Alligators and Hand Grenades

November 4 – 5, 2012

The 4th was a day of driving. We left Weatherford pretty early after having breakfast with Aunt Rosie and family. Our goal was to get to Palmetto Island State Park in southern Louisiana. The drive was nothing to write about except we started ‘The Wrath of the Khans’ podcast which discusses the history of the Mongol horsemen and their conquest of parts of Asia and Europe.

We got to the state park in the dark and went meet by a friendly little warning.

Watch Out

Scary, but not a problem, we sleep in the back of the truck. We found a campsite and went through the usual motions of moving stuff from the back to the front so we could sleep. We sat outside and had a beer while I did blog stuff and Chandler studied the atlas. I got a few mosquito bites so I moved to the back of the truck for shelter. Eventually we decided to go to sleep. It was really warm and humid, but with all the bugs I was sleeping with my sleeping bag on and the windows shut. I woke up drenched in sweat covered in bites. The truck topper is definitely not “bug tight”. It was awful. I could not fall back asleep and woke up Chan with my thrashing.

Groggily, he suggested we set up the tent. Genius idea. It was cool and enclosed but now I could hear everything. While camping in Alaska, I was always terrified of grizzly bears and used to keeping an ear out. The forest around us was loud with crashing from lots of mysterious things that go bump in the night, but I finally fell asleep and didn’t get eaten.

The next morning we had a few hours to kill before we could check into our hotel, so we decided to hang out in the park. There were canoe rentals for $5 and according to the attendant on duty, potential to see some alligators.

Canoe ride, lucy on point

The canoe ride started out pretty mellow down a creek with nothing to see but fish jumping. The attendant said the fish jump to get away from the alligators. If that was true, it seemed there were dozens of alligators in the water. We got to a little lake and Chandler saw something jumping the water and suddenly there were two alligators swimming around. One was much larger than the other, so naturally we name them mama and baby.

Let's go swimming

We hung out for a bit and then continued down the creek. We saw a huge heron and a vulture. The creek led to the Vermilion River which we had to get out and cross a weir to access. The river was slow moving and had an island we could paddle around. The water was shallow around the island and since neither of us wanted to get in the water if we got stuck, we turned back for the creek.

Scarves or moss

On crossing the weir again, I saw a snake swimming in the water (as if snakes in the grass are not scary enough), but we didn’t get a photo. We hustled back to the lake to get another look at the gators. We were in luck because mama was sunning herself on the bank.

Big Mama

Lucy's new friend

We hung out for as long as we dared so not to piss her off. On the way back to the take out point we also saw a turtle.

Teenage mutant ninja

After our canoe adventure, it was off to New Orleans. We had a three hour drive before we got to the hotel. Once Lucy was settled and we each had a shower, Chandler found us a place downtown for dinner. Just our luck, there was a Saint’s game and people were everywhere. Parking prices were inflated, so Chandler drove around for awhile until we found street parking. We just happened to find a spot on the corner of Bourbon Street.

Bourbon Street

Chandler’s mom said that we had to get hurricanes because they are an iconic drink of New Orleans. I am allergic to rum and someone needed to drive, so it was up to Chan to do all the drinking. The only places we found with hurricanes had basically alcoholic slurpie machines and weren’t sure of how it would be.

Slurpie heaven

Instead, Chan opted for the hand grenade. A very alcoholic beverage in a large green cup with the base shaped like a grenade. I’m sure you can imagine how the rest of the night went with one drunk guy and one sober driver.

Coolest guy on Bourbon St

The next couple days

Nov9

October 31 – November 4

The last couple of days have been family and friends. We had a great time with everyone. For brevity we’ll only share the highlights. Here is a irrelevant milestone: We hit 66,666 miles on the odometer in the truck. The number below is the total miles driven at that point, 6,967.6!

Halloween night was spent with my brother Jon and his wife Katrina. We had dinner and a few drinks and told stories. The next day, Jon had a test, so we took him to school and hung out with Katrina until he was done and then explored Austin together for a bit. They were kind enough to give us some new podcasts as we had run out of “This American Life”. We are now listening to “Hardcore History” which are really good and informative.

We then headed up to Temple, TX to meet my friend and her family at a Mexican restaurant. This was cheap and incredibly tasty with enormous quantities of food.

Chandler's pig cauldron of mexican meat

We all tried cactus for the first time and I highly recommend it. We spent the night at their house and were able to check up more than at the restaurant.

The next morning we boogied on up to Weatherford, TX to visit with Chandler’s Aunt Rosemary and her partner, Kent. Kent’s brother Mark and his wife Sum Se were also visiting. We spent two nights with them and had a lot of fun playing all sorts of games from the Wii to washers, similar to horseshoes. Sum Se is from Thailand so we got lots of good tips for our upcoming bike trip which begins in Bangkok. Sum Se also called Lucy by a new nickname which has stuck, BarBaQ!

The wolf goes bowling

Crazy Brothers

It was nice to take a few days off and not do any driving. Thanks to Jon, Katrina, Shana, Phil, Rosemary and Kent for some great Texas hospitality. Next stop Louisiana!

850ft underground

Nov6

October 30, 2012

After our very chilly night, Chandler and I popped out of bed the moment the alarm went off. We wanted to get to the Carlsbad Caverns in time for the lower cave tour and still had several hours of driving to ahead of us.

The driving was uneventful but entertaining thanks to a few “This American Life” podcasts. We made it to the park at 11:40, which gave us time to kennel Lucy and check out the self-guided upper cave tour. The Caverns has a cheap kennel service for animals if it is going to be over 75F so people don’t leave their pets in the car. So awesome, Lucy loves AC!

The self-guided tour began with a quick elevator ride down 750ft to the upper cave. There was a designated concrete footpath around the cave with specific features illuminated. We only had 35 minutes to look around before we had to get back for the tour.

Giant column

When we signed up for the lower cave tour we didn’t really know what would be happening except that ropes and ladders were involved. We met up with our group only to discover there were more park employees than tourists and would have a nice small group. We were given gloves, hard hats with lights and rules about safety and touching cave formations.

The entrance to the lower cave was a small hole at the bottom of a pit in the upper cave. We had actually walked by it on our self-guided tour completely unaware of it. Everyone walked down a slippery slope, aided by a rope, to reach the hole. We descended a series of three ladders down an additional 100ft.

The descent

Down the hatch

Once everyone was down the ladders, we were led around the cave and shown interesting features. Normally, the guide just spouts off memorized facts, but the guy we had was amazing. He has his master’s degree in geology and really knew his stuff and our questions weren’t brushed aside with bs answers.

Stalagtites

Bat in stalagmite

Aragonite bush

Since our group was so small, and we hadn’t smashed any ancient cave formations, the lead ranger asked us if we wanted to take the longer route out of the cave. This was exciting because we were able to go a more challenging route that was a lot tighter than the normal trail and also had a lot of delicate features much closer to the path.

The tour went an extra 30 minutes so the rest of the caves were closed when we got done. Chandler collected the dog and I took care of our gear. Our next stop was Austin, TX to visit my brother and his wife. We didn’t quite realize how far away Austin was from the caverns, so we decided to drive a few hours to shave off some time.

Mexican food was in order again and we found a busy and sketchy looking place in Pecos,TX. The moment we walked in the door it was obvious we weren’t from around there. Almost everyone had cowboy boots, one guy even had spurs, and cowboy hats. The food was good and everyone was very friendly. Chandler had a steak covered with a “long green chile” which was cut open and roasted. I had a chile rellenos. Again, it was too dark to find a suitable place to camp so we stayed at the Walmart of Fort Stockton, Texas.

Lucy of Arabia

Nov3

October 29, 2012

We spent a few hours with Alexis and her boys in the morning before leaving for New Mexico. The boys made sure Lucy was included in all the fun.

Lucy's cootie

Lucy and friends

Neither Chan or I have been to the southern part of the US east of Arizona, except for Florida, so we’ll be traveling through new territory for a while, which is exciting.

Chandler and I had two goals for the day. Find good Mexican food and get to White Sands National Monument.

We have noticed that the crappier a place looks, the better the Mexican food. The place we found in Las Cruces was no exception to the rule. The only thing on the menu was gordita, which for the uninitiated are pita-like pockets of fried cornmeal stuffed with typical Mexican things. We each had three, they were incredible.

On the way out of town, Chandler noticed a display on the side of the road. We knew that White Sands is occasionally closed due to missile testing, so we weren’t too surprised to see one on display. This was the Nike Hercules missile, an anti-aircraft/anti-ballistic missile from the Cold War era. There is an old Nike station outside of Anchorage, on top of a mountain near a local ski area so it was interesting to see a full sized missile up close.

Nike missile

We made it to White Sands about an hour before sunset and met the grumpiest park ranger ever. After Surly Sally (name changed to protect the grumpy) informed us we had to have our tent set up before the sun went down, we had to hustle to get going. In our haste, we didn’t think about how cold the desert is at night. We grabbed our summer sleeping bags and Chan decided to not bring a sleeping pad since sand is so soft.

The hike to our designated camp site fun. We walked up and down sand dunes as the sun set. We joked about mining spice, sandworms and the interesting looking plants growing out of the dunes.

Sunset

Dr Suess plant

Moon rise

After setting up camp it began to get a little cooler. Chan experimented with taking long exposure photos and it got colder. Soon it was cold enough to want to just hang out in the sleeping bags and work on the blog for a bit. The sand on the dunes was super fine and dry which made it feel very soft like fresh powder snow. The sand around our campsite was down in a valley below the dune peaks, and lots of concentrated foot traffic packed the sand like concrete. Sleeping was difficult with our thin bags. At one point, Chan asked if we could share my sleeping pad because he was so cold. I gave him the dog instead as sharing didn’t work so well. I think we each got about 2 hours of sleep total and were happy when the alarm went off at 6am.

We bolted the mile back to the car in the dawn light and blasted the heater. The thermometer read 26F. We were experiencing the true extremes of the desert climate first hand, and we didn’t like it. After an inadvertent tour of Alamogordo in search of coffee (failure) we climbed one of the largest hills in a while to the town of Cloudcroft.

Bear mountain

Nov3

October 26 – 28, 2012

After leaving the frigid Grand Canyon, we drove straight down to Sedona. Once we descended into Oak Creek Canyon we gained about 40 degrees in air temp. Sedona scenery is spectacular, but the town is a bit busy and full of grouchy retirees. We set up camp in the desert on a forest road south of the Sedona scene. We went back up to town for dinner and had a surprisingly fantastic pizza at “A Pizza Heaven”. After surviving a mild sandstorm at our camp site, Tayler and I looked like extras from Mad Max.

The next day we woke up early to beat the heat and headed to Bear Mountain west of Sedona. The trail was pretty straight up, climbing 2,000 in two and a half miles.

We were glad that we brought lots of water as it got over 80F before we made it to the top.

Luckily, Tayler brought a little bottle of Gatorade:

And was nice enough to share:

We went through two different geologic regions, starting in the dark red rock at the bottom, then about 1,000 feet up the rock switched to yellowish sandstone. I’m not sure what the geology story was.

Red sandstone

Yellow sandstone

The view from the ridgeline to the summit was of the sandstone formations around Sedona and the wide open plains to the west.

View towards Sedona

Looking west

At Walmart, Tayler found the perfect recovery food, hot dog flavored chips. Don’t worry, no hot dogs were harmed in the manufacture of these chips – they were 100% artificially flavored!

hot dog chips are cheap in Arizona!

That night we slept at Lake Pleasant which is a misnomer if there ever was one. It turns out that it is the meeting place of all idiots and teenagers with 4x4s within a 100 mile radius. We had the luxury of paying $10 to camp in what amounted to a pullout while people wizzed around us in trucks, presumably completely hammered, until the sun was nearly up again. This is the stuff memories are made of.

After Tayler fulfilled his life long dream of camping at Lake Pleasant Arizona, he figured there wasn’t much else to look forward to seeing in the southwest, so he got on the first flight back to Vermont from Phoenix. He just made out home before the whole country’s air traffic got screwed up by hurricane Sandy.

Later that day we did a much needed load of laundry in Tucson. Then, we visited Jenny’s high school friend Alexis, her husband and three boys that night. We carved pumpkins for Halloween, which was super fun. Jenny and I chose the cat bat, which is pretty scary. Also featured was the guy with scary teeth, the grim reaper and the traditional jack-o-lantern guy.

We considered dipping into Mexico since we were only a half hour away, but chickened out after hearing stories about what goes on right on the other side of the border. If we had more time I think it would have been fun to have driven deeper into Mexico where things are a little less crazy.

A Few Days Off

the things that we do

Category Archives: The Road Trip