Day 1-Home to Williams, AZ

Today is the day one of our road trip and what a first day it has been. We left at 6:12 am, just before the sunrise. The early morning was relatively uneventful unless you count dad occasionally straying into other traffic lanes and coming a little too close to a passing semi-truck. We made a couple of stops to stretch our legs and to eat lunch.

Pit stop at the outlets in Barstow to grab some Starbucks. The best spot to park was in these oversized spots next to In-n-Out. Being so early, we had no intention of grabbing a burger, but the guy manning the drive-thru kept yelling "We're not open until 10AM!" This happened on the way to Starbucks and on the way back.

Our first state line crossing of many to come...

Still the day was not too eventful... That was until 1:45 pm this afternoon. Our gas tank was seemingly ½ full, then in a blink it was nearly empty. We immediately started praying that we would have enough gas to make to the nearest gas station. We started franticly looking on the web for somewhere to get gas, but we lost our cell coverage in the mountains. Thank God for mobile Wi-Fi (Verizon Jetpack). This provided cell coverage in the middle of nowhere and we were able to keep searching.

Eventually we found the nearest gas station…it was 42 miles away! Seligman, AZ could not get here fast enough. Dad had serious doubts whether we would make it. To give us the best chance, we had to conserve fuel by keeping the speed below 55, turning off the A/C and coasting downhill as much as possible. At 2:50 PM we breathed a sigh of relief and rolled into the gas station with the needle just above “E”. Thank God we made it!

Fortunately, this all turned out to be a false alarm. After filling only 57 gallons of an 80 gallon tank we discovered that the sensor in the gas tank had a glitch. We could have made it to our intended destination without the gas stop detour. On a lighter note, while we waited for the tank to fill up, we did get to use our new telescoping squeegee to clean all of the bugs off the windshield. About an hour later, we reached our first destination…the little town of Williams, AZ.

#California #Arizona