Day 9 - In love with Bumblebee.

Sunday morning we woke up to white. Normally, I spend all winter long wishing for snow, but here I was, wishing that it were gone. We each had at least 100 miles to drive, and the roads didn't look promising... or safe. We spent about an hour and a half desnowing our vehicles. My rental looked like a giant snowball, and I had to scrape the whole thing down to be able to see to drive. Rocinante was fine except for the slideout. We had to haul everything out of the back storage compartment to get to the ladder, then repair the adjust-a-brush, and tear up the entire inside of the motorhome looking for my dad's gloves, so that we could then spend the next half-hour scraping down the top of the slideout so that it would slide in. Finally, we were ready. We each drove back down the icy road to the Ranch House Cafe for breakfast. The same waitress who served dinner the night before was serving breakfast, and some of the same people were there eating. In this town, everybody knows everybody, and they all gather around and catch up at this diner, hollering greetings at one other and interjecting in conversations from across the room. For breakfast, I had Ruth's Special, a mound of hashbrowns covered in some type of chili sauce with pieces of pork and topped with cheese. Delicious. My dad had an omelette while he chatted with one of the locals about the road conditions. He made some traveling suggestions for both of us and sketched out a map to Phoenix for me on my napkin. 

From here, my dad and I went our separate ways, me south to Phoenix, and he, on toward Las Vegas. We had decided to split up and do our own thing for a few days, then meet back up in Vegas on Wednesday. Going south on the highway, I had the better driving conditions and was off the icy roads within a half hour. He, on the other hand, had to brave the interstate in a RV on snow-packed roads - not an ideal combination, to say the least. He passed several upturned cars and a helicopter come to rescue the passengers. So it couldn't have been good. We kept calling each other with updates until we got to dry roads. Finally, he got back on Route 66, and I kept driving toward Phoenix. (Now, here is where you get only half the story. My dad will have to fill you in on his adventure.)

My drive was spectacular, with grasslands and mysterious rock formations flashing past and green mountains following me in the distance. Sheets of snow broke loose and fell from the car, to be left behind on the open road, and it felt metaphoric, for the independence I was gaining mile after mile, driving alone toward an unknown city. It felt good to be in a car, zipping across the countryside in a lightweight automobile instead of chugging up the hills. I felt lightweight.

Soon I was driving through the mountains that had been following me for so long along the horizon. The clouds hung low, and despite the cacti that dotted mountainsides, it felt more tropical than desert. The landscape was lush, the plant life abundant. There was an occasional drizzle of rain on my windshield; though it was less like rain than it was driving through the clouds, through the moisture, and absorbing it. 

Right in the heart of this curious landscape, I saw a sign for a town called Bumblebee. I had already seen it on the map, and the name was enough to make me want to stop, but its location made it a necessity. I pulled off the interstate and almost immediately, I saw my first Saguaro cactus. I whipped the car over to the side of the road and sprinted up the hill like a giddy child. Little did I know what was to come... The roads wound me down and around and back up again through this mountain desert and in minutes, I was on "primitive" dirt road. Plain Jane (as she is now called) didn't stay plain for long, but got covered in mud pretty quickly. I bounced along miles of one of the most gorgeous landscapes I have ever seen, pulling Jane over frequently to explore the desert plant life, to marvel at the mountains, and to enjoy this perfect weather and quietude. Bumblebee was just as brambly and wild and sweet as its name. A few trucks passed me, with four-wheelers on their backs, and I came across trailers stopped and abandoned, no doubt, with their drivers and passengers out playing in this desert oasis. It felt like a secret place that only us few had discovered. After about three miles into the five, it got too muddy to keep driving my little white car further on, and I had to turn back for the interstate, but I felt refreshed, returning to the road.

I had planned a lunch stop for Rock Springs Cafe, known for their pies. The cafe opened in a canvas tent in 1918. I'm not sure when they moved into their current location, but that, too, was old and looked like something out of a Western, with tin ceilings and a dimly lit wooden bar. I sat at the lunch counter, on the edge of that line that separates the customer from the reality. As I ate my turkey melt and rhubarb crumble pie, I watched the waitresses scurry from table to counter and stop for a three-minute bowl of soup as they chatted about the overflowing bathroom and what they did the night before. I saw all the different flavors of pie carried out, mounds of cream topping on the cream pies and fruit pies with their crusts fallen in. I picked rhubarb because it's the only one I've never tried and have always been curious about. I did like the taste of the red stalk, but the pie was nothing to write home about. Maybe it was something to the average taster, but to a self-proclaimed pie aficionado, I noticed how the crust was underbaked and lacked enough integrity to hold the rhubarb and how the filling was thickened not by proper cooking, but with cornstarch. Oh well, it was still nice to have a slice of pie before hitting the pavement again.

I got to Phoenix, a sprawling metropolis, about 2:30 and went directly to Mystery Castle, one of three things that drew me to this city. Mystery Castle was built by Boyce Luther Gulley for his daughter, Mary Lou. When diagnosed with tuberculosis, Boyce disappeared from his family and came to live out the rest of his life in Phoenix. He lived longer than the doctors had predicted and actually died a good while later, from cancer. Mary Lou was a toddler when her father left, and her most vivid memory of him was building sandcastles together at the beach. He had always promised her that he would build her a real castle one day, and this is what he spent the rest of his life doing. He built the entire structure by hand, himself, in the 1930's and 40's and incorporated many things he scavenged from the property and from around town, including windows made from glass refrigerator containers and wheels off his car, ceilings from railroad tracks and telephone poles, and patios and walls from cast-off bricks that came off the kiln imperfect and odd-shaped. The home really did look like something created in someone's imagination, with little creative touches everywhere, thirteen fireplaces, a floating staircase, and a looking hole from one of the balconies into the city. Mary Lou didn't know about the house her father was building until his will was read, but she still lives there till this day, and I met her while I was there (in the photo, she's the little white-headed lady on the right). She's quite the artist herself, as you can tell from the things she's collected and used to decorate her house throughout the years. And as we visited, she sat drinking coffee with her artist friend, who had painted a rock collection for her that surrounds her living room fireplace.

After leaving, I picked a hotel from the AAA book and let the GPS direct me through the confusing Phoenix roadways to what would be my home for the next several days. On this trip, I have discovered that my home can be anywhere, that it's something I carry with me. Yet, as I drove along the edge of the city, with it passing by on my right, for a moment, it felt as though as I was driving down Morehead, toward my house back in Charlotte. And for the second time on the trip, a little wave of homesickness set in. It will still be over three weeks until I'm back there, until I see that road again, and I do miss that place and all the people I love who live there too. 

I set my things down in my hotel room and went out to find some groceries to get me through the next few days, and while I was out, I found my home away from home, just the right thing to cure that yearning for North Carolina.... a thrift store! Haha! I finished the night with soup in bed, a Diane Keaton movie, and a call from Paul, and turned in fairly early to a real bed, not in a bag.