Spring Break is over...

...but we had a wonderful time. I'm going to write this post all about our trip this past week, so that I can remember it.

Monday

We left Boulder around 10:30 Monday morning, March 27th, driving the minivan that Rocket Boy had rented. He tried to get me to practice driving it in our neighborhood before we left, but I refused, too scared. I finally took the wheel somewhere in southern Colorado. The car (a Chrysler Pacifica) turned out to be very easy to drive, with a lot of power, and it got surprisingly good gas mileage. Even loaded up the way it was, we got close to 30 mph on the highway, which is better than my Subaru.

We headed straight down I-25, stopping for lunch in Pueblo at a Country Kitchen (a chain that we weren't familiar with). The food was OK, but I was struck by the bill: with tip, it was $93. Oh my goodness. I realized I'd better get used to it. We can always spend the next 6 months (or more?) paying off my credit card.

I had the idea that New Mexico is very beautiful, and all along this drive (from the border south to near Albuquerque and then south to near Las Cruces and then east to the Arizona border) I kept waiting for beauty. I think the problem was that (a) we weren't in the prettiest areas, (b) it was a little early in the year, and (c) I live in Colorado, so I have ridiculously high standards. 

We got to our Best Western in Moriarty around 7 pm. We knew that their hot tub was broken, but we were distressed to learn that the POOL was also out of commission! I took a photo of it anyway. Doesn't that look appealing? The front desk clerk told us that a lot of people had used it over the weekend and "messed up the pH." 

So we drove to a nearby casual restaurant called Chili Hills for dinner. They specialize in New Mexico cuisine, but I'm not sure we really had any except for Teen A's bowl of New Mexico style chili. He ate some of it and we all tried it, but it was way too hot and spicy for me. (I had a loaded baked potato.) Since we couldn't go swimming, we all ordered dessert too (very good pie!).

Our room had two queen beds and a sleeper sofa, which Teen A claimed. It seemed like a nice hotel, if it hadn't had that problem with the pool.

Tuesday

On Tuesday, after a good free breakfast (TWO waffle makers), we left the hotel pretty early because we knew we had a lot of driving to do before we got to Tucson. We got into a rhythm where Rocket Boy drove in the mornings and I drove in the afternoons.

On road trips I always look for interesting signs, and one I saw outside of Albuquerque amused me. It said

Hill
Blocks
View

OK, I realize this means that you can't see oncoming traffic because it's coming up the other side of the hill you're going up, so you shouldn't try to pass. But in this case there was also a hill to the right of us, blocking the view, and it seemed like that was what the sign was referring to. It just struck me funny, like -- I couldn't figure that out for myself? Yes, the hill is blocking the view. Thank you for pointing that out. 

Maybe you had to be there. But the kids and I laughed about it for a long time.

We stopped for lunch in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, the town named after the game show. Many of their restaurants are only open on the weekends -- at least this time of year? -- but we found something called Johnny B's Restaurant, kind of a diner and ice cream shop combined, that looked as though it was popular with the locals. We didn't sample the ice cream, but the food was good. I had a fish sandwich with sweet potato fries.

On and on we drove. It was dry and dusty and windy. There were mountains in the distance, but they were hard to see through the blowing dust. Saw this nice sign at a rest stop -- this might have been in Arizona, I don't remember. We looked for poisonous snakes and insects but didn't see a one -- anywhere on the trip, except in a zoo.

What struck me the most about New Mexico was that it seemed very undeveloped. Lots and lots of wide open spaces. Room to breathe! I kept thinking it would be a good place to move, and then I had to remind myself that I am 62 and I don't want to start over. But it looked like it had potential. If I were a young person, I think I would consider New Mexico. I'm not sure why I didn't consider it back in the 1990s -- oh, I know, magpies. There are magpies in northern New Mexico, but I'm not sure they get as far south as Albuquerque.

Finally, finally, finally we reached our hotel, another Best Western in Green Valley, Arizona, kind of tucked into the back of a shopping center. I was worried that the pool would be closed, but no, no, everything was open. We had two adjoining rooms, one with two queen beds and the other with a sleeper sofa and a dining table and chairs. Teen B got the sofa this time. The best thing was that each room had a bathroom! When you have four people in your party, and everyone wants to shower, it's really nice to have two bathrooms. 

It would be nice to have two bathrooms at our house, too, come to think of it.

The kids were full from snacking in the car, but Rocket Boy and I walked to something called the Arizona Family Restaurant for a light dinner. It was OK. I had lemon ricotta pancakes. Then we walked back to the hotel and went swimming with the kids. Back and forth between pool and hot tub. We had both to ourselves. Lovely! Of course I forgot to take a picture, so this one is borrowed from the AAA website. It really did look just like this. Our rooms were on the ground floor just to the right of the hot tub in the picture.

Wednesday

Wednesday was supposed to be the easy day, the day we didn't have to drive hundreds of miles and switch hotels. We were just going to hang out in Tucson and do stuff. 

The problem was that the weather was gorgeous -- in the 80s! And we went first to the Sonora Desert Museum, a sort of zoo/botanical garden (NOT a museum) in the hills west of Tucson. And Teen A hadn't believed me when I said, "It's going to be hot, wear shorts and a light-colored shirt." Instead he wore his usual black sweatpants and a black shirt. And neither boy had a hat. And I wanted to walk the Desert Loop Trail and see the javelinas that live there. So we got really hot! Or at least the kids and I did. Rocket Boy admitted, after our time at the "museum," that he probably shouldn't have worn a flannel shirt (those are his arms in the photo), but otherwise he didn't mind the heat.

The kids complained pretty much the whole time we were there, which gave me a chance to practice my parenting skills. I kept thinking: they're teenagers, they didn't really want to come on this trip, they're hot, and even if they're having fun they're not going to admit it. Rocket Boy kept saying to them, "Guys! Isn't this interesting?" That was not the right approach. I did not try to make them have fun. I looked for ways to make them happier (like ducking into the Packrat Playhouse and buying them drinks from the vending machine there -- they adore all vending machines), and I also did what made ME happy. I didn't say, "Oh, you'll love the javelinas!" I said, "I want to see the javelinas," and they followed me, complaining all the way. Then, when we found them, they really liked them too. But I let them come to that realization by themselves.

Rocket Boy wanted them to appreciate how strange the southern Arizona landscape is, with the saguaro cactus and all that. Of course, the twins were determined NOT to appreciate it. I commented that saguaros and other cacti are so dangerous (if you were to bump into one), they should be classified as weapons. Museum staff were driving around in golf carts with small saguaros in pots in the back, and we started saying, "Oh look, here come more weapons!" We talked about how since we're an anti-gun family, perhaps we should obtain some saguaros instead. All that silliness was a way to "appreciate" the landscape without having to admit to your overly enthusiastic father that you are in fact appreciating it.

We went to the aviary and the hummingbird enclosure and the gift shop (I tried to buy Teen B a t-shirt but he refused to choose one) and then it was really time to leave. The twins were completely out of patience. I was glad I'd gone to the aviary, though, because those were the only Arizona birds I saw on the trip except crows, ravens, mourning doves -- things like that. Inside the aviary we saw a Pyrrhuloxia and a Hooded Oriole and some quail. Outside on the trail we saw a Cactus Wren and a Gila Woodpecker. No Vermilion Flycatchers on this trip.

We drove to a restaurant near the University of Arizona campus to have lunch, but couldn't find a place to park, so Rocket Boy gave up on the idea of showing the twins his old building. I said to them as we were driving past the campus, "Look! This is where Dad went to school! Maybe you'd like to go to school here someday."

"No. Too hot."

Which is ridiculous because Teen B lives in shorts and flip flops, and I think he'd be happiest going to school in a place where you can do that all year long. He'll probably end up at the University of North Dakota, just to spite me.

We found a restaurant on our way back to the hotel, a Jerry Bob's that wasn't actually a Jerry Bob's, which was confusing since we'd never heard of Jerry Bob's before. The restaurant we went to had previously been a Jerry Bob's, and the family that bought it kept the name but changed the menu. This seemed a bit shady to me, but the food was quite good, so whatever.

Then we went back to the hotel and the twins said they were done, goodbye. Rocket Boy had about eight other things he wanted to do that day and he was SOOO disappointed that they didn't want to do any of them, but there you are. I was hot and tired too, but I told him I'd go with him to another place he really wanted to go: the Titan Missile Museum. This is a museum on a site where they used to keep a Titan missile, during the Cold War. I guess most Titan missile sites were destroyed, but they kept this one to remember what it was like. The missile in it no longer has a nuclear warhead, of course. 

To go on the tour of the missile silo, you had to be able to walk down and back up 55 steps, and I was a little worried about my ability to do that. But Rocket Boy got very cross with me when I wavered, so I said OK, I would do my best. And of course it was fine (55 steps are not really that many). 

While we waited for the tour to begin, I looked at the t-shirts in the gift shop. I texted this photo to Teen B to see if he would like one, but he texted back "..." which I assumed meant "no."

I was doing the tour just to make Rocket Boy happy, but it turned out to be extremely interesting. They did a simulation of what it would have been like if the crew had gotten orders to set off the missile and Rocket Boy played the part of the Deputy Commander.

After the tour we went by the mine where Rocket Boy did his research when he was at the U of A. The site was closed, but he could see that it had changed a lot since we were last in Tucson (18 years ago, we think). Then we went to a Starbucks in a Safeway and got the twins their favorite drinks and snacks, to serve as dinner. I wasn't hungry, and Rocket Boy had leftovers from lunch that he could eat. When we got back to the hotel, we had our makeshift meal and then went in the pool and hot tub again.

Thursday

On Thursday we checked out of the hotel and headed north toward Phoenix. Rocket Boy told our friends we'd arrive around noon, and I thought we'd allowed enough time to do that, but I hadn't reckoned on his secret plan to visit Casa Grande Ruins National Monument on the way there. Casa Grande is one of these mysterious Indian ruins that nobody really knows what it was for or why it was abandoned. It was quite interesting and I wished we had more time to spend there. Of course the twins thought it was so BORING. I suggested to Teen B that we buy a t-shirt, but he was having none of that.

This was enough of a detour that we didn't reach Goodyear (the suburb where our friends now live) until 1:30 pm or so. But they didn't seem to mind. They had just gotten home from a road trip of their own the day before, so only the husband, Joe, went with us to lunch (the wife needed to rest). Joe took us to a good Mexican restaurant called Arriba Mexican Grill. I had been hoping to eat lots of Mexican food on our trip, but this was the only Mexican meal we ate. With the twins, we always seemed to end up in diners.

After the delicious lunch we went back to their house and hung out, talking, for another hour. Our friends are much more conservative than we are, at least we think they are, so we prepared for seeing them by thinking of things to talk about that have nothing to do with politics. I practiced, in my mind, getting off of difficult topics if we accidentally got onto them. It turned out that they were just as careful as we were, and nothing even vaguely related to politics was mentioned. So we're still friends!

We finally got back on the road around 4 pm, which meant that we had no chance of reaching the museum in Clarkdale we had planned to visit that day. We had to just DRIVE to get to our hotel in Jerome by 7 pm. We drove north through the mountains at top speed, saying goodbye to the saguaros as we left their territory. When we got to the hotel, the clerk seemed very relieved that we'd made it. 

Jerome is an old mining town that's been turned into a sort of artist colony/tourist attraction. Our hotel, the Connor Hotel, was built in 1898, and it's lovely. We had two big rooms, a bedroom and a sitting room -- the sitting room had a sleeping couch with a trundle bed, so the twins each had a sort of bed. 

The weather had turned stormy as we drove, and when we ventured out of the hotel to find a restaurant, it was sleeting. We walked to the Haunted Hamburger, a decent place overall (though Teen B refused to get a t-shirt there), but apparently haunted. The hostess told the diners sitting next to us the WHOLE story of the hauntings she'd experienced, from orbs to mysterious shadows to knees tapped by unseen hands to mediums telling her there was an evil male spirit in the building. To me it just sounded like a mash-up of every ghost hunter show I'd ever seen, but to the twins it was a little worrying.

I didn't realize HOW worrying until we got back to the hotel. The storm intensified at that point, and the sitting room that the twins were going to sleep in got quite noisy. Their windows faced the street, and there were clatters and bangs and a wailing wind and what sounded like someone knocking on the window (since we were on the second floor, this was unlikely). Teen A begged me to let him drag his trundle bed into our bedroom and sleep there. I said no, what would Teen B do then, all alone in the scary room?

The thing is, I believe I'm a little bit "sensitive" to ghostly stuff, and I wasn't getting any bad vibes at all from the hotel. In fact, I was getting very GOOD vibes from it. I felt as though if there were any spirits there, they were friendly. I told the twins that, but they were unimpressed.

Finally, though, the storm stopped, and with it, the scary noises. We all got a good night's sleep.

Friday

Friday was the difficult day. Worse than Wednesday.

Our hotel didn't have breakfast, free or otherwise, so we drove to the nearby town of Cottonwood to go to a Starbucks (the twins' request). Unfortunately, the Starbucks was drive-through only, and Rocket boy didn't want to do that. So we went across the street to the Black Bear Diner -- another new-to-us chain. 

Maybe it was because we'd all slept well, but we had a wonderful breakfast at that diner. Everything struck us funny. I like a lot of cream in my coffee (on the rare occasions when I drink coffee), and so I kept opening more and more little creamers. I don't know what I was doing wrong, but I kept squirting cream on my phone, the table, my shirt -- you name it. Rocket Boy said it looked like a small child was sitting at my place. We kept making bear jokes. And then there were those orbs from the night before. *I* don't know what was so funny. It's hard to recreate. But we just couldn't stop laughing. 

After breakfast we went to the Arizona Copper Art Museum in nearby Clarkdale, which we had been too late for the night before. The museum is owned/run by a second cousin of mine and when Rocket Boy and I brought my mother to Arizona to see the Grand Canyon, back in 2003, we came to Clarkdale to see the old high school where the museum was going to be. So of course we wanted to see what had happened to it. But really, I wasn't very interested in going to a copper museum, even though it had very good reviews online.

I was so wrong! It's an excellent museum. Every room is interesting. The displays and explanations are very professional. It's clean and the copper is beautiful. If you're ever in that area, I highly recommend it.

It was after the copper museum that things went bad. It was late when we left -- maybe 11:30? -- and we were still planning to go to the Grand Canyon AND get all the way to Moab, Utah that night. It wasn't a good plan. We needed one more day to do all of that. We should have stayed somewhere near the Grand Canyon, or possibly in Mexican Hat, where we've stayed before. We shouldn't have tried to get all the way to Moab. Anyway.

It took forever to get to the Grand Canyon. The road to Sedona, the road to Flagstaff, the road to the Grand Canyon -- it was all so slow. Teen A kept saying we should skip the Grand Canyon -- but how could we do that? It's like the major attraction of all of Arizona. Six million people visit it every year. We had to be part of those six million. Didn't we?

We finally got there. We parked in the gigantic parking lot with what seemed like quite a few of the six million. Several of us needed to go to the bathroom, but the bathrooms were crowded and gross. 

Rocket Boy took off for Mather Point, the view that everyone who visits the GC sees. It was a bit of a walk, slightly uphill, and I got slightly out of breath, being an old fat lady who worries about being able to climb 55 stairs. We got to Mather Point and looked out. "There it is!" Rocket Boy announced.

The twins were not impressed.

I knew they weren't going to be. If we could have stayed there overnight, gone on a tour, that kind of thing, maybe they would have gotten something out of it, but just driving up and looking at a view, when everyone's tired and hungry and needs to go to the bathroom...

The Visitor Center was closed, but there was a separate gift shop, and Teen B finally let me buy him a t-shirt.

We drove on. 

There was no time to stop for either lunch or dinner. That's how screwed we were. We just drove. And drove. And drove. It's 300 miles from the Grand Canyon to Moab, and we'd already driven 165 miles that day and it was late. And most of that 300 miles was on little winding roads, little two-lane roads with no passing lanes and stupid people driving RVs who REFUSED to pull over. We were driving through some of the most beautiful country in the world (as far as I know), and it was dark for much of it. That was the saddest part (for me). The twins didn't care.

Before we left the Grand Canyon I had pre-registered for our Moab hotel and checked the box that said we would arrive between 8 and 10 pm. But I'd forgotten about the time change! Arizona stays on standard time but of course Utah was on daylight saving time. At 10 pm my cell phone rang -- it was the hotel. Were we still coming?

"Yes! We're less than 20 miles away!"

We got there about 10:30. The pool and hot tub had just closed, but at least they hadn't sold our room to someone else. 

We had an amazing (read: expensive) room with three beds (two queens and one king), and a living room area and a dining room area and a kitchen area, but it was up a steep outdoor staircase and we had to haul ALL our gear up.

I realized when we'd gotten everything up and it was time for showers that I'd run out of gas. There was nothing left in the tank. I couldn't take a shower (even though I hadn't taken one in the haunted hotel and thus was rather grimy). I just went to bed.

Saturday

Saturday morning, we ate perhaps the best free breakfast of the trip and then Rocket Boy went swimming in the pool. But I couldn't do it. I also couldn't take a shower. I was so tired and stressed that I decided to go home dirty.

We had a nice drive through the canyon that leads to Cisco, Utah, and then continued on to Colorado and Grand Junction. In Grand Junction, Rocket Boy wanted to see the statue of Dalton Trumbo, so we drove to the library and asked them where it was, and then we drove to the statue and looked at it. And I said to Rocket Boy -- "That's it. No more detours. That was the last one." He agreed.

We ate lunch at the Pufferbelly Station Restaurant. I had a Reuben sandwich and sweet potato fries. I love Reuben sandwiches, but they don't go well with braces -- everything gets stuck in them. Also, what am I doing eating beef? But I do love them, and it was the last day of the trip. Might as well go for broke.

Rocket Boy drove the rest of the way -- about 250 miles. We hit terrible traffic on I-70 going up to and beyond the tunnel. But we made it home by 7:30 pm. And there was a voicemail on our home phone from the last hotel telling us that Rocket Boy had left his swim trunks in our room. We called them and they said they'd mail them to St. Louis.

Sunday

And now we are home. Rocket Boy and I took the car back to the rental car place at the airport this morning, so that's done. The twins go back to school tomorrow (yay), and then he flies back to St. Louis on Tuesday. It is supposed to snow on Tuesday, but I think I'll still take him to the airport. Well, I'll see. I want to be a nice person, but I hate to drive in snow and I hate driving to the airport (especially on a weekday). Maybe I'll make him take the bus. I'll see.

Was it worth it, that long crazy trip? Yes, definitely. Even though I'll be paying for it for a very long time. Memories, right? 

And we get to scratch two more states off our map of the U.S. (we've taken a couple of swipes at them but haven't done the full scratching yet). Maybe tomorrow.

Teen A suggested that next year we might want to go to Texas for spring break.