October, 2013, Road Trip

We spent three weeks on the road this October. We drove with our two pets some 2,200 miles to get to Freeland, Washington, on beautiful Whidbey Island, from Tucson, via California, and about 1,700 miles on the return trip via the Great Basin Highway in Nevada.

The latter route, the Great Basin Highway, is our our favorite. When done directly and taking a little known shortcut using Vulture Mine Road from Wickenburg to get to the Peenix bypass, it works out to 1,600 miles.

We took ten days for the drive up and two and a half days on the way down. We were visiting family and friends on the way up, and mostly anxious to get home on the way back, putting in a couple of days of eleven hours on the road.

As I often intelligently observe from my own personal experience, traveling — in addition to lots of other things — is work. The older I get, the more work it is. I feel like I'm getting old.

Jasmine, our older furry child of twelve dog years (equivalent to 84 for people), would agree with me. She got very sick by the time we reached Whidbey — Shari made three trips to the vet. Jasmine recovered only after our return home.

Redwood Highway.

Smoke (pronounced "Smokay," as in Danish for good looking) Ganesha, our trusty 2003 Ford Explorer cruising towards its first hundred thousand miles, also displayed a little age. Nothing that replacing the front brakes and a wheel bearing couldn't fix.

We've done the Whidbey-Tucson drive before. Eighteen times, counting each vehicle and each Whidbey-Tucson and Tucson-Whibey trip separately. We've gone south on I-5 to Los Angeles and made a left, passing through Blythe and Quartzite. We've gone east from Eugene in Oregon over Mackenzie Pass to connect with I-84 near Ontario. We've done the route to Bakersfield via Tehachapi. We've gone through Peenix and we've used several bypass routes. From I-10 to Needles we've done at least three variants. We've driven through Utah and Salt Lake City several times using different routes through Panguich and the canyon lands to end up in Flagstaff. One time we even went via Denver, Colorado, which is a story by itself.

There's still one route through Nevada we haven't tried.