Get your kicks... on route 66

Well I have finally edited most of our trip pictures: 900 something, only 500 left to go!  So for the next week or so I will be posting about our trip to and from Seattle for the National Conference of Education of the Ceramics Arts.  I can't believe it took so long! Well here it goes! Have a great Tuesday ~Kendra

Day 1: March 23rd 2012 
On a warm and windy Friday afternoon, after weeks of planning, looking over google maps, campsites in four states, grocery list, and packing check list, we were finally ready to load the car and hit the road.  I was a bundle of excited and nervous energy as Jon and I got into the car to leave Lubbock for our grand adventure out to the west coast.  Of course the first part of the drive from Lubbock to Clovis, NM and on to Albuquerque, NM was been there, seen that.  321 miles down, quite a few more to go!  We hit Albuquerque right around the 5 o'clock rush hour, but traffic on I-40 was flowing good so we blazed on through to make our way to Winslow, Arizona.  

We started hearing a bit of a rattling noise, but the roads were rough and didn't think to much about it.  Being on 1-40 really was like the scenes from Pixar's Cars of all the country side and made me think of that song, Get your kicks on Route 66.  We stopped at a Shell station in Gallup, NM (I do believe) and for the first time all day, we had trouble with the gas card.  Of course their customer service was already closed and the automated system was of no use to get the card validated for the night.  Hiccup #1 of the trip...

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but that's ok the GPS says we will be arriving at our camping location at 8:30 pm and it was 7:30 and still not dark!  So we fill up the tank, eat our sandwiches, and hit the road again.   

Well the GPS was right about us getting there at 8:30 but we didn't realize we were about to change time zones again, so something in the car is rattling on the rough highway, gas card is not working and now we have a little over two hours until we get to our campsite.  We stopped at the closed Arizona Welcome Center to stretch our legs and take a break.  On the road again, we finally made it to our campsite at the Homolovi Ruins near Winslow, AZ.  Now if you have read or heard about any of my previous camping trips, you will know that we always set up camp in the dark.  I think in the past year we have set up camp one time in the daylight, only to move that same day because of the forest fires.  So here we are again, setting up camp in the dark.  We got everything set up pretty fast, crawled into our sleeping bags and went to sleep.   It was still pretty early when we went to bed, neither of us thought about it getting much colder that night, but both of us woke up cold.  Seeing that we were in the desert... this should have come as no surprise.  Day one of our trip down!