After Meg and I spent six hours sitting on the tarmac at Chicago's O'Hare airport last December, we vowed that we'd had it with air travel. We decided we'd take at least one trip by car that we'd normally take by plane, thereby taking at least a small amount of revenue out of the airline industry's coffers, as compensation for our ill treatment at Christmas time.
If you've been paying attention to every minute detail of our lives (there's no particular reason why you should; I'm just saying if you have), you probably know that we've been plotting and scheming to pull up stakes and move our flying circus to Flagstaff -- sometime within the next year or so, we hope. Having spent some time out there last October, we decided to go there in summer, to get a different view of the town, when it's got more tourists and when the weather's a bit rainier and not quite as glorious as it is in the fall.
Kicks available here
As anyone over the age of 30 or so should remember (from the song), US Route 66 winds from Chicago to L.A., more than 2,000 miles all the way. One of the towns it winds through is Flagstaff. Although Route 66 no longer exists as an official highway, we decided to take the Interstates that replaced it, along with a few segments of the original highway that are still in use. This route took us through St. Louis, Springfield, Missouri, Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Texas, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, among other pillars of Middle America.
Instead of taking one of our old cars, we decided to rent a car, figuring the 3,800 miles would be a bit much for any of our current sets of wheels. (Meg's Geo Tracker has well over 100,000 miles on it, as does my Hyundai, as you'll remember from Ode to a rice burner, July 21. My Chevy C-10 pickup only has about 83,000 miles on it, but it's also 24 years old and not in any condition to pound out 700-mile days at this point in its life.) We ended up with a '98 Mercury Tracer from Hertz. Not a bad car, for a mid-size four-door sedan. Not exactly a drag racer, though -- it had a 2-point-something-liter inline-4, which we referred to as "that team of trained squirrels under the hood." Power delivery was through a five-speed automatic transmission, which was the source of no end of frustration for Meg -- she repeatedly insisted on flogging the thing to within an inch of its life, in the vain hope of squeezing a ten-second quarter-mile out of it. No dice. Still, it was a great car for driving all day. Pretty economical, too, at around 28 mpg.
Cooling off in Arizona
One of the big misconceptions about Arizona is that it's one big, endless, undifferentiated desert. When we told people we were going there in August, the typical reaction was, "What are you, nuts?! I hope you like it hot!" Well, we like 50-degree overnight lows (with low humidity), clear, haze-free skies, and cool rain showers, which is what Flagstaff has in the summer. At 7,000 feet, a 90-degree day is unusual. Thursday, we took the chairlift up to the top of the Arizona Snowbowl (a ski resort just north of Flagstaff -- yes, there's a ski resort, not an inconsiderable one, in Arizona). We found that packing sweatshirts had been a good idea -- it gets pretty chilly at 12,000 feet. But hey, we're not about to complain about the general misperception of northern Arizona -- the better for keeping it uncrowded!
1-888-STA-HOME!
Anytime we take a road trip in the summer, it's hard not to notice the huge number of recreational vehicles (RVs) on the road. The RV is a concept that escapes me. You go out and pay anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000 for a 35-foot-long land barge that goes five miles on a gallon of gas -- all in the name of saving a few bucks on motel rooms?
Some of the "units" (that's what we've taken to calling them) we saw on this trip were beyond belief, in terms of the stuff people found it necessary to carry cross-country with them. I'm talking bicycles, motorcycles, golf carts, lawn chairs, satellite dishes -- and that's just the stuff they strap on outside the RV itself. What's more, a lot of these travelers can't seem to get by without towing a car, pickup truck, or sport-utility vehicle behind them.
I can't figure out why they have to take so much stuff along when they go on vacation. I thought the idea of taking a trip was to get away from home, not to drag it with you. Then, when you consider what the monstrosities cost -- and that the savings on lodging is offset by the cost of the extra gas they burn -- it's even harder to fathom. But I suppose they don't do much harm, other than ruining mountain roads by taking them at 15 miles per hour, while motorcyclists fume behind them.
Temporary burglary
Having said all that, though, I have to admit that there's
at least one reason why it might not be such a horrible idea to drive around
the country in a house-on-wheels. That's the fact that staying in a motel is
no guarantee of a good night's rest. Regular readers of this column know that
Meg and I haven't had the greatest luck with overnight lodging in recent months
(see Sleep deprivation for fun and profit,
June 8). The afternoon before we left Flagstaff to come home, however, we experienced
the
strangest motel incident I've had yet.
That morning, we'd gone out to the Snowbowl, then had lunch at the Downtown Diner in Flagstaff, then returned to our motel room at the palatial Crystal Inn on Route 66. As it turned out, the maid was busily cleaning our room when we arrived, so we waited 'til she was finished, then went in -- and discovered that the room was more than just cleaned up: all of our belongings, including the computer on which I'm typing this, had been removed!
As we ran to the front desk, I was already going through a series of mental calculations: "Well, the computer cost me $2,300 last year, but they've come down to about half that price since then, so that's maybe $1,100-1,200. The rest of our stuff was probably worth a few hundred bucks total, if that. But how are we going to replace it all out here?"
Well, as it turned out, our belongings hadn't been stolen; they had been taken out of the room and put into storage by the motel staff, in the mistaken belief that we'd taken off and left town without checking out, and had "forgotten" to take our stuff with us! "We check in with our guests after three days," we were told. "You weren't here, and we kept stopping by, but we missed you every time. So we assumed you were gone," the explanation continued. Never mind that we'd obviously been occupying and using the room -- the maid had come by and straightened the place up each day, leaving a new set of towels, and so on. It shouldn't have taken Sherlock Holmes to figure out that we were still using the place, but somehow, the staff had gotten it into their heads that we were long gone. So they shoved all of our belongings into a storage closet behind the front office, dumping all the loose items into a big plastic trash bag. They figured they could go ahead and rent the room out to someone else -- never mind the fact that we'd been scheduled, since the day we arrived, to be in that room until the following day.
In any case, when we explained that no, we hadn't taken off, that we weren't planning to fly the coop for another day, and that if we had flown the coop, we certainly wouldn't have left a computer, a camera, and other expensive gear lying around in the room, the staff member on duty brought us back into the storage closet, from which we retrieved our stuff and brought it back to the room, where it remained until we packed up and started the drive home the next day.
So all was well that ended well, on that score. Rather amusing, even, in hindsight. But I have a feeling that next time we go to Flagstaff, we'll probably look for another place to stay!
Copyright © 1998 John J. Kafalas