A long day on the road

750+ miles would normally be torturous enough. Mix in snow, rain, high winds, and a few rubberneckers and you have a recipe for a particularly long day on the road.

We got a few flakes of snow as we left San Bernadino around 9am. It turned to rain soon thereafter and then nothing else noteworthy happened until after lunch. Upon getting back into the truck after splitting a Subway sandwich just before Phoenix, Dad and I were dismayed to find that the Silverado’s radio was no longer pushing sound out the speakers.

We pulled over at the next exit to try turning off the car to reset the radio, but found no change. We decided to drive through Phoenix instead of taking the I8 bypass so that dad could get online to do a few Google searches on this MAJOR problem. To break the monotony of driving down the interstate, Dad gave me a pair of headphones to connect to my xm radio.

Driving through Phoenix was a mistake. We got pounded by rain and spent at least an additional hour sitting in traffic slowly passing a few horrendous (and some not so serious) looking accidents. It really seemed to take forever to get to Tucson.

At a gas stop in Tucson, Dad opened up the hood of the truck to check the fuse for the “radio amplifier.” He found it in perfect health, so we had to assume that somewhere in the car some wiring must have come loose.

Imagine our surprise to hear music when we turned the truck back on! All we did was pull and reinsert the fuse. Phew!

From there it was mostly smooth sailing to El Paso. The wind died down, the rain cleared up, and we didn’t hit any more traffic.

Poor Cali the cat hit his limit around 11pm mountain time. It was 3 hours past dinner time and he hadn’t seen a litter box all day. I was torn between laughing and crying at the piteous meows emanating from the carrier.

We were all very relieved to pull into the hotel in El Paso just after midnight mountain time. No pictures today.

Next stop: Cypress, TX in the Houston area.