madame_chuchita

I was going to try for a standby flight today, but instead I woke up early and hiked a mountain and bummed around the desert. My college best friend/roommate is on her way over from her house on the northwest side of Phoenix. I haven't seen her for 2.5 years! I predict happy hour in my very near future. I should walk down to the liquor store and stock up before she gets here.

Dudes, I have to go home tomorrow. To the land of no mountains, no flowers or fresh backyard citrus, no heat or sunshine yet. And I have to go back to work. This (Phoenix) is definitely not the city for me--I am not tan enough or skinny enough and I have all my original parts, though I have the skank part down pretty good--but I'm definitely not ready to go home yet.

So my LJ choices are:
a. Post from my Crackberry
b. Post from my sister's computer, which does not have a backspace key

I chose B, so don't judge my misspellings or poor grammar. In fact, don't judge me for that anyway, because most of my posts are on my phone lately, which is just about as difficult as you can imagine, even with a full (tiny) keyboard.

So, the snowstorm in the mountains. It looked a little like this, and also like this, and a little like this too. If you don't want to click on the links, they basically say "Arizona 100-car pileup kills two and frightens the hell out of cross-country travelers trying to get from Minneapolis to Phoenix."

While we were sitting on the freeway, not moving, at all, not one bit, for an hour and a half, we placed calls to our dad, whose best advice was to take the next exit. That's wonderful, Dad, but we haven't moved for an hour an a half and we're in the mountains, so even if there were exits to be taken, we cannot get to them. Cars were flipped over everywhere we looked and pretty banged up. Ambulances and fire trucks. I've spent nearly my entire life in Minnesota, and this was the worst winter weather I had ever experienced. Visibility was just a few feet and the roads were completely iced over (I know this because we and hundreds of other travellers were growing weery of the wait and got out of our cars to explore). We found out that the holdup was a hill up ahead, which no cars could make. We were waiting on the DOT to come by and plow and salt so cars could get some traction, and we were warned that we may be spending the night on the mountain, in our car.

I have to say now that it was the most bizarre thing ever, and we did not purposely drive into a mountain snowstorm. As we approached the mountains, I took pictures of the summits covered in clouds, not realizing we were about to drive straight up and into those clouds. It was sunny and pleasant; I figured we were okay.

Somehow traffic got moving again and we crossed our fingers as we fishtailed up the hill. There were tire marks all over the medians and cars had wiped out all over the place. We were at 8000 feet at the time and the situation did not clear up until we were down to 4000 feet.

And then everything was beautiful and sunny again. The drive down to Phoenix was incredible. We arrived at my sister and brother's house just an hour and a half after sitting in a blizzard. Their house is very cute and the neighborhood is nice. Today we grocery shopped and got Jill settled in a bit and went out for sushi lunch. I'm about to go outside and enjoy the sun and grill some dinner tonight.

So that's it. I think the only other two highlights I left out was the lack of gas in Kansas (every gas station for many miles had signs saying, "No fuel", which makes me think we are in some sort of secret crisis) and my boyfriend forgetting my brithday, which I find hilarious. I hope to meet up with my uncle for a green beer tonight, my college roommate tomorrow, then head home the next day.

Thanks for all of the birthday wishes! If I don't respond to your comments or posts it is because doing so on my phone is a pain in the ass. I will try my best.

I last wrote as we were entering New Mexico and the land made this sudden change from flat fields of oil and cattle to little tiny mountains and later, bigger mountains.

The towns in NM (that's easier to type!) look like they haven't changed in 30 years. It was extremely windy and we found ourselves in a dust storm, tumbleweed and all. It was awful, but we had no idea that this was nowhere near as treacherous as what we would encounter later in the day.

Other than the dust storm, NM was unremarkable. Even Albuquerque left much to be desired. I had pictured NM as this beautiful, serene state, but the parts I saw were neither. Western Arizona was even less exciting. No "This Land is Your Land" or all-American beauty on display. Seriously, I started wishing we were in Kansas again.

Near Flagstaff we admired towering mountains with summits hidden behind clouds of precipitation. We got stuck in traffic for awhile and should have been clued in that something was up when truckers were pulled over on the side of the road while we were creeping along. We were hearing reports of interstates being closed, but it was nice and sunny so we didn't worry about it.

We finally got out of the jam and started south. It was snowing a tiny bit and there were advisories of winter weather. Being hardy Minnesota gals, we figured we could handle it. Before we knew it we were in white-out conditions in the mountains. Cars were in ditches or banged up, truckers were pulling off the road, and then we were at a dead stop.

To be continued because this damn phone hurts my fingers. Sneak peek: an hour later we were still stranded on the mountain road.

We are coming up to the New Mexico border, and Jill is driving. It is very foggy and there is not much to look at but feedlots. I really hope the fog lifts soon because I have been looking forward to watching the terrain change from flat fields of cattle and oil to desert mountains.

Minnesota was unremarkable and the coffee was awful. Iowa was icy and cold. Missouri was hilly and blanketed in snow. The landscape started to green up in Kansas, and in Oklahoma it was safe to say it was spring. Texas is precisely what I had imagined; all of the states were.

We quickly abandoned our plans to switch drivers every gas stop when I declared I was perfectly content behind the wheel for the first 17 hours and 1000-plus miles, and Jill was equally happy in the passenger seat. We had hoped to stop sometime after Oklahoma City, but it was early in the evening so we continued on. In western Oklahoma, I was weary, but no hotel had vacancy until Amarillo. So that's the story of how I came to wake up in Texas on my 26th birthday.

Gotta go--my ears are popping and it suddenly turned very hilly(!) so apparently we're not in Texas anymore.

I never imagined I would be so thrilled to be typing on teeny tiny Crackberry keys in a lumpy bed at the HoJo in Amarillo, Texas, but at this moment, this stinky motel room is just about the best thing ever.

My plans for next week look like this:
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Impulse purchase of the day: Trip to New York, departing Friday.