Day 2: Phoenix AZ - Grants NM

Ho! for the country and away down I-10 we go.  If you keep going down I-10 across most of Arizona and the Scorching Plains™ of New Mexico you will get to El Paso, wot is in Texas.  Go some way beyond here and you will find the junction where I-20 starts.  I-20 will takes Lost Boys to Fort Worth.  I did not go that far, and instead left the big smelly road at Apache Junction, and headed sort-of north-east up AZ-88.  There are saguaros:

Cactus, Arizona, Saturday

AZ-88 is fab and wiggly until you get to Tortilla Flat.  Here there is a big signed reading "ROAD CLOSED 2 MILES AHEAD".  I continued the two miles and Lo! there were a couple of big concrete barriers not closing the road.  A couple of chaps in SUVs carried on and didn't come back after five minutes, and another chap told me it had just reopened, so I decided to chance it.  This was a good idea, as the road was indeed open and there's some wik scenery and Apache Lake, which looks like this:

Unfortunately it's a destination for people with boat trailers and huge fifth-wheel campers and other repellent things, who like nothing better than to force Flash Harry in his sports car into the ditch.  Almost.  Eventually you get to Roosevelt Dam, which is shaped like one of these:

And after than you get back on proper roads without lots of dicks on them, like AZ-188.  Instead it's Emily the TwatNav who is behaving dickishly, withe constant reboots for no apparent reason.  She's been doing it since she got updated before we went to Shetland in June.  Dodgy firmware update, I reckon, or droid rot.  And it got hot.  Peaked at 103 of your old-skool Fahrenheits or about forty Celsius.  Phoenix last night was warmer, mind.

After heading southeast down US-70 I turned off onto US-191.  "Emily", I said, "take me to US-191 in Alpine!"  You'd think the best way to achieve this would be to follow US-191 to Alpine, but she thought otherwise, and there were a lot of Bad Swears until well the other side of Clifton.  Which is on US-191 and had a "gas" station which didn't fanny about with any of the "ZIP Code" nonsense.  US-191 climbs up into the mountains behind the huge Morenci copper mine and if that  sounds familiar it's because I came down the same road from Alpine to Clifton two years ago, which in turn is why there are no pictures of Big Yellow Things hauling rocks to be turned into, er, copper.  But there was weather brewing up in the background:

That is not SNO, BTW...

191 is mostly tremendously wiggly, and thus I can now confirm that this year's Mustang does indeed have a TEN-speed autobox.  It was also full of pickups, mostly driven by blokes wearing camouflage gear and with the kind of decorum that suggests a hitherto-undiscovered offshoot of the Mormons live in them thar hills.  Or, with this being a Bank Holiday weekend, that the drivers were drunk.  The weather arrived, the roof went up and the temperature dropped to 16 degrees because Rain and Altitude.

Reprogrammed Emily in Alpine.  Onoz!  There are still 150 miles to go.  And most of them are over the Scorching Plains™ of New Mexico, which are in a different time zone.  Which is why I ended up arriving in Grants well after dark.  Terrific sunset though:

If you are ever in Grants, do not stay at the "Sure Stay by Best Western" unless all you want to do is sleep.  The room in nice enough now it's cooled down (they hadn't switched the aircon on) but there is nowhere to plug in the spiffy table lamp nor the coffee machine and if you want to run your laptop off the mains you'd better have a 12' extension lead like wot I have, or else you will have to sit on the floor.  The chair is terrible and the internet connection worse.  Bah!

Best singalong of the day: The Day The Nazi Died ~ Chumbawamba

Worst singalong of the day: West ~ Tribes Of Neurot.  73 minutes of mostly inaudible droning.

Days 0-1: Larrington Towers - Phoenix AZ

O hai and welcome to the (counts on fingers) eleventh annual instalment of Thee Automatick Diary, which this year is taking a more conventional approach to Battle Mountain by arriving in a state that at least borders on Nevada.  Most time up till now has been spent sitting in cars, airports or at the back of a Big Shiny Metal Birb mostly full of French types.  And Phoenix has not yet installed Immigration Daleks to process your passport, take your dabs, photograph you and print the arrest warrant, or at least not for FOREIGNS chiz.  Which at least meant that by the time I and Mr and Mrs Hairy Biker had been admitted to USAnia our bags were all but alone on the carousel.

Nice Man Sergio at Alamo motor-car rentals has given me a convertible Mustang, for which praise be, and didn't try to tempt me with growly V8s, Corvettes or any similar works of Stan that might persuade a young lad off the Path of Righteousness and into the world of Huge Fuel Bills.  "Do you want a GPS?" he asked.  "No, ha ha, I have brought my own!"

Emily the TwatNav promptly went into a prolonged sulk and claimed all the satellites had been shut down by the Russians.  Pausing in a parking lot to reboot and threaten violence seemed to wake her up and as a result I only got lost by a couple of miles.  Unlike the dude who waltzed into this hotel just before me, to ask for directions, as his phone appeared to him to be steering him wrong.  The words "Fort" and "Worth" were mentioned, along with a plaintive cry of "Dumbass phone thinks I'm in Phoenix!"

Nice Reception Lady pointed out that yes, you are in Phoenix.  Mr Larrington noted that Forth Worth is approximately 1,000 miles east of here.  I do not think he is likely to pass The Knowledge any time soon.