Route 96

Given the demise of Jenkin’s air conditioner, and the fact that it was a vinyl-melting 115 F by mid-morning, we decided to skip Death Valley. Instead we drove one hundred miles farther south and crossed the Mojave Desert at high noon!

Our last watering hole before the great crossing–of course we’d picked a minor sub-highway that went over a hundred miles without any sign of human settlement–was Lake Havasu City, a surreal little vacation spot where some loony jackass had put London Bridge–the genuine article, bought and carried over brick by brick. The bridge had become the centerpiece for an entire Merrie Olde England tourist town, with double decker buses and red telephone booths and miserable looking Buckingham Palace-type guards liquefying under those tall fur hats. [2006 Edit: Matt Grasso, I'm looking to you to provide some appropriate image or line of dialogue from the "Little England" episodes of Arrested Development.]

We had chip buddies and bangers and mash at the local pub, and did our best to imagine we really were in England–wonderful damp, cool, rainy England. But even inside the pub, free from the blistering heat and gnarled cactii, there were still a few subtle clues that we might be closer to California than the sceptered isles. Do most real London pubs sell tropical fruit smoothies with your choice of bee pollen, beta proteins, liao drug, or other trendy smartdrink additives? (Well, maybe in the West End.)

Wayne Newton built an empire there. Randall Flagg made it the capitol city of evil. Sammy Davis Jr. called it “instant swinger.” What am I talking about? Shoot, boy, I’m talking about Vegas, what the hell you talking about?

When we arrived around 6 pm, it was an infernal 120 degrees F, cooling to an oven-cleaning 110 by midnight. To fully experience the true Vegas gemutlichkeit we stayed in an absolute dive. The Motel Monte Carlo in Bob Dole’s own Russel, Kansas was a respectable second, but Las Vegas’ Casablanca Motel wins the coveted Jenkie Award for Scariest Motel of Our Trip hands down. The Carpet Formerly Known as Orange Shag was itself carpeted with about a pound of cigarette butts and ashes, where they hadn’t burned through to the concrete floor, that is. The paper-thin Reel-Wud (TM) walls didn’t quite reach to the ceiling, and the tap in the bathtub didn’t actually turn off. The air conditioning didn’t work exactly, but it did emit the cooling scent of carcinogenic freon. But neither heat nor hail nor roach motels could keep us from our appointed rounds: which is to say checking out the fabled Strip.

Continue reading ‘Viva Las Vegas’

The Bomb was invented in New Mexico, but Nevada soon became prime real estate for underground and atmospheric testing. I dunno if that was such a good choice. If I was going to test a device that can level cities and vaporize all life for miles around, I’d want to do it somewhere you could tell.

On the highway from Arizona to Las Vegas we experienced the weirdest weather of our trip. The temperature was well north of 110 F (40 C) at the Grand Canyon in mid-afternoon. As we crossed into Nevada, things started to cool off–then black thunderclouds appeared out of nowhere and we were pelted with rain and actual hailstones like the wrath of God. That cleared in just a few minutes, and by the time we rolled into Vegas it was crazy hot again. I know it’s a cliche to say of Las Vegas, “people actually live there?” but seriously: people actually live there?

Oh yeah: And along this highway between Arizona and Las Vegas were occasional signs declaring the desolate wasteland a “National Recreation Area,” which inspired much hilarity. “Pick you up in seven or eight hours, kids,” says Dad, pushing his kids out of the station wagon onto the sun-baked dunes of ashen sand. “Daddy’s off to Caesars Palace. Enjoy the ‘Recreation Area!’”

Hoover? I Don’t Even Know Her

Also: Coming into Nevada, we drove across the Hoover Dam, admiring that great 1930s and 40s architecture that seems like it should be from Stalin’s Russia. (Or the new Hamilton bus terminal, built in 1995, go figure.) Walking around the dam, you feel like you’re in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or at least Madonna’s “Express Yourself” video. So Derek and I vogued while Pete crawled on all fours and drank from a saucer of milk.

Hey, you kids! Shut up back there! It’s time to play:

Here’s how it works: Stop kicking the back of your mother’s seat and sit quietly staring out the window. When you see any of the objects or signs listed on your BINGO card, mark that space with a coin, a counter, a half-chewed Chiclet, a booger, or possibly a small dried bean. Be sure to share those beans with your sister! When you have marked out a complet row, column, or diagonal, you win! (Do NOT yell “BINGO.” That word is a registered trademark of which you are not a holder, and besides, your father is trying to concentrate on traffic. Just congratulate yourself inwardly and sit still. Maybe you can name all of the presidents.) These are all pretty much things we saw on our trip (the twister was very small), so if you can’t complete your card, I have no sympathy for you.

“Did you know that 34 million American adults are obese? Putting together that excess blubber would fill the Grand Canyon two fifths of the way up.  That may not sound impressive, but keep in mind, it is a very big canyon.”
–Kent Brockman, “I’m OK, You’re Too Fat”

Fortified with another obscenely big truck stop breakfast, we made it to the south rim of the Grand Canyon around noon.

Wow, the Grand Canyon. It’s so… grand. And so… canyony. Judge for yourself, but I think that somehow a [2006 Edit: 150 dpi PDF of] a blotchy black and white photocopy of a lo-res .JPEG of a duplicate copy of a cheap color snapshot doesn’t quite do the Canyon justice. To tell the truth, the Canyon didn’t even look real to us when we were actually standing there. It was just so big and deep and gorgeous that I kept thinking I was looking at a matte painting from Star Wars.

(That’s pretty sorry, isn’t it? I travel thousands of miles to experience one of the All Time No Foolin’ Big League Natural Wonders of the World and all my stunted imagination can think to compare it to is a cheesy special effect from a movie I saw when I was six. How depressing. Besides, the matte paintings in Return of the Jedi were much more impressive.)

Two hours hiking down into it, and then hiking back up in shadeless 110/45 degree heat, made the Canyon pretty damn real, though. The path, steep and narrow, snakes back and forth down the canyon walls and of course we didn’t even get close to reaching the bottom. You could spend weeks there camping and hiking and not come close to seeing all of it. It’s much like Value Village that way.

On the way out, we shared a laugh at the expense of those canyons, no doubt impressive in their own right, which had the misfortune to end up right next to El Canyon Grande. I mean, really. What are they going to say? “Visit Walnut Canyon, the cleaner canyon,” or “We’re Marble Canyon, we try harder!” Sure, yeah, thanks for coming out.

“You never leave a man behind!”

You-Had-To-Be-There Moment #45

“Hey, do you smell kibble?”

It has come to my attention that this site looks atrocious in Internet Explorer. I could spend hours fussing with the WordPress layout, or you could stand up against the Octopus and spend three minutes installing a new browser.

Or just read the LJ feed like the craven coward you are. just kidding lol kthx gbye!

Why hasn’t this been in a Robert Rodriguez movie yet? There’s a highway through the New Mexico desert called Route 666!

We’d seen it marked like a prophecy on a huge road map on the wall of the Elvis Diner in Memphis, and we resolved over fried peanut butter and quaalude sandwiches to drive that bad boy. 3,000 km later, we were there! What I really wanted was a picture in front of one of those black and white shield shaped highway signs saying “Route 666 South,” with all of us throwing the heavy metal devil sign in front of it. Knights in Satan’s service, that’s what we are, yeah.

But our half-inflated dark master was not smiling on us this day. We drove fifty damn miles up the Highway of the Beast, and every single Route 666 sign had been swiped, no doubt to be hung with pride in college dorm rooms and fun family restaurants across the Southwest. In the end, we had to make do with a little green and white mileage sign and some admittedly deckid highway to hell scenery. It was real Roadrunner and Coyote territory out there, with mesas (mesae?) and tumbleweeds and big red boulders precariously balanced on slender fingers of rock.

Afterwards, we passed the MTV Rock The Vote bus heading the other way, so it could’ve been them that stole the signs. I wouldn’t put it past that noted defender of democracy Jenny McCarthy.

[2006 Edit: Well, the world is just a little less cool today: In July 2003, Route 666 was renamed Route 491, "putting an end to decades of devilish innuendo and road sign thievery." Navajo medicine men were on hand to bless the new highway and 'cleanse' the demons of the old one. OK, the part about the Navajo medicine men is a little cool. And Route 666 never became a Robert Rodriguez movie, but it did become a Lou Diamond Phillips movie, which is almost as good, right? "Not terrible," raves "User Comments" at IMDB.]

We were totally unimpressed by Historic Old Town Albuerquerqueequegque, which is basically an adobe strip mall featuring historic T-shirt vendors, historic discount liquors, a historic pawn shop (we loaded up on historic $2 CDs), and the historic Montoya Cafe, whose fancy Mexican crackers were served with melted historic Cheez Whiz.

Besides UFOs, New Mexico is also near and dear to our hearts for a little something called the Manhattan Project, the birthplace of the bomb.

The National Atomic Museum is on an Air Force Base with checkpoints and military police and everything, but is actually owned and operated by Sandia Corp–a subsidiary of DOW Lockheed Boeing I.G. Farben Geffen Globex You Get The Idea. We got onto the base and did the tour and oohed and aahed at Titans and Peacemakers and other death-dealing phallic symbols and avoided eye contact with Japanese tourists. You had to goof on the ghoulish “Better Living Through Massive Retaliation” sunniness of the place, from the Sandia Corp’s happy sunshine logo, to their “Cavalcade of Nuclear Bombers,” to the handmade chocolates in the gift shop shaped like Fat Man and Little Boy. The crunchy sweets that vaporised Hiroshima and Nagasaki… atom-o-licious!