed in the Carriage House Queen, which has a queen bed in one room and two twins beds in another. The girls loved sharing a room, and I appreciated not having two share a bed with Lily for the first time all week! Each room in the hotel is uniquely decorated. Ours was a modern / rustic blend that was perfectly relaxing after a nine-hour road trip.

We checked in, got settled, and even had time to watch a Tinkerbell DVD before before.

And we all slept very happily that night.