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