California Road Trip, Day 1

We wanted to leave at 4am but we didn't get to bed until really late and ended up leaving closer  to 5am. We expected that the kids would file into the car and go back to sleep at such an early hour so we could power through 4 hours to Amarillo where we'd make the first stop for breakfast. No such luck. We made it almost an hour to El Reno where we stopped at McD's to get breakfast. When the drive-thru worker let us know the McCafe machine was "broken" we high-tailed it to the next McD's and got our breakfast and McCafes for the road. We promptly ate this meal in the parking lot of the Burger King next door. [Side note: It appears that BK had a nice breakfast menu but they were not busy at all. Wonder if they might need some better marketing?]

Sunrise in Oklahoma (wind farms on I-40)

We stopped for lunch at a Dairy Queen in New Mexico where we kept marveling at the clouds. Actually we marveled at the clouds the entire way. There was not much to see on the ground so the eye was drawn upward where there was much more interest.


The kids were good some of the time and fighting a good chunk of the time. It's amazing how quickly they go from best friends to throwing each other under the bus. Mostly they were happy...

Happy Camper

After lunch at DQ, the next interesting place we stopped was at the Continental Divide.





We decided to punt trying to see the Painted Desert/Petrified Forest in favor of getting to Flagstaff for the night, but we did wander off the I-40 trail just a bit to try to see some meteor crater. We thought we could just drive by but apparently you had to pay to go into the visitor center for an hour before the tour so we punted that and made tracks to Flagstaff.

We got to Flagstaff before nightfall and arrived to our skeevy hotel in time to order some awesome pizza and Caesar salad from Scott's Chicago Pizza.  It was at this point that I realized that I was missing my debit card and thought I must have left it at Natural Grocers but then I recalled booking the hotel after the NG trip, so I must have had it at home. I texted my nephew who texted me back a photo of my laptop with my debit card. Good kid!

Side note: Do not book your hotel at the last minute like I did. We did the same thing back in 2004 when Scott, Emi and I road-tripped to Chicago. At least we ended up with some really great Chicago deep dish pizza both times.