A Three-State Day

Route 10 Eastbound
Arizona

It’s a three-state day today. We left Benton Arizona at 9:30 this morning, and got onto Route 10 Eastbound. After about 100 miles of gorgeous desolation of desert, we stopped for ten minutes in Willcox for McDonald’s coffee, which tasted so much better for my having waited.

I don’t know if I will be able to go on without these incredible views. Miles and miles of desert everywhere you look, and forty miles away in every direction, mountains in cowboy-movie purple and grey and red-brown, a rustic picture frame set against a sky of Blessed Mother blue. I never thought I’d love this part of the country as much as I seem to today.

My take on the desert has always been dust, scorpions and rattlesnakes. No thanks.

But instead of eeeyew I am in aah mode. Our vocabulary has suffered from the overuse of words like: incredible, magnificent, oh my god, so beautiful, and holy cow. We're going to have to consult a thesaurus for some new descriptors.

We’ll be in New Mexico in about a half hour, and we’ll skim the Mexican border, passing the border patrol stations, where we’ll inform the officials that while we are Americanos, our dog is a Chihuahua masquerading as a Jack Russell and should therefore be deported. So far it hasn’t worked. I loved New Mexico, so we’ll have to come back one day and explore some more of it. For now, however, it's a passageway to our next layover.

In a couple of hours we’ll roll into El Paso for the night. Texas is wide, really wide, so it will take us three days to cross it. Then onto Louisiana and north.

The body shop called today and said our parts were shipped this morning from Oregon to Syracuse. This time, somebody may actually be telling the truth. We’re on our way.