Today being Rag’s birthday we decided to take it easy, when I say easy I mean of course that we had our earliest start of the whole trip. It’s a bit easier when there are just two and neither of you need to spend half an hour doing “the crossword” after breakfast before heading off. So we’d packed up and were set to get away at half 7, well that was the plan until I lost the car keys. Not sure how I did it, but somehow I’d put them in the back of the car and had slid Rag’s case over the top. At one point I was about to trawl through the bin as I’d throw some stuff away whilst waiting for Rag to finish packing. Anyway, keys found we were on the road and had made our way to Flagstaff by just after half 9.
For some reason I’d had this vision of Flagstaff of being a desert town, how wrong I was, it was in fact a mountain town with loads of slow. In fact it was probably one of the nicest towns we’ve visited, maybe we just didn’t see the trailer parks, or it could just be genuinely nice. Anyway we stopped off at McD’s and had a celebratory birthday breakfast and to use their wi-fi (which didn’t actually work properly).
Next we headed off down the I40 towards Gallup when we had our second closest encounter with the Authorities in the last couple of days. I was doing *ahem* a little over the speed limit as was the car alongside me when we both saw a Police car in the central reservation, we both applied our brakes but as we drove past we saw the car join the carriage way and I’m sure the other guy was as nervous as me as he tucked in behind and we both were glued to the limit. As we saw the car drive past we knew we were safe as he pulled in the pick-up just in front of us, obviously he’d infringed just before us and the cops had already decided on picking on him. Still not sure how it works if I can get pulled over, but let’s try an avoid that. Our other brush came yesterday morning quite early. We were approaching a section of the interstate where it was filtering into one lane for a border patrol when all of the cars were jumping into the one lane early so I decided to barrel down the inside of all of them (perfectly legitimately) when a car from the other lane pulled out in front of me and stopped, out stepped an official of some sort who flashed a badge at me and pointed into the other lane. I’m sure it was just some jobs worth who was late for his work, but we complied and left it at that.
Anyway once we’d cleared the pulled over pick-up we continued on our way when we saw signs for the Meteor Crater, not knowing what it was but realising it was only a few miles off the beaten track we headed for the crater. We got to the visitors centre only to find it was $15 to get in. As you will know by now, we don’t really like paying for anything and decided this was too steep. I’m sure if we’d wanted to stay and make use of the guided tour and movie theatre then it may have been worth it, but not for just a couple of pictures, and that was $15 each!
After Gallup and a slight detour for a missed turn, we headed into out next new state, Colorado, ok so we only did about 10 miles there but we visited it and rolled into Four Corners. Four Corners is the only point where 4 states intersect with each other. Ok so this cost us $3 each to get in, but we decided as we’d driven 1,000 miles extra to get this far we paid up and went in. It was as expected, just a plaque with the four state names around it. As you can see Rag didn’t know which state he ended up in but at least he looked happy.
After Four corners we headed East yet again and decided to push as far as we could. We did get a bit nervous when the road ran alongside the railway for a while given our previous encounters with motels next to railroads but fortunately that peeled off and we ended up in Tuba City 650 miles later. We did ask, and it is pronounced like the musical instrument.
Tomorrow yields the last big thing on our list, the Grand Canyon, I suppose you can’t get much bigger than that. Happy Birthday Rag.
