Pics from Pacific Coast Highway

This is the last load of road trip pictures, sorry it took so long to post them. I got lazy. The sets aren't completely finalized -- some pictures need some rotating and cropping, and there are some dupes for some reason. Anyway, I think a lot of the pics still turned out pretty stellar.


Driving up PCH


Monterey Bay Aquarium


Next post: new apartment in Palo Alto!

Lake Havasu to Bermuda Dunes

Lake Havasu was a short 200 mile drive to Bermuda Dunes, where Lia's parents and little brother live. On the highway to I-10, a train track parallels the highway. The train tracks are elevated on little hills, and the entire way is graffitied with messages on the side of that hill written in rocks. As an added attraction, every time there's a bridge over a dried up creek, there's an extra slanted surface to write on that's much closer to the road. Lia and I made our own contribution.

Pictures from the trip to Bermuda Dunes

We got to Lia's house in the middle of the day and her little brother was home. When her mom got home, we went to the Verizon store to get Lia a replacement one. She ended up with a Samsung Juke, which I think it really cool. It has a plate the spins clockwise off the phone to open it and has a really skinny screen. I like it, but it's not the phone for me. Since I'm looking to upgrade, I checked out the Voyager and other QWERTY phones -- I'm sick of T9 and Motorola's iTAP. We had dinner at Lia's house and then saw Juno with her brother. Juno was a lot less comedy and a lot more Little Miss Sunshine than I was expecting. The soundtrack is pretty good though.

Grand Canyon National Park

After Carlsbad, we drove to Gallup on the New Mexico/Arizona border. As we pulled in, we realized it was a lot colder than we thought: there was snow on the ground. The guy at the front desk said it had been there a couple of weeks and it hadn't thawed yet.

We got to the Grand Canyon at about 2:00pm on the 16th. I decided to buy a season pass for the national parks, hoping that it will motivate me to go to Yosemite (like how gym memberships cajole people into going to the gym). They have a photo contest with the winning photo being displayed on the next years park pass. Hmm...

Just like Gallup, the Grand Canyon had snow but also an added bonus: wind. This terrible twosome made it miserable to be outside for more than 5 minutes. Luckily, the road that goes through Yosemite had a bunch of turnoff points for scenic overlooks. We stopped at about 5 of them over the course of 2 or 3 hours. The sky was a little overcast for most of the day, but as it began to set, the colors became a bit richer. I think shots in the summer would turn out much better, but I still think I got some neat ones.




Raven in flight


All the Grand Canyon National Park pictures

After leaving the Grand Canyon, we stopped at the Road Kill Cafe on Route 66. Mediocre food at high prices. Yea, blame the interstate all you want, Route 66, but you need to step it up. While looking for a place to camp for the night, Lia recognized a place she had gone to when she was growing up: Lake Havasu. We called the Crazy Horse Campgrounds (actually note a strip club) and reserved a site. When we got there, we realized that wouldn't be necessary because no one else was dumb enough to camp there in the winter. The camp sites were in sand by the lake, which got a slammed wind into the tent all night long. The fire wasn't bad, but we also had to buy all the wood to use in it, which was lame and expensive.

Route Recalculation...

17 Wednesday: To the grand canyon! Google map route. Spend rest of morning and day there until the sun goes down. Drive halfway to Palm Springs and camp
18 Thursday: drive to Palm Springs
19 Friday: Drive to San Diego (hour and a half) go to Tijuana
20 Saturday: Drive halfway up PCH
20 Sunday: Finish! Arrive in San Francisco! (early evening)
21 Monday: Lia flies back to Cleveland :(

Texas and Ghost Towns

Charles sent me a link for ghost towns and said that we would be driving through ghost town central, Texas. Knowing that I wanted to end up a couple of hours from Carlsbad Caverns, I chose McCulloch county because it had a handful of ghost towns, including Salt Gap.

After a quick lunch at Taco Cabana in Houston, we hit the road on I-10 West, but not for long. When we hit Columbus, we took 71 north (no, seriously) towards Brady, Texas. When we got to Brady, we stopped to ask for directions to a Salt Gap. The first lady I talked to at a gas station was really confused -- she thought I wanted polo shirts. The second lady also didn't know about Salt Gap (this is in their county!), but the third guy did. It was on a county map, so we just found the relevant intersection and plugged it into the GPS.
It wasn't the type of ghost town I was expecting. The web site had said something about an abandoned post office, which we didn't see. Also, it looked like at least one of the houses was still inhabited. Off a side road though, I did find two collapsing buildings that yielded some good photos.





Here's the rest of the pictures on Flickr.

We decided to get a hotel in Odessa, TX, which was surprisingly big, considering I couldn't find anything special about the town.

Day 1: Cleveland to Memphis

This trip was the anticipated amount of boring. Lia and I have both driven the Cleveland to Cincinnati stretch, and just extending it down further south isn't too interesting. We saw the Florence Ya'll water tower in Kentucky. Our hotel in memphis was right by Beale St., and we met up with Lisa and some of her friends there.

Beale St. is really a cool looking place. I've heard it picks up later in the night, but we were only there until about 2am. The bars all stay open until 5am, and then the cops force everyone out. It's a little like Feast of the Assumption in Little Italy in that sense ... but only in that sense, really.



All the pics

Cross Country Road Trip #4

It's that time again -- time for me to make another cross country road trip in the Nissan, although this will probably be the last one for a while. Here's the tentative schedule:

Day 1 [Jan 12] - Cleveland to Memphis (visiting Lisa Keung)
Day 2 [Jan 13] - Memphis to Houston (visiting Charles Larrabee)
Day 3 [Jan 14] - Houston to El Paso (for no reason other than the song)
Day 4 [Jan 15] - El Paso to Vegas
Day 5 [Jan 16] - Vegas to Palm Springs
Day 6 [Jan 17] - Palm Springs to {somewhere between LA and SF on PCH}
Day 7 [Jan 18] - PCH to San Francisco
Day 8 [Jan 19] -
Day 9 [Jan 20] - Spend the day in San Francisco
Day 10 [Jan 21] - Lia flies back to Cleveland
Google Map

So... it looks like we have a day of play in the schedule. Suggestions?