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So we started on our journey on March 17, 2006. The plan was to leave town by 5:00 AM, so naturally we didn’t head out until 7:30 that morning. After a brief stop off at the gas station, McDonald’s, and back home because I forgot my sunglasses, we were off. For a large portion of this first stage of the trip, we are in familiar territory. I-10 is a well travelled route for us. We frequently make trips to Tucson and Mesa to visit family and friends. It wasn’t until we turned off onto I-8 that things start to move from the slightly mundane to the only slightly less mundane. You see, Arizona just doesn’t have that much to it. We have desert, high-desert, and some forrests. The only really notable features are up north, where we have The Painted Desert and Grand Canyon. Down here in the south, we have, well, pretty much nothing. So no matter what road you’re on, you’ve pretty much already seen it.

Southern Arizona pretty much looks like this all over. The mountains along I-8 were very cool looking,though, and were deceptively large. By that I mean that from a distance, they look absolutely gigantic. But when you get up to them they are actually very small and barely pass as mountains at all.

Okay, is it me or is Mather Nature feeling a bit amorous here? Maybe she’s just a bit cold? I don’t know. Maybe I’m just being a guy and making more of what is shown here than I should be.

We started get get hungry right about the time we hit Gila Bend, AZ (city motto: We’ll make you drive all the way through town just to get to the McDonald’s). Being that we also needed to fill the car up, we stopped at a gas station. But this wasn’t just an average gas station with a convenience store built-in. No, man. This was the Mother of All Convenience Stores (MoACS). It had a Subway, pizza place, and burger joint all in one building. You could get gas and cholesteral all in one stop! And to top it all off, they had the only two tourist attractions in town in the form of giant iron animals; including but not limited to a snake and a dinosaur.

Radio posing with the various tourist attractions in Gila Bend (all two of them).

BionicleBoy and Radio need to tone down their enthusiasm for their lunches.

This is pretty typical of how all boats in Arizona are used. Note: This boat has absolutely nothing to do with anything relating to this trip. It was in Gila Bend and i just thought it looked funny. Carry on.

Now if anyone out there has travelled cross country in southern Arizona, you pretty much know the rest of the story. Outside of Gila Bend, there really isn’t much more on the road until you hit Yuma (city motto: They Filmed Return of the Jedi Here!). So I’ll skip the details on that segment of our trip. We did stop for more gas (that seemed to be a running theme on our way out there, for some reason). But things didn’t start getting interesting until we got passed El Centro, CA. That’s when we hit the Rockies. No, really. They were rocky!

In case you can’t make out what it is, it’s basically a giant pile of rocks. Big rocks. Piles and piles and piles of rocks. All over the place! It’s like someone dug a huge hole somewhere and just left this mess for someone else to clean up. Typical government project, you know?

And then, as if the piles and piles and piles of rocks weren’t enough, we come around a bend and there’s this palm tree sticking out of the Interstate all by itself. What’s up with this? Who put this here? Oh wait…this is California isn’t it. Nevermind.

Those of you from San Diego and the surrounding communities (to include Alpine and stuff) should probably recognize these. These were very impressive peices of machinery standing several stories tall. They were moving at about the slowest speed I’ve ever seen for these things (hard to tell with a photo, though). Pretty much snails were moving faster. On the way home, there were turning at a far quicker pace and were all the more impressive.

By the way, yes, I took all of these pictures. While I was driving. In a van that was towing a camper/trailer. I’m just that good.

So that’s pretty much the journey. After the windmills it’s about another couple of hours or so to our final destination. We hit Carlsbad at about 5:30 or 6:00 PM. It took us far longer than it should have to get there, but I really didn’t care. I was with my sons, and this wasn’t supposed to be a rushed trip anyway. I wanted to arrive safely, not dead. Arriving dead would have been kind of weird and embarrassing, I think. Can you imagine what the park ranger would have thought if I had driven up in my van and camper and being all dead and stuff? Might have creeped her out, or something. Plus I think you can get a ticket for that, nowadays.

This is our campsite. That’s my van. The one I drove while taking pictures. And that camper that’s right next to it? That’s not mine. I don’t own a camper. But I do know a friend who owns one, and that happens to be his.

Our campground. Notice all of the RVs? Notice how everyone else thinks they’re all better than me because they have an RV? Go ahead, notice it. Nevermind that you can’t actually see anyone else in this photo, but trust me, they were all thinking that. And they continued to think that all the way up until all of the air in all of their tires were let out that night. Gee, I wonder who did that?

So we had a long drive, and we arrived safely despite my taking photos (and videos) on our way there. This trip was definitely going to be worth the road time, though. Not only for the time with my sons (most important) and being able to go to Legoland (second important), but the view from our campsite was phenomenal.

This is what we saw every morning when we woke up. Well, except that the clouds were different each day, and the water wasn’t the exact same water every morning (because it’s the ocean and stuff), but you get the point.

The rain you see in the distance in the top-right photo was the beginning of a drizzle that lasted all night. Mainly we got to our campspot and set up just in time to get into the camper before the cloud juice hit. That basically marked the end of our day. The boys and I had hoped to get down to the beach, but that was just not going to happen on this night. So we ate our dinner and then hit the sack, being lulled to sleep by the pattering of rain on the roof and the sound of the ocean surf down below. It had been a long day, and we had more important things to do in the morning.

Coming Soon: The Journey of a Thousand Bricks - Part 3: Legoland

The Journey of a Thousand Bricks - Part 1