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Published: August 25th 2011
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Vacuum Outlet
Exciting tourist destinations!! I've been in LA for 2 weeks now but since Travel Blog wasn't letting me upload photos for a while there, I am only now getting around to putting up photos from the rest of the trip. After Missouri, we drove southwest into Oklahoma City for a lunch break and a quick trip to a new outlet mall. On the way, we stopped at a Route 66 stop - Pops, home to HUNDREDS of pop varieties. One bottle of Lenin-ade later and we were back on our way. After lunch in O-City, upon returning to the car, we were horrified to find that the air conditioner had stopped working - right in the middle of the hottest day of the entire trip! The temperature was at a sweaty 45 degrees celsius (this is before humidity) or 110 degrees fahrenheit. Yikes!
We sweatily motored on to Amarillo, Texas, our resting point for the night. I got in touch with some Mazda dealers and made an appointment with a dealer in Albuquerque to have the car looked at. We woke up bright and early in Amarillo, had some Texas-shaped waffles, and were on our way to a tacky route 66 destination -
the famous Cadillac Drive. Apparently some rich guy paid for random art installations all around Amarillo and this is one of them. It's pretty neat, especially in the morning sun.
Anyways, we drove during the cool morning hours and made it to Albuquerque right around OUR lunch time (which is of course way earlier than normal because we eat breakfast at 6AM). We dropped off the car and were shuttled off to a local mall to kill some time. Six hours later the car was finally ready to go. We headed off into the evening with our delightful A/C working again. We were hoping to get to Flagstaff for the night but with the longer-than-expected delay, we only made it as far as Holbrook, Arizona - a town which seems to have been built specifically for people who can't quite make it to Flagstaff. It's full of cheap hotels and not much else. But we had a bed for the night and breakfast in the morning.
Our last day we drove through the hilly desert into California. We arrived in LA in the afternoon to find that our accomodation for the night with some family friends wasn't quite
ready for us. So we did what any good Route 66 driver would do (and what the posers who take the interstate version of route 66 because it's a hell of a lot faster) - we went to Santa Monica to see THE END of the route. From Chicago to Santa Monica - we braved the trek!
And that's the story of our trip (in a nutshell). The photos tell the rest.
And as for the license plate game, which we were hoping to update on here every day until travel blog stopped working for us...we kept playing in LA and we did AMAZING! We got many states we didn't expect including ALASKA and HAWAII!! It's easier to say which license plates we didn't get. We've decided these states suck and need to get out on the road more: DC (not a real state), North Dakota, South Dakota (where you at, Dakota's??), Rhode Island (ok they're small so they're forgiven), South Carolina (we kept seeing North but never south!!) and Wyoming (I kept hoping to see Wyoming but no dice. They clearly need to get out more.)
Also exciting was on the I-10 driving into LA when
Confusing sign
Why would you ever drive into the smoke?? we saw an Ontario license plate and we had a great time waving and thumbs-up-ing to them!
-Dafne
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