Day 1: September 18, 2001
Drive from Bay Area to Needles, CA

Today we started our driving trip to the southwestern US. We're not entirely sure where we're going, but we're going to head toward Arizona and New Mexico and see what happens. We'd like to visit Dipti in Texas and maybe we'll even go as far as Louisiana, but for now, we'll just see how it goes.

We got a late start, just because it took us a while to finish packing up and respond to email and such before we left. Walendo had made a makeshift American flag for the antenna but once we started driving we saw it was much too wobbly, so we taped it to the back of the car.

Windmills on I40

The drive through California was pretty uneventful. We took 101 South to 152 East all the way across to 99, south to Bakersfield where we picked up 58 East across the Mojave desert. There's a stretch after Bakersfield and before Techahapi that we like a lot. It's a hilly stretch with lots of oak trees and rocks. Not sure why it looks so much prettier than other similar areas, but it does. After the pretty area, there are hills full of windmills, which always looks neat. We stopped a few times for gas and to stretch our legs and geez it was hot! It is the desert, after all.

We were going to stop in Barstow for dinner at around 7pm, but had trouble finding a place to eat. Just as we came to the diners at the east end of town Walendo remembered Peggy Sue's 50s restaurant about 20 miles outside of town. (We had stayed in Bartsow for a weekend when we visited Afton Canyon, and we'd eaten at Peggy Sue's twice.) We decided to keep going to Peggy Sue's, figuring it would be fun to go back to this entertaining restaurant in the middle of the desert, but after more than 20 miles, we realized that it was on Rt15, not on Rt40. Doh! So we kept driving the rest of the 140 miles to Needles, which is right on the border of Arizona. (Walendo did all the driving, I had to lay in the back on my stomach because my back was hurting me.)

In Needles, we stopped at the first hotel we saw (Royal Inn Best Western for $61/night, which isn't bad except it's overpriced for this town). It was about 9pm. Then we went to a nearby diner where Walendo snarfed up his omlette and pancakes. I guess he was hungry. Even the waitress laughed at him. Then we drove through the town a bit, going off the main drag. There's a fairly large community here. I wonder why, since it's mostly just desert. What do people do here? We didn't see a lot of industry, but you never know.

At the restaurant they had those coupon booklets for hotels in the area (also on the web at www.travelcoupons.com and www.ustravelguide.com), so we picked up a few. We found one that had the hotel we were staying in for $50. When we got back to the hotel, I asked the guy if we could get that rate and he said they were all out of those rooms. That seemed odd, since they obviously had rooms. Do they have special inferior rooms for that rate? I let it drop and wondered if these coupons ever work. (As it turned out, they did. We used them 3 or 4 times on the trip and saved about $125.) When we got back to the room, we started looking through the guide books to figure out what to do tomorrow.

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