We stayed by the pool until late that afternoon.
Later that night, we went into the city. After walking for a bit and getting a feel for the atmosphere we chose a nice place to have a beer and some appetizers. There was some live music which we really enjoyed. The two guys, a guitarist and a bassist, played the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Steve Miller Band and the such. After devouring a huge plate of nachos we explored a bit more before going back to the hotel.
The next morning we had breakfast, checked out of the hotel and headed back to the Stone Brewery to refill the two growlers we "accidentally" drank ;) They don’t open until 11am, so we explored a little of Escondido, California in the meantime. We found this park with a playground in the shape of grapes and vines. It was so cool.
We spent the rest of the day driving on Route 66 as much as we could. Since it’s not technically a route anymore it ends and picks up again, sort of randomly, alongside I-40.
We saw a lot of ghost towns with houses that were boarded up along the way and a volcanic crater!
It was interesting seeing the effects of an interstate on local towns. We also saw SOOO many used car lots with really nice classic cars for sale. A lot of them were in pretty bad shape but there were some nice ones that made us really jealous. We also drove through some cool (tourist trap) towns that were really fun.
One of those towns, Seligman, AZ, we decided to stop in for dinner. This is supposedly the town that the movie 'Cars' is about because once I-40 was built all the businesses lost customers and a lot of them closed down. It’s obvious driving down Route 66 that a lot of these little towns milk the historic aspect of the route to get people to stop in. We planned on going to Delgadillo’s Snow Cap Drive-in but it was closed when we got there :( From the outside this restaurant looked like a junkyard with the amount of stuff they had, so of course I took lots of pictures. They even painted eyes on the cars to look like the ones from Cars.
We ended up having dinner at a really classy joint called 'Roadkill Cafe'.
After dinner we continued our 7+ hour drive to the Grand Canyon. We decided since we’re running out of time that we wouldn’t have much to spend there and that we would get as close to the Grand Canyon as we could and be there in the morning for the sunrise. On our drive we saw TUMBLEWEED, yes tumbleweed!! We were so excited! Only it didn’t roll in front of the car like in an old western film, it was flying in the air over the car.
The sun had just set and it just started to get dark, when all of a sudden Larry notices a bunch of the yellow lines on the road disappeared. We both lean in to look when we see 2 little glowing eyes! It was a HUGE deer in the middle of the road! We slowed down and it just ran off but it was so scary how fast it all happened.
