(Written by kencraw)

I’m kinda known for my crazy road trips, even when it isn’t a Cal game (although all my most epic ones are). Usually it’s because I try to combo in something else beyond just the point of the trip that takes it from aggressive to crazy-insane. For the ASU trip, it was making the detour to the Grand Canyon on the way home while preserving my “take no time off work” pledge.

So I did 28 hours of driving in a 53 hour trip:
11 hours: Friday 3:30 PM to Saturday 2:30 AM – Roseville to Tempe
4 hours: 3:30 AM to 7:30 Sunday – Tempe to Grand Canyon
1 hour: In and out of car in Grand Canyon betwen 7:30 AM until 10:00 AM Sunday
12 hours: 10:00 PM to 9:00 PM (time change adds an hour) Sunday – Grand Canyon to Roseville

Click the link for the full rundown of my trip:

Friday, 3: 30 PM:
I snuck out of work early and got on the road while everyone work was bringing their kids in for trick-or-treating. I had brought the kids in earlier than most people, which was convenient because I knew I had a long drive ahead of me. My mapping software indicated it would be just over a 10 hour trip to my hotel in Tempe. That was assuming no traffic which I expect to hit the commuters as I go through Sacramento. As such I fully expect to not be in Tempe until 2:00 AM.

Friday, 5:00 PM:
The traffic in Sacramento was not too horrible. It probably cost me about 10 to 15 minutes. Luckily I got through Stockton without hitting any traffic even though I crossed over from 99 to I-5. I expect smooth sailing from here and hope to make it over the grapevine before filling up with gas. For the most part I’m sticking with my prediction on the game. My gut still says this Arizona State team is not very good at all. Usually however, as the game gets closer my nervousness starts to get to me particularly since this team has shown signs of inconsistency. Right now I’m more concerned with making good time than with worrying about how the team will to.

Friday, 7:30 PM:
I almost made a faux pas, there’s a tradition in my family that all trips to Bears games start with playing Mr. Jones by the Counting Crows. After having listened to two or three albums I realized that I had not yet listened to Mr. Jones. However, I think still being multiple metropolitan areas away from Tempe, I discovered that my mistake before was too late.

I’m making pretty good time and am most of the way to the grapevine. It doesn’t look like I’ll make it all the way into L.A. before needing to gas up. However I spend time before the trip to check out the key gas stations along the way and found a pretty cheap one about halfway up the grapevine, which was surprising. I should be there in a 1/2 hour to 45 minutes.

Since I’ve got nothing to do but talk to you for the next 8 hours, here’s a little bit about my setup in the car. Even though I have an old Volkswagen Jetta, I’m able to have GPS navigation because I bought a touchscreen that plugs into my laptop. I made a mount for the car and it makes it so that I can act like I have new car with a built-in GPS. But it has some additional advantages including the ability to install custom software unlike a built-in unit. I installed Dragon NaturalSpeech so I’m able to dictate these notes to you. Of course I also have a GPS and the necessary mapping software to make this work. I use Delorme Street Atlas for what it is worth. It’s OK, but not outstanding. I also put all my MP3’s on my laptop and use the cassette tape audio adapter so that both the voice commands from the mapping software and the music come out through my car stereo. And yes, my car is old enough that it has a tape player. One of the cool things about my mapping software is that one can put custom notes on the map so I put notes were all the good gas prices were. I’m also able to navigate to them. That also means I can get ETAs and other information by making routes to those points. Pretty neat, eh?

Friday, 11:00 PM:
Well, I’m out of the L.A. Basin. I had more traffic than I expected to but apparently there was an accident on I-210. Now comes the long slog up over the Southern Sierra and across the Arizona desert. I feel like I’ve both made pretty good time in things are going slower than I hoped. Perhaps I expected too aggressive of a timetable for this to trip, but that’s what the mapping software suggested.

Saturday, 2:00 AM:
I gassed up 30 miles into Arizona. It’s amazing how much cheaper gas is in the surrounding states to California. I was paying around 3 dollars a gallon for Chevron gasoline in the cheaper places in California but I just payed $2.55 a gallon and highway side gas stop in Arizona and those usually aren’t the cheapest gas stations around.

But more distressingly I think I just get nailed by a photo speed trap. My speeds have been creeping up as I’ve been going across the desert particularly when the speed limit it went up to 75 miles an hour. I suspect that was going over 85 when I was hit by a blinding light, which was most likely the speed trap trying to get my picture using a flash. I think my only hope was that another car was merging onto the freeway right as the flash went off and perhaps that either of obscured my picture or will bring a doubt as to my speed and I’ll be able to use that to get out of it. Unfortunately I’ll just have to wait by the mailbox to find out.

Saturday, 2:30 AM:
I’m finally in Tempe. My target had been 2:00 AM and it became quite apparent that wasn’t going to make that time as the evening wore on. The only reason I’m here as early as I am is that I pushed really hard through the desert. Which is, as mentioned above, was probably not smart as I likely got a ticket which only an attorney could get out of and will cost me a couple hundred dollars to pay the ticket. Either way it won’t be cheap. It any case, now it’s time to hit the hay and get at least a few hours sleep before I have to wake up and get to the stadium for my pregame rituals of photographs and blog posts and such.

Saturday, 9:30 AM:
I woke up around 8:00 AM this morning about a 1/2 hour before my alarm clock went on off. The first thing I did was turned on ESPN Game Day that was broadcasting from Eugene to watch the ruckus there. It interesting to me that they changed the location of the Game Day set from when they were there in 2007. It now looks to be in between the training facility and the stadium where as last year it was to the west of the stadium in between the river and the stadium. Overall there was not that much interesting to talk about in the show. It’ll be interesting to see how the game goes. I think USC’s defense is going to be able to corral Oregon (posting note: boy was I wrong!).

After Game Day was over I ran over to the lobby to get some of the continental breakfast which was your standard affair for a cheap hotel, prepackaged pastries and orange juice. Sadly, when I came back to my room, I realized the shower wasn’t working. The knob would freely rotate but I couldn’t seem to pull, push, lift, twist or move it in a way they would make water come out. I went to the front desk and they sent the cleaning lady in to slam on the knob for about five minutes before she finally was able to pull it so that water would come out and then she looked at me like I was crazy for not having been able to get to work. In any case that’s my humorous story for the morning. Now I’m off to the stadium which is just a couple miles away on the other side of the campus.

Saturday, 11:00 AM:
I’m sitting in the press box now after having taken pictures of the stadium. It really is the most pro style stadium of all the Pac-10 stadiums. The only stadium I haven’t been to yet is Husky Stadium which I gather though all that I’ve heard, is an older style but nice college style stadium.

There was a funny incident with one of the security guards. They have this one section of the stadium that is exclusively for donors and they wouldn’t let me through even though I had my press pass. The guy who wouldn’t let me through actually went over to another set of guards to ask them if it was OK but it was clear he wasn’t petitioning for me very hard. So after he gave me the bad news I walked back out through a different tunnel to get to that group of guards to make my case directly to them. After explaining myself he radioed into the head guy who said it was OK but to keep an eye on me. So, I went and got the few pictures I wanted. At the same time the ASU band was playing for the players as they arrived at the stadium. So I walked out past the original guard who didn’t let me in. I smiled and said that I made my case to the head guard and thanked him for help. He smiled back and nodded. After I took my pictures of the band, which for what is worth was no more than 30 feet from this original guard and in view of him the entire time, I went to walk past him so that I can get to another part of the stadium which was most conveniently got to by going back through that section. And the guard says to me he can’t let me through.

Huh?

It was mostly just funny because all I had to do is detour a different way to get to the section of the stadium I wanted to get to and it wasn’t worth arguing with him. Nevertheless it’s another example of how sometimes the staff at football games can forget what their real job is and be too concerned with certain rules some of which aren’t even nearly as absolute as they believe that are.

Saturday, 8:00 PM:
I’m done with my reporter work. It surprises most people to hear that it takes a long after the game to write the articles but it’s a pretty long process. I think the game was over a little bit before 4:00 PM so took me almost four hours to get out of the stadium after the game was over.

It takes nearly an hour just to get all of the interview quotes. Most of the time in my podcast and articles I only have a handful of the many players we get to talk to. Obviously not every player says something that is worth writing about. As a short side note, it’s quite surprising how it’s often not the players you would expect to give the quotes that we want. In any case, after that hour in the interview room, it takes just as much time to use transcribe all of those quotes into text form. In fact, usually it takes longer to transcribe than to get the quotes (people talk faster than most people can type). What that means is we’re a full two hours into the post game routine before I’ve written a single word. From there a takes another hour or two to write my articles. I wasn’t in a big rush today and I probably could have finished quicker than I did if I was rushing.

So now it’s back to the room to get some sleep. My hope to get up early tomorrow for the trip home and I obviously didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.

Sunday, 3:00 AM:
Before I started this trip I was toying with the idea going to the Grand Canyon on the way home. When I started looking into how much extra driving it was I became less sure though. It turns out it was a full 4 hours of extra driving. Considering the trip is already 10-11 hours and I was going both ways in one weekend it seemed to me that it was too much driving. However, I always wanted to go and I decided to play it by ear. Then to make life even more interesting a co-worker of mine who shares my love for photography pointed out that if you really want to get good pictures in the Grand Canyon he should really do it closer to sunrise or sunset. All of this is a long way of saying I talked myself into waking up at 2:30 AM to make the trip up to the Grand Canyon. I figured that way I can break the day up a little bit and spend a few hours in the park in the morning and it won’t feel like a 15 hour drive. I’m out the door now, so we’ll see how it goes.

Sunday, 4:30 AM:
I managed to get out of the Phoenix area finally. They were doing a ton of construction in Phoenix both on I-10 and on I-17 and they lower the speed limit down to 55 for these very long stretches of road construction. After my incident with the photo speed trap that I’m pretty sure got me on Friday evening I wasn’t willing to push my luck and get a second ticket. That made the going out of Phoenix frustratingly slow. But now I’m working my way out into the mountains to the north of Phoenix on the way to Flagstaff which is just to the south of the Grand Canyon.

Sunday 6:00 AM:
I’ve made it through Flagstaff. In the ‘learn something new every day’ category, I had no idea the elevation was so high here. Right now I’m at about 6850 feet and got up to just over 7000 feet on Highway 17 about 20 miles outside Flagstaff. Then when I got out of the car to top off the tank (because Flagstaff has lower prices than most of Highway 40 until right before the border) I realized just how cold it was, both because of how the desert gets cold at night and the elevation. I’m in sweat shorts and a T-shirt right now, my Cal T-shirt of course, and I think I’m going to be very cold in the Grand Canyon. It feels like its 35 to 40 degrees outside. My breath was very visible as I was filling the tank.

One of the downsides of traveling in the middle of the night, which for the most part I prefer for traffic reasons, is I can’t see the surrounding scenery. I got the feeling that the drive over the top of Highway 17 is very beautiful mountain desert. Unfortunately all I could see what is some shadowy silhouettes from the full moon moonlight. It’s the very beginning of dusk right now and the grandeur of my surroundings is just starting to appear. I’m 30 to 45 minutes from the entrance of the park so I should get their just about at sunrise which is at 6:51 AM.

Sunday, 7:45 AM:
I arrived in the park around 7:30 AM and my first stop is at what is called Desert View. There’s a really nice watchtower that looks a little bit like a lighthouse except it’s not meant for shining light. The morning views were very beautiful with lots of shadows still cast around to really accentuated the depth of the field. I’m now driving towards the west end of the park along the rim road and I’m sure I’ll be stopping numerous times for various photo opportunities and just to take in what is obviously a beautiful example of God’s creation.

Sunday, 10:15 AM:
I exited the park around 10:00 AM, after getting about 2 1/2 hours in the park. That was about just as reasonably fast as you could go through it and not feel like you are just going through it for the sake of going through it. It was still very rushed but I did get to stop at all the major out-looks that are reachable by car and to take the time at each of those outlooks to really take it in and snapped a number of pictures. So while it was rushed it was still very much a worthy visit. I’ll definitely be coming back again. The answer to the question of how long it would take to go to Grand Canyon if you were passing through Flagstaff already is 4 hours would be pretty tight and 5 would be more realistic. Since I left Flagstaff at 6:00 AM and expect to be on Highway 40 in about an hour, I’ll have spent five hours on the loop. Of course I will be an extra half-hour down the road from Flagstaff when I get back on the freeway but nevertheless five hours is about the right amount of time to do it comfortably but rushed.

The one thing I didn’t get to do that really would’ve like to have do is take Hermit road to the western most end of the park. Unfortunately they closed that road to cars (I’m not sure if it’s ever open) and you have to take a shuttle bus. It would’ve taken me another couple hours or so, well, I’m guessing, I didn’t ask, but I know it was going to be long enough that I didn’t need to ask. Unfortunately I just don’t have that kind of time. The good news is there are hotels and camping grounds both inside and just outside the park, so spending a couple to a few days here would be easy to do and not very inconvenient driving wise. Of course there are lots of hikes and other activities they could be done if you have multiple days to spend your here.

Looking forward at the rest of the trip home, I’ve got about 11 1/2 hours of driving in front of me. I’m hoping to hold out until the gas stations in the border of Arizona before stopping for food even though I’m pretty hungry already. But if I stop there for gas there, I only need to stop one more time in Bakersfield which seems to have some of the better gas prices in the state. Perhaps I’ll try to record the On The Road Home podcast before that first gas stop to keep my mind off of feeling hungry.

Sunday, 1 PM Arizona time, Noon California time:
I’m just a few miles from crossing back into our home state of California. This game was on a very interesting weekend time wise because daylight savings time ended while I was in Arizona. For those who don’t know, Arizona does not observe daylight saving time. As a result, during daylight savings time, even though they’re in the mountain time zone, their time is the same as it is in California. However when daylight savings times ends, they’re an hour in front of California. What this means is I traveled into Arizona and I didn’t need to change my clock; I didn’t have to change my clock while I was in Arizona when daylight saving time expired; but when I returned to California I needed to change my clock falling back a hour.

Not far on the Arizona side of the border is a town called Yucca. My uncle has a pretty large ranch a few miles outside of Yucca so I know little bit more about Yucca than most I guess. I even almost had my car impounded in Yucca because of where I parked it for a couple days while on the ranch. But please don’t think that means I’ll be making a pitch for Yucca any times soon. It’s about as nice as it looks from the freeway if you’ve ever driven through it. But I did want to send a quick shout out to my uncle to let him know that I passed by the ranch but was unwilling to take the gravel road to actually go see it.

Overall, I’m making pretty good times so far. Originally I thought I wouldn’t be home until 10:00 or 11:00 PM, but the current estimates have me arriving at 8:30 PM. Now in part that’s because I forgot about the daylight savings time, but still shows a making better time than expected. At the same time, on my trip here it was the California side of the trip where I wasn’t able to keep up with my GPS’s approximations so I may not be as ahead of the game as I thought.

I did manage to hold out to eat lunch until I gassed up just on the Arizona side of the border, recording the OTRH podcast definitely helped, so I should only have one more stop in Bakersfield to refill the tank and get an afternoon snack before making a final push home. According to my GPS I have another 4 hours and change until I get to Bakersfield and another 4 1/2 hours after that until I get home, so the majority of the trip is still in front of me particularly if we count the start as when I left the Grand Canyon not when I left Tempe at 3 AM this morning.

Sunday, 4:30 PM California time:
Well I’m out of Bakersfield now on the final stretch. I haven’t had the best of luck with the companies I’ve dealt with this trip. I already told you about the shower at Days Inn, but the gas station I stopped at was an absolute disaster. They used to be a Chevron and had just dumped them, so the credit card at the pump wasn’t working because that would be associated to their Chevron account. As a result everyone had to go inside to give their credit card and the system the assistant had for doing was extremely inefficient. It took about 20 minutes to do a 5 minute gas up, mostly waiting in line with everyone else while they figured out how to charge people for their gas. In any case, I’m back on the road without too much trouble and now have an ETA of arriving home a little after 8:30 PM although I suspect it’ll be closer to 9:00 PM based on my inability to meet the GPS targets on the way down.

Since I’ve got plenty of time to blow, one other thought. I’m really a fan of the high desert. It is very beautiful country in northern Arizona. Not just the Grand Canyon but all the surrounding mountains and hillsides with the Joshua tree and cactus’s and it makes for a very interesting drive. It was a real treat to find out that I was at such high altitude because I haven’t spent that much time in the high desert. Two other places in this corner of the country that I’d like to visit some time is the Salton Sea, which is actually just off of I-10 and is a good one hit on an Arizona trip in the future and Death Valley which I’ve never been to before. Death Valley is a bit further out of the way but maybe something to combo with a Vegas Bowl.

Sunday, 9:00 PM:
I arrived home a few minutes ago. I hit a 10 minute delay on the freeway with an accident about an hour north of Bakersfield. It had just happened so the backup wasn’t too bad. Luckily everyone looked OK at the accident scene. Other than that, the last leg of the trip went smoothly.

In total I drove 1844 miles in 27 hours of driving (that’s averaging 68 mph, even including the driving in town and in the national park) and used 61 gallons of gas (average of 30.23 mpg) costing $166.80 (average $2.73/gallon). Phew! That’s a lot of everything but I feel like my cost and MPG averages were very good, as good as I hoped.

This is my last road trip of the year as I’m flying to UW. I didn’t want to risk dealing with snow in December on the drive. But tune in next year. I’m sure I’ll make some crazy road trip.