High Plains Panhandler

Western Expansion Vacation: Day 9

It's a long drive from Los Angeles to Amarillo, 16 hours, four gas stops, and an ocean of vacant land, wide open, bleached with sun and smoothed by wind.

We left Renaldo Beach at 5:30 in the morning, half and hour later than we had planned but still early enough to miss (most of) the traffic. It took us a good chunk of time just to get out of Los Angeles, and as we were driving through I began to truly understand Kurt Russell in the movie Escape from L.A. It's bad enough to get out on an early Saturday morning. Being chased by gun wielding, hand grenade throwing, chopper riding prison maniacs (and that's a normal weekday) would be much worse.

7:30: we stop in Barstow, California for breakfast and gas. In the interest of time, we grab some bags of breakfast surprise from McDonald's Burger King, where the walking undead that make up the staff trudge around behind the counter, moving in iron boot stomping slow motion, no way at all resembling anything close to "fast food" delivery. Of course, with all that languid care in preparing our meals, they also get the orders wrong. But by then, we're back on the road, everyone eating their slice of breakfast picnic heaven in the car, as we careen onto the start of I-40.

Lunch: Flagstaff. More fast food, but this time we eat healthier with some fast salads. There's no play area for the kids to stretch their legs, so they do the next best thing: bicker with each other.

5:00: Albuquerque. We're making good time so we decide to keep driving for home instead of stopping here for the night. The weather, however, is strange: massive wind gusts blow dirt and sand around, destroying any semblance of visibility. We pass a motorcyclist who's pulled over on the side of the road, hunched over and miserable. The 18-wheelers in front of us sway back and forth uncomfortably.

I check the weather on my phone, and it looks like once we're pass the Sandia mountains (which are on the east side of Albuquerque), we'll be out of the storm. I neglect to calculate that storms travel. This one travels at the same speed we are.

7:00: Santa Rosa. Dinner. We pick up some chicken from KFC, the staff here obviously trained by the staff in Barstow. Nothing moves quickly at all, although the guy with the waist length hair, beard, biker jacket, and single tooth who is working behind the counter seems happy as he fills up the kids' meals bags. He grins when he's finished. He has two teeth. Outside the clouds are looming over us, dark and mean, threatening with imminent badness.

10:00: Nowhere particular. The storms open up with crazy and powerful rain in sheets thick enough to convince the truckers around us to slow down to a rain slick 95 miles an hour. The rush past us, throwing up waves of impossibly opaque water. The lightning is intense, packing enough zap that it takes our eyes a few seconds to resolve the darkness, as if someone set off a camera's flash two inches from our faces. Nothing is visible on the road except the tail lights of the car in front of us. We take an exit to switch drivers and, in doing so, accidentally fool the car behind us, who follows us onto the exit road, panics, and then flails around looking for the freeway entrance. I am too stressed to feel bad about this.

11:30: home. Finally. Sweet Stinky Pete, it's good to be home. Later, on the news, we learn our part of town got 0.04 inches of rain from that storm. 20 miles away: five inches.

Now: sleep.

Western Expansion Vacation: Day 8

Los Angeles. What else can you say. Isn't this where everyone wants to be discovered?

Well, we didn't do much of that. But we did discover slogging through traffic isn't that much fun.

Our first stop: the Warner Brothers VIP studio tour. Now this is a misnomer, and it makes it sound like we drove up to the studio lot in our fancy pants, window-tinted limo, eating caviar. But really the VIP tour is nothing more than a tour of the studio that you pay way too much money to take. Anyone can tour the lot, just as long as you have the cash and are older than eight. So we had no problem taking seven-year-old Alex along with us.

Pictures are verboten on the tour - well, at least in the interesting areas. They make you lock your camera up in a box on the little tour cart, and to make sure you aren't wielding another camera, there's a security guy who keeps his eyes on everyone.

At the beginning of the tour, our guide asked what Warner Brothers shows we liked. People shouted our random things, and our guide happily acknowledged all the shows. Then I blurted out "Babylon 5!" And he gave me a cold look and said, "Huh."

So we drove around and heard all sorts of things about the movie and TV business. We walked around a little bit and knocked on some buildings that looked like they were brick, but they were really just foam. And then we watched a lot of big men move big equipment around while a camera (that we couldn't see) shot a scene for "the hit show Pushing Daisies!" (a show I thought had been canceled), and we were able to walk around the outside set of the "Gilmore Girls." Still, no pictures.

We were able to take some photos in a building that had the Batmobile, the Scooby Doo car and some other things. But it was all staged for us, the cars lined up for decent picture-taking, everything positioned just right. Not a chance at taking a picture of anything not pre-approved.

The entire tour was just about two and a quarter hours, and at the end we were dropped off (where else?) in the gift shop. Then a few crowed streets later, we had lunch at the California Pizza Factory, and then we crept our way along the freeway to the Getty Museum, which was really a high point of the day.

You don't exactly drive directly to the Getty. You have to park in its large underground garage and take a tram up the hill to the museum. It's a beautiful complex, and it has gorgeous views, even a view of downtown, if you can make it out in the smog.

Apparently, tonight the Getty was throwing a big party, so as we were leaving we passed all sorts of dolled up people, drinks in hand, milling around. We rode the tram down the hill and were surprised to see how long the line was to get onto the tram going up. And the line of traffic waiting to enter the parking garage spilled way out into the street, around a corner, and far back to the freeway exit. Most cars had one person.

We drove back to the hotel on the beach. We found a nice Indian restaurant for dinner, and then we all piled back into the room, weary but looking forward (somewhat) to tomorrow, the day we drive home.

Tomorrow: the road that will not end.

Western Expansion Vacation: Day 7

We are spoiled by the perfection that is Disney.

I say this because even as we walked into Legoland, an amusement park about - you guessed it - legos, we noticed small things, small non-Disney things, immediately. Things like: you have to drive almost through a business park to get to the right parking lot (a section of which was full of cars from the dealership down the street, all lined up in perfect and odd rows), the missing smiles on people at the ticket booths, the lack of the unquantifiable enchantment, a spell Disney casts on you before you even get to the gate.

We were so used to our pre-programmed Disney attack plan from last year, that we weren't quite sure which way to go first, but Suzanne found some rides that a guide book said were among the most popular, so we marched across the park to do those first.

Legoland is, contrary to some opinion, not made completely out of legos. Alex was distressed about this last night, and told me he didn't want to ride anything because the legos might snap apart. Not to worry, I told him. Even though the rides are made from cheap plastic, they certainly won't unsnap in the middle of something dangerous.

One of the most interesting parts of Legoland was the area of the models of New York, Las Vegas, Mount Rushmore, San Francisco, The Eiffel Tower, The Taj Mahal, and all sorts of other landmarks and locations. Unlike the rides and some of the food, these are indeed made from legos.

We spent most of the day at the park, and when we were finished, right about the time that park closed, we gathered up our towels (there's a small water parkish type place in the back of Legoland), bags, cameras, and stuff, and headed out to dinner. Dinner tonight:

Fish tacos. We liked them so much, we had them a second night.

Then we left our friends and drove tp LA, which I had thought was just 30 miles up the road (it's really about 120), but the map fooled me because the distance between San Diego and Los Angeles is, pretty much, one long uninterrupted corridor of people and towns and traffic.

We thought we had plenty of time to make it to the American Girl store so Colleen and Megan could get whatever they were getting, and Alex and I could stand around dumbly. I found two American Girl locations for LA on Google Maps - the first one was in Anaheim, which was a close to us, so I navigated us there.

Unfortunately, Google was wrong and we ended up in some weirdo industrial park that was a little scary. We sat in the parking lot of the non-existent American Girl store while I flicked my finger back and forth on my iPhone looking for the other location, which happened to be pretty far away in Beverly Hills.

We drove quickly (as quickly as you can in LA) and made it to the store by 8:50, ten minutes to spare. The girls were happy. Suzanne was happy. Alex and I found a bathroom so we were happy.

And then we had to drive a little more, this time to Redondo beach (for reasons I cannot explain, I kept calling it Renaldo beach) to check into our hotel where we all immediately collapsed from exhaustion.

Tomorrow: LA traffic

Western Expansion Vacation: Day 6

Our friends in San Diego picked us up at our hotel, packed us in all in their gigantic moveable fortress that must, I'm sure, get at least 5 gallons a mile, and then we drove to the Torrey Pines state beach where we did all sorts of beachy things. Now I am not a big fan of the beach because I tend to do idiotic things, such as attempt to build a massive sand castle, all the while forgetting the sun is beating down on my back and turning me into a lobster. Fortunately, this year, I slimed myself with plenty of SPF 10,000 sunscreen, which worked well except for my feet. I had forgotten the tops of my garishly white feet, and now they both sport angry red spots, as if someone had dropped a hot clothes iron on them.

Colleen surfed a little with her boogie board. Megan kept on the hunt for small, weirdly transparent sea creatures, and Alex went to town with a sand castle. Suzanne kept bundled up - a seemingly mild day turned pretty chilly on the shore.

Of course, I was slightly apprehensive about the kids in the ocean because at dinner last night our friends were telling the story of a recent Great White shark attack, close to the very beach we were going to visit. We don't have many of those kinds of shark attacks in Amarillo, Texas.

As an aside, what kind of paranoid parent am I becoming? First I thought the kids would fall into the Grand Canyon and now I was afraid of Jaws. Pretty soon I'll want to lock up Spongebob because of his intimidating scowl.

We had fish tacos for dinner at Rubios. I didn't want to partake in this experimental dinner, mainly because I found the idea of a fish taco repellent. But I went ahead and had one, and you know what? It was good. I mean really good. I'm hooked.

Tomorrow: Legoland

Western Expansion Vacation: Day 5

We've been to quite a few zoos, but never before have we been to one like the San Diego zoo. Immense, gorgeous, amazing - those are simple ways to describe it.

We started with the official zoo tour on a double-decker bus (three adults and six kids, since we were with our friends today). Our driver took us all over the zoo, and since it was the first thing in the morning and nicely cool, most all the animals were awake and scurrying around. We also learned that if you take the different escalators scattered around the zoo, you'll never have to walk uphill (and there were some significant hills).

Highlights: the pandas, the polar bears, the sea lions, and the guy who said this to his wife about the flamingos as they were walking toward their food: "They're migrating. That's what they're doing. My-grating!"

When we were about to ride the Skyfari arial tram from one side of the zoo to the other, we had to dig out our park tickets to prove we had paid the extra secret fee for the ride. I had grabbed a child's ticket instead of an adults', and so I started saying, "Why am I a child?" But it came out in a weirdo South Carolina-type accent, the words blending together so I sounded like this: "Why-my uh shy-uld?" For reasons still unknown to me, the kids found this hilarious, and it became the new catch phrase for the day.

Tomorrow: the beach.

Western Expansion Vacation: Day 4

Five in the morning comes with a bucket of sunshine when you're camping at the Grand Canyon in the summertime. It also wakes up the group of very loud and boisterous campers one tent over. It was as if the Ghost of Christmas Present stormed out of his puny pup tent, scratched his ample tummy, and then gave a great and bellowing baritone "Good morning!" to everyone in the surrounding 500 square mile region.

So we got up pretty early, our only plan being to strike the tent (according to the box, a seven to nine person tent, which really meant a three kids, two adults tent with room for pillows) and head out for California, stopping at Joshua Tree National Park along the way.

But we were cursed with amber glow of the Check Engine light on the dashboard, something the made both Suzanne and me very nervous. Check engine? Check it for what? Would it blow up in the middle of the great expanse of nothingness between Flagstaff and San Diego? That would rank in the category of "bad news."

I read the van's book about the check engine light, and the information it contained was, for the most part, worthless. Well, worthless except this this small gem: "Get to your dealership IMMEDIATELY."

It was in all caps. It must have been important.

We drove back to Flagstaff, 50 miles out of our way, so the Honda dealership could check out what we could not.

The Honda service guy seemed nice enough, but he struck me as if he also sold life insurance on the side and was proud of printing out all sorts of life insurance graphs and charts on his portable color ink jet printer he carried in his glove box.

This is how the conversation went:

Suzanne: Our check engine light is on, and we want to make sure nothing bad is going to happen to the van.
Honda Guy (nodding and smiling): Absolutely. Uh huh! Sure. We'll check it. Can we have the vehicle for the day?
Suzanne: No! We're on our way to San Diego. Can't you just tell us if there's a problem?
Honda Guy: Oh sure. Sure we will! But you know, we've got a lot of people ahead of you today. But we'll check it out.
Suzanne: Can't you just check it out now? Real quick?
Honda Guy: Absolutely! Absolutely! Everyone's on vacation, you see. We'll have it done for you, oh say, before lunch.
Suzanne: What?
Honda Guy: Well, we have to put it up on the lift, you see.
Suzanne: Gah!

They gave us a ride to a restaurant down the road, so we took our time and ate pancakes. Megan wanted some hot tea and asked for some chai. The waitress gave her a long and confused look. And that's when I noticed a garage across the street. A sign outside said, "Is your check engine light on? We'll repair the trouble."

Seriously. They were completely promoting themselves as the check engine light place to be, the very specific thing we needed.

So I took Megan and Alex to Borders bookstore, which was around the corner, and Suzanne took Colleen to pick up the van from the Honda place and take it to this other garage instead. But, miraculously, the Honda place had, by then, investigated our check engine light problem and declared it to be insignificant for now, neglecting to call us with the good news. So they washed the car, charged us $100, and set us on our way.

We changed our plan, realizing by now we were out of time to visit Joshua Tree, so we went south to Phoenix, where it was close to 3000 degrees, and then we jumped on highway 8, skirting the Mexico border and driving into California. We did stop once to have a picnic in the middle of somewhere excruciatingly hot, and all we could talk about was what would Bear from the TV show "Man Versus Wild" do out here. Then we all stupidly placed our palms on some rocks that had been baking around the picnic area and fried our hands.

And soon, past Sugarloaf mountain, the In-Ko-Pah Gorge, the Anza-Borrego Desert State park and Viejas Mountain, we arrived in San Diego, where we were very excited to see a giant Honda dealership, just in case. From the freeway, it looked like it even had modern air conditioning.

Tomorrow: The Zoo.

Western Expansion Vacation: Day 3

I had this great fear that helicopters would be buzzing this way and that, dripping in and out of the Grand Canyon every five minutes during out stay. I based this on the airport we saw on our way into the park, at which was parked a long chain of multicolored helicopters, the sparse kind, the kind that was one jet engine away from being the bubble space car from the Jetsons.

But, pleasantly enough, we weren't bothered by incessant tourist flights at all, and we were able to stand in awe at the magnificent sight that is the Grand Canyon. Someone once told me the Grand Canyon is proof of a higher power at work, but I prefer to think of it as proof of erosion, and that raging river a mile down, granted some speed and volume thanks to the friendly folks at the Glen Canyon dam upstream, just keeps churning away, year after year, grinding its way through the earth to its inevitable run in with the roof of the Mole Men's metal city far below.

We had a great hiking plan in mind, a moderately difficult hike that would dip into the canyon and go on for some time. But then we realized that hikers who go down must come back up, and a quick glance at the kids reminded us they might lack certain elements of fortitude required for climbing back to civilization. So instead we took the shuttle bus.

The Grand Canyon Village on the south rim has all sorts of shuttle buses that carry people from one end of the village to the other, and we hopped on the blue bus that took us to a red bus that took us up to Hopi Point (well, actually, a little below that, since the road's under construction). And as we climbed in the rickety bus whose last job must have been shuttling Japanese internment prisoners in World War II, I stared at the deep drop into the canyon a few feet from the side of the road, and I kept thinking, what if one of these bus drivers, retirees by the looks of it, decides today's the day he's cashing in, there's nothing else to live for so he might as well go out with a bang, and with a giant tug at the wheel, the whole bus falls straight down into the mile-deep canyon? That would be a lousy bus ride.

I wiped my sweaty palms on my pants and focused on the other passengers: a family of French, four from Australia who were genuinely happy and, believe it or not, said "G'day, g'day!" to everyone, some Japanese students who were playing Tetris on their mobile phones, and a group from who-knows-where USA who were chiding the slowest one of their party to hurry up and get on the bus. When she did, the entire bus erupted into applause, and she grinned wildly, showing off her crooked and brown-stained teeth that looked as if she had just finished eating a tub of brownies.

Once we started hiking down from Hopi Point, I began an instant transformation into paranoid father, berating the kids to stay far away from the path's edge, which was at least a smallish number of feet from the lip of the canyon, and beyond that, wide open air embracing an instant vertical fall into the nether regions of the park. It was enough to make my palms sweaty. And, like the picture in my head of the bus driver taking a wrong turn, I could imagine Alex rushing past the girls to get first in line, launching himself over the cliff, legs spinning in the air Wylie Coyote-style, and then plunging to his doom.

But, of course, nothing dire happened at all, and we made it to the campsite with no trouble. We attended a ranger presentation about water, which was very good but made us all extremely thirsty, then dinner (where we all drank plenty of water) at the Arizona Room of the Bright Angel Lodge. And even though the view at the restaurant was fantastic, the food . . . well, not so much. I had pork medallions, which were two hockey puck-sized slices of pork glued together with some strange brown sauce. Once I scraped off the sauce and made an impromptu sandwich with one slice and a dinner role, the resulting combination tasted utterly no different than a chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A (in this case, a very expensive doppleganger sandwich).

Then that was that, and I had to get back to the campsite quickly before sunset (since I hadn't put up the tent yet). The kids and Suzanne followed, after getting ice cream, and they were amazed at the woman on the shuttle bus with them who spent the entire time yapping on her phone about why the people here were making such a big deal about a hole in the ground.

I guess it takes all kinds to enjoy one of the most awesome sights on the planet.

Tomorrow: On the road to San Diego.

Western Expansion Vacation: Day 2

Even after a night sleeping on the granite pillow (Alex's hair that had been on the pillow stuck straight up, just like half his head had just seen something scary), Alex was in good spirits, so we dashed down to the hotel's lobby to get our fill of free breakfast, which included: half a dozen stale donuts and coffee. So we dashed back to the room and made plans for a better breakfast.

(We've found free breakfasts at hotels to be really hit or miss, mostly miss as in missing taste, nutrition, or redeeming value. This one was particularly heinous, week-old donuts in a cardboard box. That said, we've had some great breakfasts too. Every hotel seems to love English muffins.)

First off, we needed to visit Robertson's string shop to switch out Alex's viola for a cello, a change he's making because cellists get to sit down and play, and then after that we hit I-40 for the long(ish) drive to the Grand Canyon.

We stopped at the Painted Desert National Park and ate a picnic lunch looking over the otherworldly shapes and colors of the desert, splayed out in a valley below us. And then we drove south through the park and into the petrified forest where we hiked for about a mile along the Crystal Forest trail.

On the hike we ran across a older man who was recording and narrating his trip on video. He held the video camera arm's length away from him and droned on and on, his unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt blowing behind him, his bulbous tummy toasting in the afternoon sun.

"In 1903," he lectured the camera, "people came here by and took away petrified wood by the truckload . . ."

He had his camera focused on a massive petrified tree trunk and on the path we were following. As I walked by I said in a loud voice, "And to this day we have yet to master the alien technology that levitated these trees here for us to enjoy."

I'll probably be cut out during post.

The petrified forest is an amazing place, but the rangers kept lecturing everyone on the evils of taking any petrified wood from the forest. At first I thought this was overkill until we learned that a ton of petrified wood is stolen from the park every month. That made us all very sad.

After the park, we drove through Flagstaff to Williams, Arizona for dinner. Williams is not what we expected; it's quite the tourist town, thanks to its self proclamation of "The Gateway to the Grand Canyon." And it's also the place you catch a train to the canyon, which sounded compelling because 50 more miles of driving didn't.

But a few dinner calzones later, we filled up the van with some fancy $4.19 a gallon gasoline and headed for the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

Tomorrow: Exploring the Grand Canyon

Western Expansion Vacation: Day 1

This summer we decided it was time for a little trip out west, toward the Grand Canyon, San Diego, and then Los Angeles, the land of make believe and Fabulous People (TM).

We started Friday, leaving late in the afternoon, stopping in Albuquerque for the night (which is about four hours from Amarillo). We stayed in [Generic and Unforgettable hotel] that was located conveniently on a street called Hotel Drive. This is one of those hotels that, with a AAA membership and penchant for lying about the size of your family, you can get a stylish and interestingly smelling room for only $39.00 a night. But with three kids in tow, we were given the super-deluxe suite, which is identical to every other room, only four times more expensive.

We had hoped for an uneventful night, since the next day would require much longer driving, but we didn't anticipate the Night of the Granite Pillow.

I collapsed on the bed, and my head landed with a dull thud on the immovable object below it, a small suitcase-sized pillow that had the density of a lead bar.

"Oof!" I said, hearing the ratcheting pop, pop, pop of my spine and it suffered through the shockwave traveling down my back. Of course, after that everyone wanted to try out the rock pillow, both for sleeping and as a possible weapon in a pillow fight.

Alex was the one who offered to trade pillows with me, an offer I couldn't refuse (and I think he wanted the pillow to threaten the girls if they did something he didn't like).

Tomorrow: the Grand Canyon.