About 320 Miles Mark Our First Day Towards Home

Early up and early GO has always been our style. Get something out of the day and if something happens you got time to fix it.

So following our custom, we were actually leaving Quartzsite around 8am. Of course, before that I had to do a desert doggy walk. :-)

Heading north from Quartzsite

Our early departure got into an unwelcome halt just down the road from Quartzsite. Obviously some construction work was the reason. They kept us waiting for 30 minutes. When we finally were to go, there was no active construction work going on. A few workers standing around chatting was all we saw. And the right lane, recently being resurfaced was all ready, but blocked off.

One might really wonder what the purpose of such BS.

We passed Parker and Parker Dam, then got sucked into huge traffic at Lake Havasu City. I know I have mentioned this before, but that city really sucks with its terrible traffic. The city is also growing at a rabid pace. We remember this as a sleep desert town at the Colorado with the Old London Bridge being the only attraction. Well, the bridge is still there, but the athmosphere of the town is long gone.

Approaching Lake Havasu City

Eventually we reached the I-40 and were heading towards Kingman. There are tons of online comments about the state of the I-40, but experiencing the huge and many potholes, the desperate and poorly performed attempts of road repair is a whole different story. Luckily, the road improves somewhat east of Kingman, but there are still some pretty bad passages left.

The I-40 also has some pretty long uphill grades at 6% until it reaches 6800ft at Flagstaff. When we got outside at a gas station we almost froze to death. It was super cold, especially for us coming out of the warm desert. The snow along the road witnessed about recent snow showers in the area. We enjoyed the view of the snow-capped St.Francisco Mts. 

Snow-capped San Francisco Mts.

We were now getting close our destination for the day, which was the Meteor Crater Rest area, roughly 40 minutes west of Winslow. We had stopped here on our way south and after we had visited the Meteor Crater. The rest area is extremely clean, it offers potable water and the large paved area for trucks is very inviting.

After about 320 miles from Quartzsite I was tired enough to call it a day at 4:30PM