We started out on I-5 south, on our way to Tucson, AZ. My goal was to keep our daily travel time to around 6 hours. This turned out to be a good decision because by the time hour 6 was rolling around, people were starting to get cranky. I did have a daily "good traveler" award for the kids who were on their best traveler behavior, and this helped keep attitudes fairly positive. Although, it turned out to be too good of an idea because they all started tie-ing for the win!
Our first stop was in Ashland, Oregon on the southern border. This was a Holiday Inn Express and Suites. It was awesome. We got there in time for the kids to enjoy the pool the night we stayed, and they had a pretty decent continental breakfast in the morning.
Woke up the next morning and started our journey to San Francisco! We breezed into SF around 1pm. My friend Shannon was still at work, so we headed out to see some stuff.
...and the classic.
When Shannon got off work, we wound our way to her house, dropped our stuff and headed for pizza. We hung out that night catching up. Slept (all over) in her cool little 1 bedroom house and then we packed up and headed out again early the next morning. Because we had gone to visit Shannon, we had gone a little bit "out of the way" as our ultimate goal was Tucson. However, when on a road trip, I am thinking there is no such thing as "out of the way"... Regardless, we had to grapple our way through traffic and back to the I-5 and head toward Los Angeles.
Then, this was all we saw. For. Hours:
And then as we got closer, this:
After saying prayers that no one was injured, we sent up some gratitude prayers. We were SO grateful that this was on the OTHER side of the road. Traffic was backed up for miles...
Next stop? Evike! (Los Angeles) This stop was for my airsoft loving teenager (and his little brothers)...
Not so much for Sara. You can see that she is taking things real serious!
Yes. Those are airsoft guns. Lots of guns. He was in heaven. Along with guns, they had all sorts of gear to go with it. Goggles, masks, gloves, combat armor and a place to test a gun that you might want to buy. Thirsty? Sorry. These vending machines only serve up airsoft pellets...
It was a pretty cool place to see, if I do say so myself.
After Evike, we crawled out of East LA traffic and headed to our hotel. Same chain of hotels as the first night (awesome), but the experience here was a little different (not awesome). This hotel was an older one, in need of some TLC and maybe some upgrades. Everything worked and it was a place to lay our heads so for that we were thankful, but there wasn't much sweetness in these suites.
Woke up early again the next morning for the last leg of the journey. Out through Palm Desert/Palm Springs area, into Phoenix and then on down to Tucson. Not much to see on this section except dry and hot. Did I mention that the air conditioning in my van was broken? Ha! Yep. I was definitely thankful that it was January and not June!
Closer...
At one point, as we were zooming down the freeway I saw a sign that said, "Elevation = Sea Level." I thought that was interesting considering we were in the middle of the desert and it "felt" like we were higher than that... I wish I could have gotten a picture of that sign.
Last fill up before we're there!
And....
WE MADE IT! Phew...
ARIZONA BABY!
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