Day 2 (June 20th) Kingman, Arizona to Amarillo, Texas

We started our day at 6 AM. We ate breakfast and hooked up the trailer and on Interstate 40 by 7 AM. This was the long driving day. Today, we needed to get as far east as we can. This will make the rest of the days shorter distance wise. This would also allow us to get to Benton, Illinois on Monday. Benton is our first major stop and where Lisa’s aunt lives. With that in mind we were hoping to go to Tucumcari, New Mexico. We had to definitely get to Morarity, New Mexico.

As I said, the day started out well. We made our first stop at a rest stop outside Flagstaff, Arizona. We then stopped at Navaho, Arizona for gas. As the picture to right shows it is basically a gas station.

As we crossed into New Mexico, I tried to get a picture of the “Welcome to New Mexico” sign but I didn’t get a good shot. Well you can see it but it was like, “Oh, where’s the camera”. I fumble for it and take a snapshot. Not my best effort. I should mention that I tried to get the “Welcome to Arizona” sign and totally missed it. At this point, Samantha says that I should have Lisa take the picture. I would have, but I did not realize that we were at the border. I thought it was a little further down the road.

When we crossed into New Mexico it started raining and there was some lighting. We were lucky to miss the heavy stuff, but we did get some drops on us. So at this point, your thinking that this is going to be an uneventful day, well you would be wrong. This is a road trip and with any road trip, things happen. It so happened that we got to Tucumcari pretty quickly, so we decided to push on to Amarillo. This was a mistake as about 10 miles from the Texas border the trail blew out a tire. We called AAA and they sent someone out to change the tire. Now before you say, “What, you can’t change your own tire?” I don’t have a jack that will lift the trail to put it on, so we had to wait about 30 to 40 minutes to get it fixed. What dismays me is that this is day 2 of the trip and I have a blown tire and rim that is destined for the scrap heap. I hope this is it for these types of incidents.

Well, I can’t just end today’s entry without mentioning the stars of this little blog, the kids. Today, they were pretty much subdue, except for one fight in which Lisa had to yell at them to stop. It seems Samantha thought it was a good idea to grab a stuff animal that Miles brought along. Miles didn’t think much of that idea and started to get mad. The next thing that you know it turns into a World War III. Lisa set them straight this time. When we got to Tucumcari, I asked the kids if they want to stop or go on. Miles responds that all he wanted to decide is to go to sleep. Samantha said to go to Amarillo. Samantha didn’t like the way her peanut butter sandwich was cold. We made sandwiches in Kingman and stuck them in the cooler.

This to here was heresy and refused to eat the sandwich until it was room temperature. We made to Amarillo at about 9 PM Texas time, so we were in the car for about 12 hours with a long rest for the blowout. We drove a total of 724 miles for the day, and a total of 1088 miles for the entire trip, so we have done about one-sixth of the driving. The total for gas was $143 for the day. Tomorrow should be a much shorter day and we may actually stop and see something other than rest stops and gas stations.