We've slept two nights out and I suspect Mark is getting sick of it.
I would have liked to stay another night, spend a day walking around the
rim and looking in the museums but the nights were cold and the food was
rough. We were up at 7am and packed before 8am. We went to Mcdonalds for
breakfast and spent more in US dollars than we ever would in Canadian dollars.
Oops. By 10, stiff from the hike the day before, we were on the road again.
We stopped at the Texaco in Williams for Gas, Coke for Mark, and then
drove off across Arizona. Instead of going up through Las Vegas again,
we went lower to Needles. We stopped at a joint Mexican/Jack in the
Box just after school bus of high school students had descended without
warning. The overworked staff were nice and gave us table service,
but they were obviously near the end of the rope.
Driving out of needles we hit some big desert in California. In
BC it's rare to see large vistas except from mountain tops so seeing miles
ahead from the road was quite different. There was more traffic on
the California highway so for some reason I found it quite mesmerizing compared
to the open spaces in Nevada. We had to use the air - conditioning
for some parts of the treck.
We arrived at Bakersfield around 5pm to find the highway clogged with
rush hour traffic. The traffic slowed to a crawl to look at the broken
toybox on the road - an old tow behind camper had split open spilling hundreds
of brightly color bobbles across two lines of traffic. I was tempted
to pull out the camera but I was driving and traffic was bad.
For more than a km ahead traffic was no better. And then we cam
across the reason why - a rear ender blocking a lane. Driving another
km, the traffic is still bad - everyone was slow to watch a rear ender
in the other direction. Just to top it all off there was a news
van parked in the meridian covering the whole thing. Traffic Bakersfield
style.
We stayed the night at the La Quinta Inn. We used my BCAA card
to get a discount to $54 US a night and it was a good night.
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