Pico Rivera to Phoenix

On Saturday we started our drive to Houston. We spent considerable time learning our new radio, the Satellite Radio system and Maggie (Magellan RoadMate). They are all pretty awesome, but Maggie is Fantastic!! And, our radio has a remote control. Which is super freaking awesome and I love it!

Anyway. We drove due East on I-10 and we were gonna pretty much stay on it For Freaking EVER! It would take us all the way to Houston, which is easy at least!

We were driving uphill in the desert and on the left side of the freeway we saw …. Dinosaurs. Freaking Huge 25 foot tall Effing Dinosaurs! And a sign that read “Robotic Dinosaur Exhibit”. How can a girl pass that kind of awesome?!? She cant! She NEEDS To Stop!! So, we stopped.

Holy. Crap! That place was crazy! They had exactly ONE Robotic dinosaur. But Whatever. I can live with ONLY one robotic dinosaur. I mean, they have lots of other dinosaurs .. its cool. As we are walking around the outdoor exhibit, in the desert, during a wind storm, at 3600 elevation we saw a mannequin like thingy of a crusader … in the middle of a dinosaur exhibit … ok. Sure, fine, whatever. We keep walking around and checking out the exhibit. The dinosaurs start getting smaller. From Large building sized, monstrosities to small family dog sized annoyances. Also, very strange. But this IS a road-side attraction. A Tourist Trap. They don’t usually have a ton of money. I can see how part-way through the exhibit they began to run out of money and just started to make the dinos smaller, sure. Then. The Best. Thing. Evar! A LARGE Crocodile hanging out with a plastic lion and plastic lamb. Freaking Hilarious!

They had this big cement turtle jungle jim thingy, which was also very strange and confusing. We climbed up inside the large T-Rex, got schooled on Creationism and took pictures of outside from the mouth, which is just cool since there are big teeth in the shots.

Finally we left the Land of the Lost and got back on the road. More uphill. Many more hours. And made it to Phoenix, Arizona. Part of our plan to save money was to sleep in the back of our 4Runner. Neither of us had really done this before and didn’t know how it would turn out. We didn’t know if we would be able to find campgrounds or bathrooms or anything, but figured we couldn’t really afford $50 every night.

We found a KOA in Mesa, which is a little off the I-10, but not far. We set up the back of the 4Runner with WAY too many blankets for the 65 degree weather, found the bathrooms, discovered that we could have showers in the morning – WOOT! – and bunkered down for the night.

It. Was. AWESOME! We were warm, safe, slept like the dead, had access to bathrooms, were surrounded by lots of really nice people and paid Less Than $30 a Night!

It was way awesome. We had a great day, a great night and the trip so far is just plain fun!

Miles today – 390. Total Miles Driven – 790. Miles To Go – 1,150