My Life in a Car: Day 2

As it was nearing the end of Day Two, I realized I'd peed nowhere but in gas station bathrooms, I'd eaten Subway three days in a row, and I'd sworn there was someone else's hair in our motel bed the previous night. Sometimes roadtrips aren't so glamorous. (Especially since we managed to make each other so paranoid during the night that someone would break into our car, that we both woke up every few hours and peered out the peephole, like a couple of criminals on the run, at the car that was parked--and alarmed--right in front of our room, thus getting very little sleep.)

The glamorous part comes, however, when you arrive at places like this

 

The Painted Desert and Petrified Forest were our scenic detours for the day. I wanted to add Roswell, New Mexico to the list (I was a bit of an X-Files fanatic growing up...), but the boy wasn't so excited and the 4+ hour detour wasn't so enticing.

I had been to the Painted Desert once before, as a displeased teenager along with my displeased twin sister and my amazingly enthusiastic aunt. We actually loved the trip and the views, we were just displeased at life in general at 16. Still, all I remembered was thinking that what I saw looked like someone had watercolored the earth in front of us, so I was eager to see it again.

 

I wasn't disappointed. Since we decided to cut out Roswell, we spent a little extra time in this National Park and got to see some landmarks I hadn't seen on my previous visit. Like The Tepees,

natural, amazing hill-like cones of rocks and minerals (thank you, handy welcome brochure) that look like someone took a paintbrush across them and swathed them in giant blue, purple, and gray stripes. They also reminded me at times of a landscape out of Star Wars...

Lastly, we got to see our first glimpses of petrified wood, which the boy was the most excited for I found out later (boys really think differently than we do, don't they?).

 

 

 

See the petrified wood? It's the bright red bits scattered throughout the hills. Such amazing stuff--even close up it makes your brain oscillate between thinking, "It's wood!" then "No, it's stone!". Here's a close-up

And a necessarily cheesy photo to end the adventure

 

Next stop? New Mexico, whose state sign you've got to love

Enchanted? 

Maybe the miles upon miles of flat, increasingly snow-covered landscape that made up the entirety of our views of New Mexico would do the trick. It's an interesting state to drive through, though, because it really is so far from everything man-made (at least along the I-40). I couldn't help but feeling like I were somehow transported back to covered wagon, cowboy and Indian days. As a self-proclaimed city girl, I'll admit, it was a nice little change of pace.

Alas, we had to trudge on through the night to make it to Oklahoma City and to the boy's family's home that night, which meant driving in conditions like this 

for over 6 hours. When we (and I say "we" perhaps a bit loosely since I did absolutely none of this driving) weren't hunched over the steering wheel driving a mere 45 miles per hour because of the less than 25-feet visibility, we were following as close to the convoy of passing semi-trucks as we possibly could in order to use their much more powerful lights to actually see through the sea of fog and onto the road in front of us. Inevitably, the trucks would charge ahead at 70 mph and we'd lose them, left to the fog, teary eyes from staring so hard into the dark, and no rest stops in sight. At 2 am, Oklahoma City couldn't have come soon enough.