California-Arizona

We spent Wednesday and part of the day today (Thursday) driving California and into Arizona. Stopping the night in Needles, CA in the Mojave Desert, we tuned into the weather channel to learn about the blizzard heading toward Denver,CO and Amarillo, TX and into Wichita, KS...We spent the extra day driving through California to avoid the blizzard in Wyoming, but it headed our way. Our route was to be along I-40 through Flagstaff, Arizona,into Albuquerque, New Mexico, then on to Amarillo, Texas, Oklahoma City, then up to Wichita. The Weather Channel gal was saying that this would be the course of the storm and would be the heaviest snow in a decade. Our choices were to wait it out in Las Vegas for three days, have a good time, spend a lot of money, then head into Wichita on Sunday. This of course would have put us almost a week behind schedule, and who was to say that there would be clear skies to follow? Springtime weather is so unpredictable and I have been caught driving in a blizzard before. That is not at all fun and extremely dangerous! I put my pilot training to use and plotted a course around the weather. So that is why today we are in the desert heading across Arizona on I 10. The weather is nice, 72 degrees, with hardly a cloud in the sky. Our plan is to make El Paso by nightfall, then through Texas via San Antonio tomorrow. We ate lunch at the In and Out Burger in Phoenix, Arizona, went past the University of Phoenix, Aaron's college, and south to Tuscon. There have been severe thunderstorms east of Houston, so we are taking our time to let the front move east ahead of our journey. This has been a very exciting trip with flexible routes. Aaron's Explorer is running well and getting over 24 MPG on these long stretches of Interstate. And so we tumble along with the tumbling tumbleweed into El Paso, the land West of the Pecos.