Route 66 Westbound - Days 10, 11 and 12: Kingman AZ to Los Angeles CA

---

And suddenly, it was over.

Sorry for the extended delay. The past two days consisted mostly of doing some very serious hanging out with some high-quality people in Kingman, AZ and while this makes for excellent brain-balm it also makes for fucking boring blog posts. To that end, I'll cram the last three days into this final post.

The past three days had been spent at the home of Ron and Margie Stinchfield, relatives of Kennedy's and some of the best, most genuinely good people I've met in a very long time. They took us into their home for three full days, fed us and filled us with coffee and tea and stories and just a lot of good times. I'm truly grateful for everything you did, you two. It was a real pleasure spending time with you and I hope to see you both again very soon.

Friday was limited to a quick shopping trip to Walmart, which while assuredly creepy was nowhere near as bad as the one we hit earlier in the trip. That evening, my good friend Scott Crosier and his wife Meghan made the 90-minute drive down from Vegas to Kingman with their two boys Sevrin and Zod (yes, you read that right) to meet me for a VERY passable dinner at the Kingman Chophouse. It was wonderful to see them and get to spend just a couple of hours catching up.

Ron, Kennedy and I journeyed out to the Grand Canyon Caverns on Saturday morning, the largest dry cavern in North America and the 3rd largest in the world. By dry cavern, I mean that the relative humidity of this near-hermetically sealed cave 210ft below the desert outside of Seligman AZ is a steady 6%, meaning nothing can survive down there for more than 72 hours. There are no plants, no dust, no spiders, no mice, no rats...nada. Nothing lives down there. The facility was designated a bomb-shelter during the Cuban Missile Crisis by JFK, and it remains so today. Stacked in the Hall of the Ages are crates of old crackers and hard-candy (the only food the government saw fit to send into the shelter) and barrel after barrel of 50+ year-old drinking water in 75-gallon containers. Most interestingly, for a mere $800/night for two people, you can stay in the semi-fabulous Cavern Suite, a "guest room" built into the middle of one of the cavern's rooms complete with sleeping for 6, a TV with DVD and VCR(???) a working bathroom with shower and about 40 theater chairs salvaged from a condemned theater in Los Angeles that face a blank stone wall. They say they've rented the room more than 1,300 times in the past 5 years. You'd need a gallon of bourbon and 72oz Ribeye to get me to consider it.

Today, we left Margie waving in the driveway at 6:30am and after a gas-up, coffee-up and wash-up, hit I-40 running for California. We'd seen most of the western stretch of 66 on Thursday when we went to Oatman and Lake Havasu, so we decided to gas it for the Cali border and pick up the trail in Needles. Good thing we did, as I'll explain a little later.

The California desert is the perfect amalgam of everything we'd seen so far on our trip. It has the rocky outcrops and beautiful mountains of Arizona, the scrubland and high-desert stillness of New Mexico combined with the ever-lasting stretch and giant sky of Illinois and Kansas. The first 100 miles of our journey through California were some of the best miles I've experienced throughout this trip. In retrospect, I should have taken more pictures. I should have pulled over more often. I should have budgeted another day so I could drive slower. Towns like Amboy (the "ghost town that ain't dead yet"), Ludlow and Newberry Springs (home of the Bagdad Cafe, named after the movie filmed there in 1988) gave way to Barstow, whose identity with the Mother Road may be the strongest of any place I'd seen since the Midpoint. The magic ended far too soon.

Before long, we were coming into San Bernardino and the beginning of the colossal urban sprawl that is LA County. Sitting in bumper-to-bumper Mother's Day afternoon traffic on the I-15, Kennedy and I made the decision just to head for LAX rather than try to fight our way through side-streets and urban routes to stick with the Old Route. To be honest, it was kind of a sad ending. There is no completion. There will be no iconic photo of the NEON FUCKING YELLOW Mustang parked on Santa Monica Pier, just as there was no photo beneath the Inception Point in Grant Park, Chicago.

We hit 99.2% of the Old Route, traveled every conceivable side road and took the long-way 'round whenever it presented itself, saw things and met people in obscure places that I'll revisit in my memory a 100 times before I finally coax my wife to do this trip with me a few years from now. I'll be coming back. This Road-Trip has been cathartic and very rewarding, but I simply cannot imagine never seeing some of these sites again. And there is so much I need HER to see.

So there you go. Trip over, blog over. Tomorrow we catch a 1pm that dumps us at Logan around 9:30 eastern. A pause with a cause to drop Kennedy in Hull and with any luck I'm hugging my lady by 11pm. And all will be right with my world.

Post Script: we ended up covering 3,145 miles in the 9 days of driving. Kennedy never did get behind the wheel, but I think it was better that way. I think he enjoyed seeing so much of the country without having to worry too much about where the car was pointed. And for me, the ride was a good one. As Mr. Peart once said, it soothed my little baby soul. Who can complain about that?

---