Sun
and Gun
The
Trip – Day 9
Valle,
Arizona – Bakersfield, California
483
miles
The
day after our visit to the Grand Canyon, we got up early, checked out
of our quaint but breakfastless hotel and drove awhile before
stopping for breakfast in Williams, Arizona. This small town
contained some of the remnants of the old Route 66, the popular
highway used in the days before the interstates to travel from
Chicago to Los Angeles. Route 66 no longer exists as a continuous
road, but pieces of it, with historical restaurants and buildings,
remain in towns found along the interstates that replaced it. Today
was to be a long driving day, backtracking in part almost 150 miles
over the same roads we had traveled two days before. The land
surrounding Interstate 40 through northern Arizona into California
was not as spectacular as the land we had been seeing in Colorado and
Utah, but still interesting in a not-the-midwest sort of way. The
hills looked a little like a more deserty version of western
Colorado, with large wind farms in some areas. The weather was hot –
103 degrees for much of the day – and the sun was, well,
relentless...
Before
our trip, people had told us about the heat and sun in the
southwestern part of the country. It gets hot, they said, but it's a
dry heat, very little humidity. And it's always sunny, lots of
bright sunshine, they said, like it was a good thing. For someone
like me who struggles with Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder,* the
constant sun was starting to get to me. The rain of eastern Illinois
on the first day of our trip was a distant memory. Except for a very
brief shower we drove through the morning of our Las Vegas adventure,
there had been constant, relentless sun. My son, returning to the
midwest after living in El Paso for two years, said one of his
reasons for leaving Texas was the relentless sun. (He suffers from
Reverse S.A.D as well...) During the travels of this day I finally
grasped what he meant by “relentless”. The sun in the southwest
just doesn't let up. It is blinding to look east in the morning,
similarly blinding to look west in the evening, and it beats down
unimpeded by clouds the rest of the day. The unfiltered intensity of
the light out here was of a radically different quality than the east
coast and midwest sun I already had a grudging relationship with.
The 103 degree heat didn't help. Humidity or no, hot is hot.
Fortunately, we were two days ahead of a heat wave. The roads we
traveled today would experience 120 degree temperatures later that
week. Relentless...
We
entered California at Needles, south of the Mojave Desert. My first
experience of the state was more heat and light with the addition of
haze from wildfires burning out of control north of Los Angeles. We
left the interstate at Barstow and stopped for lunch, again along the
remnants of Route 66. With no reservations for a hotel that night, we
pushed our mileage a bit further, deciding to stop at Bakersfield for
the night.
When
we don't have reservations for a place to spend the night, we usually
look for an inexpensive chain hotel. The night before such a stop, I
would look on Google Maps to see what areas of what towns have
clusters of cheap hotels and see what prices and overall ratings are
for hotels in those areas. We got off the exit in Bakersfield where
my research the night before indicated a collection of places to
sleep. We were about to pull into a Red Roof Inn when I saw a Motel
6 a little farther down the road. I suggested we go there instead.
I had remembered the Motel 6 at this exit was very highly rated. We
pulled into the parking lot and looked around. Like many hotels we
found in the mild climate of the west, this one had outside entrances
to the rooms, but looked clean and well-maintained. The room was
beautiful – newly renovated, sparkling clean, with a refrigerator
with a freezer for our cooler ice packs, a microwave, great pillows,
a great showerhead, and a comfy mattress. There was a laundromat
down the road, and we were able to wash nine days of dirty clothes
efficiently. We finished our laundry, grabbed something to eat, then
returned to our clean, cool hotel room. After a long, hot day of
driving, and still recovering from the Grand Canyon hiking of the day
before, we went to bed early and fell asleep quickly.
The
next morning I woke up feeling well-rested. My husband, however, did
not have the same experience. “Are you O.K.? Weren't you scared?”
he asked me. “Didn't you hear the yelling outside our room and the
doors slamming and the sirens at 2 a.m.?” I told him I had the
best night's sleep of the trip. He told me he lay in bed afraid to
move because of the loud arguing going on outside our door. Never
heard a thing, I told him. We got up, packed the car, and he went to
check out. He returned and told me things last night were worst than
he had imagined. The clerk at the desk, very apologetic for all the
noise that night, told him two men had been shot in the parking lot
right outside our room. My husband was right to have been scared. I
was right to have slept through it. We kept track of the news feeds
on the shooting for several days. Both men survived, but the
shooters were still on the loose. Ironically, I had just warned my
adult children to think twice about going into Chicago this summer
because of the violence. That same weekend Chicago would see 59
shootings with 13 fatalities. And here we were, in sunny California,
far from the south side of Chicago, with a gunfight at our door...
*Seriously!
See The Angle, “God of the Gray Day”, February 10, 2016
Traveling
- It leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller. - Ibn
Battuta
Next:
Dancing
in the Pacific
The
Trip – Day 10
Bakersfield,
California – Cupertino, California
Sea
Cliff State Park, The Coastal Highway, The Road to La Honda
335
miles
