FIFTY STATES AWAYAfter a late arrival in Albuquerque last night and finally connecting to some WiFi, we were in for some disappointing news. Unfortunately we had driven all the way here from Roswell for a special activity, which turned out to be fully booked. Assessing our situation we decided to work around this, because we both still wanted to have this experience. Despite the fact that it wouldn’t be the most efficient way to drive around the next few states we decided that we would book the next available time slot and head onto another state to keep the miles rolling, before returning for said activity.
Bright and early we headed out of Albuquerque towards Phoenix, Arizona. On our way we saw a truck with a dog sat in the bed of it going along the freeway, I bet the dog liked the feel of the wind on its face! I commented to Ben that we’d seen it all now, only for him to point out ten minutes later another truck with two people sat in the bed of the truck! Crazy times in Albuquerque!
After exiting New Mexico we found the first part of the drive into Arizona to be particularly beautiful, with high red and orange rocks all around. I had noticed the terrain steadily changing to encorporate the huge stripy rocks, a gorgeous colour tone and something I had been excited to see beyond the scope of the TV and internet pictures. Continuing our journey deeper into Arizona it turned out to be an interesting drive, and our longest drive so far.
Arizona, unbeknown to us was in the midst of a massive dust storm, this provided us with another category of weather to add to our experience list! At first it wasn’t too bad winds were at 40mph, but it seemed to escalate pretty quickly ramping up to around 70mph. The road was completely obscured ahead of us by the dust and getting out of the car was no fun (we definitely need to be wearing sunglasses and keep our mouths closed)!
Along our journey we discovered an abundance of tumbleweed! It was rather funny to see trucks and RVs passing us with the grills on the front completely covered in the stuff! We were excited to see if we had any attached to our grill, upon our brief lunch stop for yet more Mexican food. It turned out that as we turned into the car park a huge chunk blew off, so we didn’t actually get to see it stuck to the car, but it was there!
Continuing the drive we eventually made it out of the storm, where the terrain turned to a lush green and we got our first peak at some cactus (Ma, check these bad boys out)! Something we had expected to see on Texas but oddly didn’t! It’s really something to be excited and appreciative over the smallest things and to be continually in a state of wonder.
We had planned to make it to Phoenix this morning and we did, this epic journey clocked up 421 miles, which Ben tells me is roughly 2/3rds of the distance of the UK. Checking in to rest up we are rather confused, we appeared to gain an hour. We had not been expecting another time change until we hit the west coast (namely Nevada and California). So after some good ole googling we found the answer: it turns out that although Arizona is in mountain time, it does not observe daylight saving time like the other states do. The clocks, in the states we have just passed through have just gone back an hour, but as Arizona doesn’t do this we are now technically in Pacific time (PST). Who knew?
