Day 13: Wednesday 7-Jul-1999
From: Santa Rosa, New Mexico
To: Holbrook, Arizona
Distance: 340 mi (544 km)
Time: 6h
The radio alarm woke us up at 6:00 am (EDT), which is 4am local time. We slept well. The temperature was just perfect. We wrapped up and by 7:30am (EDT) or 5:30 local time, we were on our way towards Arizona.
After a little while it was Lillemor's time to drive, for the first time. She ended up driving just over 100 miles (160km). She had really wanted to avoid driving through the congested Albuquerque. Unfortunately we found no good spot to turn off and change drivers so she ended up driving through it, during morning rush hour. It worked really well. We had plans to make one lunch stop along the way, but missed the first rest stop as we entered Arizona. By then it was not that far to Holbrook (about 90 miles/150km). So we just kept going. By about 1pm we arrived at the city of Holbrook. It pretty much looks like an oasis in the middle of the desert.
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| Getting into the desert .. scenes from the truck window |
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| You could see this water tower for miles in the desert before getting to the town of Holbrook. |
We registered at the front desk and then pulled into the KOA campground there. It looked like a large gravel field with a few trees planted there to separate some of the sites. Pretty much zero protection against wind and sun. Oh well, we're here now and they do have a pool. We took down all the awnings to get a little bit of shade and then turned on the AC. It was in the high 90s outside (35C+). And then we went over to the pool. It was quite nice and big. The wind picked up as we started to swim .. and before we knew it .. it had started to rain! We stayed in the water for a while and then decided to get up. The wind made it feel really cold. We could not believe it. Here we are in Arizona and we're cold after having walked out of the pool in the afternoon. By the time we got back we discovered that the trailer was caught in the middle of heavy wind. We had nothing protecting it in front of us. We struggled to get the awning down, as the wind kept pushing it up. As we got it down we noticed that the center solid aluminium stabilizer had gotten bent! Yuck.
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| Naked campground in Holbrook Arizona. We checked Sam's and it looked very similar. |
Per then went out for a ride in town to look for a place that could fix the bent rod, some groceries and a place where we could get hooked up for e-mail access. Wow. What a town. It really had nothing in it, except: (1) Hotels/Motels (2) Restaurants, (3) Gas stations, (4) Auto service stations and places selling petrified wood. Sure, there were a few other things.. after a lot of searching Per found a Safeway where he could buy food. He must have gone up and down main street 8 times until he found it. There were mini-marts after mini-marts, all which sold beer and chips. After a lot of searching he finally found one place where we could get the PC hooked up: the other campground. Ours only had one phone line and they would not let us use it for e-mail access.
Per came back and then went back with the laptop to the other campground to get connected. Meanwhile, Lillemor stayed back with the kids at the trailer. By the time Per came back Lillemor had learned that our campground's evening BBQ had been cancelled. We felt really hungry and since we did not have anything in the frige we decided to go out to town for a meal. We could not figure out why there were so few people out eating, but soon realized that Arizona is one the same time-zone as California .. and we had not even changed over our own clocks from New Hampshire time. We finally found a Mexican restaurant. It turned out to be a good choice.
We went back to the campground and went to bed. The kids stayed up for a while to watch TV.