Category: Day 0 trip
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Day 527 – Vermillion Cliffs, Horseshoe Bend (Page, AZ)
From Zion National Park we headed over the Kaibob plateau in a full snowstorm and into the Vermillion Cliffs Scenic Byway (89a) towards Page, AZ. Ominous banks of clouds loomed like celestial beasts grazing on the red dirt expanse. As we ascended the mesa, the landscape was charred black, miles of forest, as far…
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Day 525 – Zion National Park – (Springdale, UT)
The area surrounding Zion National Park was originally inhabited around 8000 BCE by groups of the native Anasazi, or Ancestral Puebloans, who were also responsible for the more famous cliff dwellings found throughout the four-corners region of southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado. The first Europeans to migrate to the…
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Day 524 – (Desert Roadtrip Part 1) – Driving the Mojave Desert to Las Vegas
“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. …” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats,…
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Day 464 – The city of Joshua Tree, CA, and the high desert.
We stayed in the Joshua Tree area for two months, the first month in a house in Yucca Valley, the larger town to the west, and a month in a small house a couple of blocks from the heart of the city of Joshua Tree proper. The two towns were only about 10 minutes…
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Day 464 – Joshua Tree National Park
Two hours east of San Bernardino through Cabazon (where the concrete dinosaurs in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure live), past Palm Springs and a series of steep climbs up into the Mojave desert you arrive in a magical landscape that’s as alien as any place you’re likely to find on the planet. I’d been here before…
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Day 444 – Tucson, AZ – Discovering the ancient saguaro cactus.
Tucson sits about 60 miles north of the Mexico boarder in Arizona between California and New Mexico. This area has been populated by native people for over 12,000 years. The first European settlement happened in 1700 when the Spanish Jesuit missionary Eusebio Francisco Kino founded the Mission San Xavier del Bac in 1700. The…
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Day 411 – South Padre Island, TX – Gulf Coast Paradise
After several long spurts of driving and active sight seeing, we were ready for a brief repose. I had packed for a beach adventure a year and a half earlier and had been carrying it with me without ever making it to a beach. So when we were looking for a place to go…
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Day 405 – San Antonio, Texas – Looking for the basement of the Alamo.
It wasn’t until 1691 that Spanish explorers first met the Payaya Indians of the San Antonio River Valley. It was June 13, the feast day of Saint Anthony, and so they named the area San Antonio. In 1716, to prevent French expansion and illegal trading with the Payaya, the Misión de San Antonio de…
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Day 394 – Austin, Texas – In search of TPS reports and high weirdness
Austin is a city I’ve always wanted to visit. I kind of thought I might have waited too long and all the tech hipsters might have drove the prices up and all the cool places might be replaced by soulless condos and expensive margarita joints. But to my surprise it was still pretty fucking…
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Day 393 – Driving from Arkansas to Texas
Our next stop was Austin, Texas, a 7.5 hour drive from Hot Springs, so we decided to break the drive up into two days and head through Shreveport, Louisiana which added another hour to the drive. We wanted some Louisiana food and neither of us had been to Shreveport. Then on to Tyler State…