Earlier this week, I decided to drive back to my house in Arizona after spending Christmas at my parent’s house in Idaho, despite “having a perfectly fine plane ticket” (as my dad put it). Between Christmas gifts, too much post-Christmas shopping and other random items, I had enough stuff that I needed to get back to Arizona that it would have cost me just about as much to ship everything as it did to rent a car. And I was kind of up for a road trip anyway.
15 hours of driving through the Great Basin on Highway 93 means lots of long, lonely stretches of road between small towns – sometimes you can go 50 miles without seeing a building. You have to strategically plan your bathroom and meal stops, as your only option may be to squat in the sagebrush if you don’t plan well. It also means you have to find ways to entertain yourself so you don’t fall asleep. So as one way of trying to keep myself entertained, I decided to go in search of bacon for every meal.
I left Boise around 6 am. By 8 am I had arrived in Twin Falls, ID, where I made my first bacon pit-stop at Sonic for a Breakfast Bistro bacon, egg and cheese sandwich, tater tots and a Coke (which I realize is disgusting for 8 o’clock in the morning, but I was in desperate need of caffeine). Wanting to keep up my pace, I inhaled my delicious breakfast quickly and hit the road again.
A few hours later, as I was passing through Lund, NV, I started to get hungry again, but I was still over 100 miles away from my target destination for lunch. And there weren’t really many lunch options in Lund anyways. So I powered through (and fortunately the Nevada State Police don’t patrol this stretch of highway regularly). When I finally got to Ash Springs, NV a little over an hour later, I was relieved to find a truck stop that not only served food, but also served some entertainment courtesy of the locals. It was definitely worth the wait.
In terms of services, the Ash Springs Shell station has a dog park, picnic tables, slot machines, and a nice selection of typical truck stop odds and ends for sale (I was tempted to buy a sweet looking Evil Knievel DVD but resisted). They also serve a decent selection of hot and cold foods such as burgers, sandwiches and a number of fried items. I was tempted to try the “Hell’s Kitchen Sandwich” just to find out what it was, but I settled on the bacon cheeseburger, seasoned fries (with fry sauce, of course), and another Coke to keep the caffeine flowing. Despite this establishment being pretty much my only option for lunch within a 50 mile radius, the burger was actually quite delicious. While waiting for my food to be prepared, I also got some entertainment as one of the neighbors stormed into the store and demanded to speak to the manager because something was blocking his driveway. After observing the way that most of the store employees reacted (ie they rolled their eyes and went on about their business), I got the sense this wasn’t the first time the neighbor had been mad about something. Between the locals and the constant stream of travelers coming in and out of the store, I probably could have sat there for hours and been entertained. But I had to keep moving if I was going to make it to Arizona that night. I once again inhaled a meal in a parking lot and took off.
By the way, as a sidenote…Hertz’s “Neverlost” device doesn’t live up to its name between Ash Springs and Las Vegas. On at least half a dozen occasions, it instructed me to take a turn that was 1) unnecessary or 2) didn’t exist. I can just imagine some clueless tourists turning off the highway on to a dirt road and heading into the middle of the Nevada desert. And even though she can speak several languages, Ms. Neverlost can’t start a campfire when you’re stranded in the middle of the desert on a cold winter night. So if you ever find yourself doing the trip between Idaho and Arizona in a Hertz rental car, I suggest just going old school and buying a map. But I digress.
I got to Las Vegas around 4 pm, which was just about the time I was hoping to get there based on my estimated split times for the trip. I had originally thought I might stop in Vegas to play a couple hands of blackjack and grab some dinner, but since I had just eaten and it was still early in the afternoon, I resisted temptation and decided to continue on. Which turned out to be both a good and bad thing. It was bad because there was a traffic jam at Hoover Dam, as is typical these days due to construction of the new bridge and routine security stops to prevent terrorists from blowing up the dam. Which meant that by the time I finally got across the dam, I just wanted to floor it and get to Phoenix as quickly as possible. Therefore I didn’t want to take too much time to stop for dinner. So I wan’t able to finish my quest for bacon because by the time I got to Kingman, AZ, I just stopped at the first place I could find which was a KFC. And unfortunately KFC doesn’t serve anything with bacon on it (although their Snackers are quite tasty). But the good news is that I found a pack of cars doing about 90 mph between Kingman and Phoenix, so I latched on and got home by 10 pm.
So from a bacon perspective the trip may not have been a total success, but despite the Hoover Dam delay I made pretty good time getting home and was able to sleep in my own bed rather than having to stop at a hotel for the night. And I was also able to bring my new deep fryer home with me rather than having to ship it, which means I can deep fry my way into the new year!