Ash Fork

Vegas and Bruno Mars were amazing, but my plans of hitting the Grand Canyon afterwards were soundly put to sleep by a dead alternator right outside of the Sonoran Desert. I’ve honestly been broken down in worse places, but sitting around in 95 degree heat with a busted vehicle also wasn’t my ideal use of that particular day. Expectations aside, I ended up spending a day in the scenic town of Ash Fork, AZ while my car got worked on.

There’s not a lot to mention about Ash Fork, but I suppose it’d be fair to say the people are super friendly (even if a bit rough) and I now know what a $29 a night motel looks like. While the mechanic fixed up my car I took some time to check things out, and this is just about everything there is to see there:

After a day of mostly killing time I got up early to check out the Grand Canyon. I got in a little before noon and started off for the South Rim trail in manageably hot and pleasantly sunny weather.

It wasn’t long however before my nice sunny weather was quickly overtaken by dreary and fastmoving cloud-cover, which then devolved all the way into a thunderstorm by the time 2PM rolled around.

Within the space of about two hours, I went from nice weather to thunder and lightning so severe that the park actually asked people to return to their various forms of lodging so that nobody would get hurt. Luckily for me, after Ha Ling Peak I was ready for this sort of weather treachery, so I just laughed and waited the storm out until the evening came.

I made an effort to get up early the next morning and grab a few more pictures, but I had planned a bit of a longer drive to go watch the balloon festival in Albuquerque during their evening session, so I got in the car and headed out east.

After an eight hour drive into Albuquerque, I went to the front desk at the balloon museum, bought a ticket for the evening session, went out to the main area to get ready for the evening bout, and then was informed by two very enthusiastic but also poorly informed volunteers that there was to be no evening session, even though it was on the website and I’d been sold a ticket. At this point, I’d felt that I’d more or less worn out my welcome in the Arizona/New Mexico part of the U.S., and drove all the way to Texas.

All in all, about a 17 hour day of driving and just over 1,000 hours made up the final leg of a long and wonderful trip. I loved just about every minute of it, but I also have to say that I was more than ready to sleep in a bed for a few days and not have to drive one more mile for a while.

I’ll be focusing on work for the foreseeable future here, but I think my next vacation spot may be a beach 🙂