Week of June 21-27 - Special Moving CJ and Ashley to Las Vegas Edition! Part III

The road from Albuquerque to Williams treated us to one of the prettiest sunsets we’d seen on the whole trip. It also treated CJ and I to the chance to look at the back of the same truck for several hours. This ended not because we eventually passed said truck, but because it became too dark to see it anymore. I guess we shouldn’t feel too bad, seeing as how Ashley and Brooke had been looking at the back of our truck since we left Orlando. The rest of the trip was uneventful, just another long night on a long road. When we got to the hotel in Williams, and I suggested to CJ that there was a more efficient way to park, he looked at me as though I had just asked him to eat dirt. I think I remember falling asleep on the floor for a little bit that night.

We had a long day ahead of us, starting with a quick stop at the Grand Canyon. Now, many of you may think that you can’t squeeze all the awe and appreciation one of the earth’s greatest natural treasures deserves into one short hour, but we sure tried! We took some pictures, leaned waaaaaay over the railing (sorry Dad) and generally marveled at the sheer size of it all. I remember the first time I saw it, and it still felt the same way; looking off into the distance it just got to be too big to comprehend, and I stopped seeing it as a 3 dimensional space and just broke everything down into single planes of distance that eventually became surreal and made me a little dizzy. After that, we piled into the car to go retrieve the truck and hit the road again. Instead of Brooke and Ashley following us for this leg of the trip, they took off first because they had to find an open Bank of America to get a money order, and it being a Saturday they only had a small window of opportunity to find one.

Down the road a ways, CJ noticed a sign that due to construction on the Hoover Dam, all truck traffic, including us, was being diverted through a bypass that took us a good deal out of our way. Ashley and Brooke proceeded over the Hoover Dam, because they had to get to Las Vegas and deal with some paperwork on the house, and it made no sense for them to go the long way with us. The trip got a little interesting for CJ and I on this last leg, to say the least. Conventional wisdom would lead the average person to believe that the desert is mainly flat, especially when the only other well-known feature of said desert is a huge hole in the ground, but this is not the case. The desert just looks flat, but it actually a series of hills and valleys that can be quite exciting in a truck. Even more exciting still when the air temperature outside looks less like an atmospheric condition and more like a descent bowling score. At temperatures like that, our truck got a little cranky. First of all it refused to do any better than 25 MPH uphill and made a sound like gravel in a blender when we asked it to. I’m sure this had something to do with a combination of dust in the air filter and the hot air causing a poor air-to fuel mixture in our engine, but we hardly cared about the reason at the time. Next, our truck threatened to overheat whenever we turned on the air conditioner, so we spent a very unpleasant couple of hours creeping uphill like a turtle with sweat pouring from places I didn’t even know I had glands. At last, the top of the hill, and we could relax. Not so fast there, professor. All this time in the heat had given the brake fluid time to heat up to the point of being unreliable, so as we picked up speed going downhill, it was always a fun surprise to see how the brakes would react when called upon to do their duty. At first the truck would slow down on command, but with a larger than usual amount of brake fade. Later on though, pressing the brakes would cause the whole truck to shake like a rocket on re-entry but provide little in the way of stopping power. With white knuckles and very sweaty backs, we made it through the hills and all the way to Las Vegas with no other difficulty besides going the wrong way in the city, but that was corrected, and we made it to the house in pretty good time.

They have a very nice house in a very nice neighborhood, if you can get past the ultra-cutesy names of the streets in their subdivision. Happy names like Dancing Dolphin and Friendly Flower that make you feel less like you live in a grown up community and more like something out of a storybook. That aside, the houses are all brand new and have plenty of space. CJ and Ashley’s house is a 2 story with three bedrooms, but no yard. This is OK, because there’s no grass to grow anyway. Once we arrived, we immediately set to work unloading the truck. I’m proud to say that we got it done rather quickly, and only broke 2 glasses in the process. One of those was Waterford crystal, and that was a bummer, but overall I’d say it was a success. The down side to living in a two-story house is that you occasionally have to put furniture up there for comfort purposes. We all hoisted a sofa and a love seat up stairs, as well as a host of mattresses and bed frames and the like. Then there was the armoire. The armoire was the most unruly piece of furniture, and weighed in at what felt to be about a metric ton. CJ and I muscled it upstairs with about as much planning and toil at it took to land men on the moon. I’m not ashamed to say that it was one of my greater achievements on the trip. The rest of the night was spent ferrying boxes to the rooms they needed to be in while Brooke and Ashley set up the kitchen. The night ended with pizza and bottled water and four very tired people.

Next week: My Visit to The Strip!