Around the world in 108 days
From Cathedral City, we needed to head slightly south to visit a friend of Yanmei's who lives in Escondido, CA (between LA and San Diego).
When we left it was about noon and we needed to decide where to stay for the night. Eventually we decided to just drive all the way home, even though it would be a long day. We managed to skirt around the worst LA traffic and get through there by 2:30pm, and finally got home at 10pm. It was great to sleep in our own bed after 15 days on the road!
-David
From Flagstaff we headed south towards Phoenix into the Sonoran desert.
One thing we missed that I wanted to see was Meteor Crater, which is between Flagstaff and Holbrook. If you google the images of it, it's pretty cool. It was dark by the time we passed it the previous night. It's about a 45 minute drive from Flagstaff and we considered going back to see it, but ultimately didn't want to backtrack.
I thought it would be fun to ride horses in Phoenix, similar to what I did as a child with my family. Yanmei has never ridden a horse (but she has ridden a camel). Unfortunately all the trail riding operations were closed for the summer. We could soon see why as the heat continued to build throughout the day. We had lunch at a nice Thai buffet, then headed west towards California.
Once we got into California we stopped at an Airbnb in Cathedral City for the night.
-David
It was still raining lightly when we left Tucumcari.
We stopped in Albuquerque for lunch (charger was in an Applebee's parking lot) and discussed our plan for the day. Originally I'd planned on stopping in Holbrook, which is a small town just across the border to Arizona that has a charger. The problem was it is basically just a truck stop, there were no AirBnbs there and we'd have to stay in a motel. So we decided to push a bit harder and continue an extra 95 miles to Flagstaff, Arizona where we could get a hotel room with a kitchenette.
We crossed the rest of New Mexico without incident. I kept thinking we'd get past the edge of the storm clouds, but we never did, in fact it seemed to get more threatening, although other than a few scattered drops it didn't rain after the morning.
We crossed over the border to Arizona and soon came to one of the places I've been looking forward to the entire trip: the Petrified Forest National Park.
We saw a few other people, but for the most part it was like we had the park to ourselves. Awesome giant desert vistas dotted with mesas.
Other than the mesas there is a petrified forest, which was really cool. It is from 230 million years ago, the trees fell over and were buried by sand and mud from a river, therefore they didn't rot. Over the millennia silica penetrated the wood and eventually they became solid quartz. Then the river washed away the mud and exposed the rock trees.
After the park, we arrived at Holbrook and charged up before continuing to Flagstaff. Normally we've avoided driving at night because it's more stressful and you can't see any scenery, but this time we did, and we were lucky because we drove right into a great sunset as the clouds finally started to break.
-David
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