Day 9

States covered: 3 (AZ, NV, CA)

Today did not go exactly as planned, but there is a happy ending.

To start, Stephanie began calling Las Vegas hotels last night to find a room. [We hadn't made advance reservations since we did not know how long it would take us to reach Las Vegas, thus, we had no idea what night we would need a room.] It soon became apparent that no rooms cheaper than $300/night were to be found. A nice lady from the MGM Grand informed us that there was a NASCAR event at the Las Vegas Speedway this weekend, so all of the reasonably-priced rooms were sold out. Oh well. That cut a stay in Las Vegas out of the trip.

Last night at 1:30AM Stephanie awoke to find the hotel alarm clock flashing 12:30. Remembering the last clock fiasco, Stephanie panicked and checked her watch, Todd's watch, and the TV stations to verify what time it actually was before resetting the alarm clock and going back to sleep. It sounds trivial now, but we knew we had a big day ahead of us, and we wanted to get a good start.

We woke up at the Best Western Pony Soldier this morning to find that it had snowed! Of course, it figures that we would have to wait to get to Arizona to see snow on our trip! ;-) We got to put our scraper and brush to work, and after a nice continental breakfast at the hotel, we were in the car and driving by 9:30AM.

Todd drove the first leg of today's trip, which included driving through a bit of snow and some salty and sandy roads through the mountains below Flagstaff. By 11:30AM we needed a bathroom break, so we turned it into our lunch stop. We stopped at a nice KFC in Kingman, AZ. Although the line moved very slowly, the food was good, and we were able to get going again by noon.

We were excited about getting to Hoover Dam -- the turn-off for the road leading to the dam was just past Kingman, so we soon turned off of our trusty interstate 40 (which we had followed since Oklahoma City) and onto state route 93. Route 93 was a scenic road with beautiful mountains on each side of the flat valley.

After about an hour of driving, we got close to the dam and found many cars pulled over as well as thousands of people walking around. Stephanie started to notice that nearly all of the folks walking around were wearing car-related apparel. Hmm. That darn NASCAR! All of the NASCAR fans were at Hoover Dam since the actual race wasn't until Sunday! :-( We pulled into the dam parking lot [ha ha] but soon found that it, too, was mobbed. We realized pretty quickly that not only were we not going to find a parking place, but also there was no way that we were going to get a spot on the coveted hard hat tour. So, we decided to bag the dam and save it for another trip to the area when we had a bit more time to spend. We continued on.

Since we had planned to meet Todd's cousin, Nicole, for dinner after she was finished with work for the day [at 5PM], we were running a bit early, since the dam is only about 30 minutes from Las Vegas. [By this time it was only about 1:30PM.] We had nowhere to be and no place to stay in Las Vegas, so we also bagged Las Vegas and decided to drive straight through to Carlsbad today. It was an option/contingency plan that we had briefly considered yesterday, but we thought it might be tight since we had planned on spending a significant chunk of time at the dam. Without the dam, the drive was do-able. We called Nicole to put off our dinner plans until another visit, and we called Steph's parents to let them know we would be arriving a whole day early. They were surprised!

Unfortunately, veering off of interstate 40 to the dam was very inefficient, so we went quite a ways out of the way. [Had we known that the dam would be so crowded, we could have stayed on I-40 and saved a lot of time.] Anyway, Todd got to see the Las Vegas strip from the highway, and we pressed on.

Between Las Vegas, NV and Barstow, CA there isn't much of anything. It's a drive through the Mojave Desert, and there aren't a lot of people who live there or do business there, for pretty obvious reasons. We both enjoyed I-15, the road that connects Las Vegas with Southern California. The posted speed limit was 70 mph, but at that speed we were being passed so frequently and so quickly that we felt like we were a road hazard! We upped our speed to 75 mph, and we did not feel like such a danger on the road. We stopped in Baker, CA [home of the world's tallest thermometer . . . really!] to fuel up and change drivers. Stephanie drove from Baker, through more desert, and then into Barstow and the more inhabited parts of the state.

Getting into the home stretch of the trip in Escondido, CA, we both knew that we were less than 30 minutes away, which seemed amazing after such a long trip. We got into Carlsbad by 5:30PM, as we had made great time out of Las Vegas. Since we were so early, we stopped by the fantastic car wash in Encinitas to have the car hand-washed. They did a great job, since the car was filthy from today's driving [salt from the snowy roads in Flagstaff, and mud from trucks near Hoover Dam]. They even Armor-All'd the dashboard, which had been desperately in need of attention. :-)

We opened the sunroof for the drive from the car wash to Stephanie's parents' house [now our temporary residence!] to enjoy the weather and the sunset. We can't believe we're already here! :-)