Day 9 end: The Journey so Far

So, now that we've arrived in Vegas I can finally sit down and type up our last few days!

Alright, so I guess we're going back to.. day 7?  The morning we left Tulsa, OK and went allllllll the way to Albuquerque, NM.  That was quite the day.





Oklahoma wasn't too exciting really, but nice easy driving.  Though once we hit the point that the soil started turning red it was very exciting for us!  The tolls roads there were unusual for us, they were the only tolls we've hit so far (or are going to hit I think).  Cades had never even driven through a toll booth before ever!  One of the booths was broken so we had to toss in our money and then just drive through and set off the alarm, so fingers crossed we don't get a ticket in the mail for that one, but everyone else was driving through too so it should be okay.

Red soil!  OMG!

We "quickly" made it into the panhandle of Texas... it took about 5 hours, but for the scope of that day it wasn't too bad.  Texas is BEAUTIFUL!  While I certainly wasn't expecting it to be -ugly-, I was surprised by just how beautiful the scenery is.  The first rest stop in the state gave us an amazing view.... and it was also -very- Texas.  Huge building with the big 'Lone Star', grills shaped like Texas, signs all over the place about how awesome Texas is, haha.

Texas, wow...

At the Texas Welcome Center

The drive through Texas was lovely, and we stopped for food and encountered an interesting feature, Farm to Market roads.  Long stretches of totally flat road, speed limit 75, but stop signs about every 2 miles.  They were unique and it kind of felt like being in a movie to be driving up to a stop sign where you could see any cars coming for miles in all directions.  That was at roughly our halfway mark of the day.

After exiting Texas we made to into New Mexico!

At the New Mexico Welcome Center

New Mexico was... interesting.  While it certainly wasn't as bad as Missouri, it was depressing and a little scary.  We would see signs for 20 miles advertising a pull-off with gas, food, and things to see... only for it to have clearly been abandoned for at least 20 years once we came up to it.  The whole place had an air of desperation that made you feel both uncomfortably like you're flouting your wealth just by driving through... and also a little fearful for your safety.

It's hard to even give a good example, just things like driving past an exit with the only thing for miles being a boarded up old gas station, or nothing but a tiny town made of trailers and falling apart shacks with no businesses to be seen in any direction.  Don't get me wrong, the scenery is GORGEOUS and we constantly found ourselves gasping at the sights, it just doesn't really feel very welcoming to stopping and hanging around.

In the end though, with the desert darkness pressing hard against us, we found Albuquerque.  It pretty much just jumps out of the darkness at you, you finally hit a section of highway with streetlights and then BAM, you're in urban sprawl!  Thankfully our stop that night was easy enough to find in the dark and we had a GREAT relaxing night after the 13 hours of travel time it took to get there.

So on day 8 New Mexico got even more beautiful, west of Albuquerque you start getting less long flat stretches and more mesa's and other interesting sights.

And then of course you pass on through into Arizona!

At the Arizona Welcome Center

The view from said Welcome Center

Arizona was also weirdly abandoned, for example there was a spot called Fort Courage, that we saw billboards for starting probably 40-50 miles before its exit.  TONS of billboards!  "Cold drinks", "Local Indian made crafts", "Ice Cream", "Old West photo spots" etc, etc for MILES AND MILES.  When we finally came over the hill just before it, with the billboards shouting 'THIS EXIT', the roof on one building was caved in and the whole place was just dead.

Along the way we hit another milestone on the trip!



So while Arizona was also weirdly abandoned, one of the most interesting things we encountered was woodlands!  We were really not expecting to hit thick pine forest in Arizona.  Otherwise though the drive up to the Grand Canyon was pretty uneventful, though it did start raining/lightly snowing as we arrived.  We got a room at the Bright Angel Lodge right on the south rim and proceeded to not be able to see hardly any of the canyon through the low cloud cover, haha.  Here's the two best pictures we got:

So we spent the night at the pretty cool historic Bright Angel Lodge and then headed out the next morning.

The lobby fireplace at the Bright Angel Lodge

Driving down out of the canyon was an interesting experience that can only best be described in a series of videos we took:

Cades here! Taking over this half of the post because of how long its taking to write! haha!

So after the rather scary drive out of the Grand Canyon and getting back on I-40 for a bit the clouds finally began to break, or rather, we finally began going below them! At that elevation it was full on winter wonderland but not 500 feet down it was merely an overcast day.

Once we finally came out underneath the cloud cover and drove for a bit, We were greeted with some of the best views we have seen yet! It was surreal, almost like looking at a painting or a screen, Like if you tried to walk to it you would find a wall. Some of these shots are the kind that seeing in person made me feel less bad about missing out on the grand canyon. Here are some photos, panoramas, and a video or two!

So then, we went north just a little bit further, and ran into this crazy thing.

Hoover Dam is pretty intense. The vertigo isn't quite as bad as, say, the Grand-freaking-canyon, but its still there. The "Is this even real" sense was hitting me really hard as we were taking these photos and taking it all in. The intense speed at which we are running across this country is still blowing my mind, it would seem. Lake Mead, the lake created by the dam damming up the Colorado river, was also a pretty good sight, but we had gotten a little turned around in Boulder city and forgot to get any good pictures. I mean it looks like a lake, but it was still cool.

Once we found our way out of Boulder city we started the last leg of that day, "straight" on to Vegas. The road leading there was.. Post-apocalyptic is a good descriptor. To our friends who may play games from the Fallout franchise, particularly New Vegas, I want to mention that the scenes in that game aren't futuristic, they are absolutely realistic and current.

The whole area looked--quite literally--as if a bomb had gone off and these were survivors making ends meet in the wasteland. We saw "towns" that were nothing but a pawn shop and a liquor store, random trailer and RV's out in the desert rusting away slowly, a scrap fortress, let me repeat that, we saw a SCRAP FORTRESS. It looked like a stone building kept in "repair" with scrapwood, tarps, and car parts, and it was surrounded with a chain-link fence with aluminum siding on it so you couldn't see inside very well. Surrounding that were dozens of junked and scrapped cars, as well as piles of wood. We only got one shot, and it's so-so, because of how long it took us to pick our jaw up off the floor. Here are some photos from that stretch.

The Scrap Fortress

After that wonderful stretch of $3.55 per gallon gas and people who might actually be accurately labeled as "bandits", we made saw this up ahead.

And we knew; we were very nearly there. During the day Vegas is actually remarkably easy to get around. It being like 1:30pm on a Monday probably played into that a little as well, but easy traffic is easy traffic. We found our way to the Palms hotel, and after a quick bite to eat at the casino, checked in. The best way to show it is with this video, Its a little dark in the beginning, but just hold on.

After that we fell down on the bed, had some drinks, and spent a few hours on and off writing this monster of a blog post. YOU ARE NOW CURRENT. Huzzah! Tomorrow is the--- nothing day!

We'll probably gamble a little, probably check out the pool and hot tubs, maybe walk around some, but tomorrow is a mental and physical health day of the utmost importance. There will probably be some kind of update tomorrow anyway, even if its not travel related. But now, it's 11 PM Pacific, which means I am super tired. See you all soon!