There are a lot of changes in the works for “While Las Vegas Sleeps” at present. My annual summer trip to visit friends and family in Texas has proved to be very good for near-term plans for our site here. Some things I’ve been planning on doing for a while now are just about to start happening, so I’m really excited.
My friend Kelly from Houston took the drive back from Houston to Las Vegas with me and we took the slightly-longer-but-completely-worth it northern route home - the I-40 (old Route 66) way. You can get to the Texas Gulf Coast faster by traveling down I-10, but it’s just nowhere near so beautiful. Once you get to Amarillo and state highway 287 joins I-40, the drive becomes interesting. There’s the Cadillac Ranch, also known as “Carhenge.” It’s probably the most tourist-trappy of the things along the way home but it’s worth a look. It was late at night so we missed Carhenge, ourselves, but there was plenty more to see and do.
As you leave Texas and enter New Mexico, I always think to myself that it sort of makes sense how they set the state boundary there - the topography really starts to change and it just looks like a different place.
Kelly and I stopped to explore a bit in Albuquerque - a city that I think doesn’t get as much credit for interesting places and things as it should (probably because of the old Bugs Bunny line about having “taken a wrong toin at Alba-koi-kee.”) I took her up on the tramway there that goes to the top of Sandia Peak. The view is awesome and the thin air is much cooler than down below and gets your heart pumping - love that stuff. We sat on a rock with about a 1500 feet vertical drop below us and thought about being alive and what lay ahead of us. After a nice ride back down I took her into Old Town and had lunch and strolled around a bit. The food there is great; the margaritas are even better.
After taking off on the next leg of the trip west, the drive is just cool. You pass through the Painted Desert, Petrified Forest National Park, right near the meteor crater, and start climbing up, up, up into Flagstaff. Flagstaff is another hidden little southwestern gem of a town. The downtown historical area has many square blocks of old, two-story hotels, restaurants, galleries, bars, and even outdoor entertainment during the summer in a small square amphitheater. The air up there just smells wonderful. It’s like it’s perfumed, but I suppose it’s just the Colorado-like pine trees of various types and very clean mountain air. If you’re traveling through there have a pizza at Alpine pizza and then walk across the street for a beer at the old saloon. Good times.
Thirty miles west of Flagstaff is Williams, Arizona, which is the main cut-off town to the south rim of the Grand Canyon. It’s a cool little town, as well, and probably a good place to gas up and get a soda before heading west off the side of the mountain (at very high speed due to the grade of the interstate there - it’s damn fun!) and also because the small villages between there and Kingman charge astronomical rates for gas, though the best bet is to fill up in Flagstaff.
A couple of hours and you’ll make it to Kingman - that’s the cut-off to the home stretch - highway 95 to Las Vegas! From this point I’m usually averaging about a hundred miles an hour.. just can’t wait to make it back to the promised land… home in Las Vegas.
Wow! From this one article, if you were wanting to take a road trip west through the United States to Las Vegas, Nevada, you’d have one hell of a framework to start from… just follow the links to wikipedia.org articles and add places and stops you find from there!
In the next week we’ll be announcing our new plans for WhileLasVegasSleeps.com. I think you’re really going to dig it so check back… And now that summer’s business trips and vacations are done - no more lapses in posts - I promise!
Tags:
Albuquerque,
Flagstaff,
Texas
