We're home!! (facts and figures)

We drove from Cameron, MO to St. Paul, MN today, stopping in Des Moines at the Waveland Cafe for lunch. It was quite a funky place with good food, so we were revved for the final four hour drive. When we got to St. Paul, Mara was reunited with her fousin.

We drove a total of SIX thousand SIX hundred twenty SIX miles!!! The average MPG was 50, a bit lower than previous years. It was the longest drive in the fewest days. Many times I thought we were pacing ourselves a bit faster than other years, and now I see that, sure enough, we were moving pretty fast. Here are some more trivial facts:

most pickup trucks - Louisiana
most Honda Elements - New Mexico
best cactus - Arizona
most interesting road kill = Louisiana (armadillos)
fastest speed limit - Texas (of course (80))
most tolerable radio stations - Oklahoma

Nobody wins the song contest, the lyrics are from the Little Feat song, Willin'. Where are all the people I knew back in the '80's?

Sara's top two stops - Watts towers and Georgia O'Keeffe's home and studio
Sara's bottom two (non)stops - closed art car museum and cancelled chuckwagon breakfast

Mara's top two stops - City of Rocks and Disneyland

Mara's bottom two stops - walk of fame (too many people!!!!) and the top of the St. Louis Arch (the bottom is better)

In 2011 we are taking a field trip to France and England where I will return to my role as "chaperone". It is not clear, at this point, if the blog will have a European chapter. In 2012 we might be heading east. We still have the entire east coast and a few inland states to cover. And then, Alaska and Hawaii. Thanks for all your comments, we sure enjoy hearing from you.

Last Tour

Sculpture in front of jazz museumFrank Lloyd Wright Design

Price Tower National Historic Landmark Plaque

Signature of Frank Lloyd Wright

The Price Tower

This morning we woke up late, too late for breakfast. So we hurried out of the hotel so we could see the Price Tower Art Center. Frank Lloyd Wright's only skyscraper. The walls were lined with metal with patina, to create a bluish green color. The floors, walls and ceilings were covered in triangles, and other shapes created from them. The building was mostly red, which was Wright's signature color. The whole building was supposed to be like a tree. The elevators were around the size of a squirrel hole. The building was designed for New York, but they built it in Bartlesville, OK. Originally it had offices, apartments, and retail stores. Now it is a hotel, a small art museum, and a tourist spot. After that, we drove by the the Jazz museum in Kansas City, but didn't go in. Before driving to our hotel, we had dinner at the Rosedale BAR•B•Q. (Yes, Rosedale.) We took a swim on our last night on the trip. Tomorrow: HOME!

I been from Tuscon to Tucumcari

Whoever can name the title tune first gets a prize! Wednesday morning, while we had breakfast at the Plaza, "someone" apparently put toothpaste on our brushes. The hotel is haunted!! After checking out, we walked around the Las Vegas square. Lots of nice old architecture, but it seems like many are soon to be demolished. We went into a store across the square from our hotel that had signs that said, art, beads, rocks and a few other things. They were having a sale with everything between 25 and 50% off. We found lots of interesting beads and a few rocks that we just had to have and all at a substantial savings, so how could we not?

The Historic (haunted) Plaza Hotel

A lovely rest stop in Texas

On the way to Amarillo, just for kicks (it is on Route 66), we drove through Tucumcari. There were many interesting signs along the road, but nothing that made us feel the need to stop and get out. Before we left on this trip, I made reservations for a Chuck Wagon breakfast at a ranch outside of Amarillo. It is at a ranch in the Palo Duro Canyon (the second largest canyon in the U.S.). After a large breakfast of all the traditional cowboy vittles, there is entertainment by traditional cowboys performing the great "old cowboy classics, poetry and humorous cowboy storytelling". I'm sure you can understand why I felt this had to be a part of our trip. As we neared Amarillo, the phone rang. It was a woman from the ranch saying that only 6 people had signed up for the breakfast and they needed more like 30 to make it worth their while. So, the Chuck Wagon Breakfast was canceled. Bummer. Just as I hung up, I saw exit 60 ahead and we got off the freeway so we could visit the Cadillac Ranch. The Cadillac Ranch was built in 1974 by Stanley Marsh III, the helium millionaire who owns the wheat field where it stands. Ten cars are buried in a straight line. They are covered in graffiti and we witnessed many people adding to the art work as we were there.

Cadillac Ranch

Finally, on to Amarillo and the Big Texan Motel. It's a very western themed dive hotel that I read many mixed reviews of but decided we should stay there, for its quirkiness and the Texas shaped swimming pool. When we presented ourselves at the check-in, we were told that they had no reservation for us. I checked my copy in the car and sure enough, I'd made a reservation for the day before. Oops. We had passed many hotels along the way, so we turned around and easily enough, got in at an alternate spot, though with much less character. We did return to the Big Texan for dinner. They offer a free 72 ounce steak to anyone who can eat it and all the sides within one hour. We watched several men make the attempt as we ate our delicate and delicious 6 oz. sirloins. We did not stick around to see if they were successful, but the man who started first had about 20 minutes remaining and he seemed well on his way to success.

The Big Texan free steak contestant

Today, we drove to Tulsa, uneventful except for the rain. When we got into town, we went to the Philbrook museum. It's a beautiful building with a very nice collection of art including Native American (they have two paintings by Pablita Velarde and one by Helen Hardin!), American, European and African collections. And a really nice gift store.

O'Keefe Country

Pooh on Palace. Wait...

The Monk's Corner.

Old Abandoned Cabin

Window in the mosque

The mosque

A smaller mosque

Yesterday morning we went shopping in Santa Fe. All of the stores were very authentic. We had lunch at the Blue Corn cafe, which we tried to go to the night before, but we couldn't find it. We had blue and white corn chips and dip, and blue and white corn enchiladas. One of the stores we went to was the Monk's Corner. Aaaaaah. We had ice-cream at Haagen-Daz, and walked around for a little more. After shopping, we drove to Abiquiu, Georgia O'Keefe's home town and stayed at the Abiquiu Inn. It was such a sweet little hotel, in a wooded area with pretty little flowers and wild life. I was in awe at the hummingbirds who moved so fast and sounded like giant bees. We drove around Abiquiu for a while, and it was beautiful. The rocks were in amazing hues, and after seeing her paintings, you saw that what you thought was abstract, are actually quite realistic. My mom bought a book about Georgia at the O'Keefe museum, which had a map of places in Abiquiu. So we followed the map to Ghost Ranch, where Georgia stayed when she visited New Mexico. She loved it so much, she bought a house there. This morning, we visited it. When she first bought it, it was merely a few large clumps of mud, and a couple walls. It took her ten years to restore it. It was a simple house, but the view was amazing. In almost every room, windows look out to the rocks and mountains. Her room has two windows that look out to a flat topped mountain, which she made her own. After the tour we drove to Dar al Islam, the mosque. It is around the "White Place" which we couldn't visit for they were filming the movie "Cowboys and Aliens" there. No Harrison Ford sightings. The mosque was very large, but we couldn't go into all of it. It was an adobe building with interesting windows and doors. We drove on to Las Vegas. No, not Nevada, New Mexico. We checked into our hotel which we thought looked like the Stanley, the haunted hotel we visited last year. (See "Mint Room Survival" from July 8 last year.) When we got to the room, my mom started reading up on the hotel. "OK, it turns out, this hotel is haunted." Hmmmm....

Windy Windy Roads

We didn't make it to Roswell, but we found these in SonomaIt was a very windy day

It was a very windy drive

a very accurate map

petrified forest guard

is it a tree? is it a rock?

we found a car for Mara!

a bull in Madrid

On Saturday, we headed to Albuquerque. Leaving Sonoma, we drove up the same winding road we drove down the day before. We made two unscheduled detours on our way. The first was at the top of the ascent out of Sonoma. There was a scenic view and a Native American craft market. We pulled in and walked to the amazing view. We could see the winding road, but not the town below. The crafts seemed more authentic than the stuff we had seen in all the tourist gift shops we had already visited, so we picked up a few things. About two hours later, we decided that we needed to spend some time in the Petrified Forest. We drove past many interesting views and finally, we found the forest. Pretty amazing rock/trees. With all our detours, we didn't make it to Albuquerque until 8:00. We desperately needed some clean laundry, and there were some laundry room problems, so we stayed up quite late and then got up quite early to finish the drying. There was a 12:00 parade we needed to get to, about an hour away, so Albuquerque will need to be visited some other time. I'm sure it's very nice, but the little corner of it that we saw left something to be desired. We drove to Madrid, NM along the Turquoise Trail scenic route. The GPS send us on a bit of a "short cut" to the route that involved about 10 miles of unpaved rocky rutty road. We got to Madrid in time to find a good spot to park and then walked to a good viewing spot for the parade. It was a "peace parade" with many interesting animals and lots of hippies. From there, we drove on to Santa Fe and we visited the Georgia O'Keeffe museum where we saw a very nice collection of her paintings and drawings. Then we visited the New Mexico Museum of Art where they had a show of cowboy boots. Later in the evening, we drove to the High School and waited for the fire works. They were lovely and the people at our hotel had another show in the parking lot, so the 4th was complete.

More Dam Traffic!

Yesterday we drove for a while through the dam traffic, which was exhausting. It was just starting and stopping and starting and stopping. It made me sick. We spent the night in Williams, AZ. Today we drove to the Grand Canyon. (I'm Tom Hanks) There was a lot of walking, but the view was spectacular. There were people that were so far, they were almost in the canyon. But we didn't go that far. After the Grand Canyon (I'm Tom Hanks) , we drove to our hotel in Sonoma, AZ. On the way there we drove through a very scenic route, with lots of trees and red rocks. After checking in into the hotel, we drove into town for some BBQ. We stopped by a few gift shops, but didn't buy anything. WE wrapped up the day with some Ice-Cream from Cold Stone Creamery. We ate it in front of a great view of the red rocks. Tomorrow, we go to Albuquerque.

Vegas, Baby

Mara at the beachMara. In the water.

Mara. In a dam tunnel.

Just a dam picture!

The dam water flow

Mara, Sara and Penn

Sara and Teller

Mara and Teller

The Luxor, our comfy pyramid

A sphinx

On our way out of L.A., we went to an IN-N-OUT that was all drive thru. Someone came to our window to take the order as soon as we pulled in. By the time we got to the window, they had already made our burgers and we had already paid. So off we went. We stopped again at a Starbucks so that Mara could write her post about L.A. We were so relaxed hanging out with the smell of coffee, that we lost track of the time and we only had 4 hours before our Cirque de Soleil show. So we packed up and sped on to Vegas. We found our hotel 45 minutes before the show, parked, found the front desk, checked in, found our room, performed a quick change and then ran to the MGM. Everything is over sized and maze like in these casinos, so none of this was easy. We made it to the performance only 7 minutes late. The show, Ka, was amazing. The first half was more like a modern dance performance, but the second half included lots of awe inspiring circus skills. The most amazing part was actually the stage itself. It was on hydraulics and could tilt to any angle while the performers hung on to arrows or sticks coming out of the wall/floor. After the show, we leisurely walked back to our hotel, the Luxor. It's a giant pyramid. The elevators go up and over at the same time, so you feel like you are falling when ever they start. Our room looks out over the sphinx and an obelisk from the windows that slant out, because they are the outside of the pyramid.

In the morning we saw workmen rappelling down to clean up the roof of a "smaller" building (that holds both the Bodies and the Titanic exhibitions) in the center of the pyramid just outside of our room. Late in the morning, we drove to Hoover Dam to go on the Dam tour. We got there at 12:15, just in time for the 2:00 Dam tour. So we had some time to kill. We ate some lunch at the Dam restaurant, and took our time in the Dam air conditioning. The Dam temperature outside was about 112. Finally, we were ready to join the rest of the Dam tourists and get ready for our Dam tour. Our Dam guides were Frank and Hal. They told many good Dam jokes. It was pretty interesting and amazing to see all that Dam cement at work. When we had finally had enough Dam fun, we headed off to see more of Lake Mead. We made a short stop at a beach and walked a bit in the water, but it was still about 110 and it was very windy, so we headed on back to our comfy Pyramid. That evening, we had tickets for Penn & Teller. We drove to the show, and did not need to do any running to get there on time. The show was very funny and entertaining. They had lots of audience participation, but we did not get to take part. It was still lots of fun and we had a perfect view from our seats. After the show, both Penn and Teller came out into the entrance area and signed autographs and let people take pictures with them. I told Teller about how I use their Behind the Scenes videos in my classes and he said he had just been thinking about them. They were made about 20 years ago. Maybe it's time for them to make some new ones.