Vacation 2010 - Day 17

Today was the last day of our vacation. It was pretty much a travel day. Kenny and I had to drive back from St. George (UT) to Agua Dulce (CA). All in all that would have been an trip of about 390 miles or so. That wouldn't have been so bad if there wouldn't have been some things to take into consideration.

First of all I absolutely refuse to drive through Arizona. As far as I'm concerned they can keep their fascist law and their state. I have no interest in Arizona and I've made a decision not to buy products from Arizona and not to do business with companies located in Arizona, and I certainly don't drive through that rotten state!

So I had to find a way around Arizona into Nevada. After some searching of Google Maps I found the route. Okay it was going to add about 140 miles to our travel, but I was willing to accept that. So we took State Route 18 north to Highway 219. The plan was to follow highway 219 west to highway 319. That is possible, but Google Maps didn't tell me anything that about half of highway 219 is unpaved and not much more than a dirt road. At first it was no problem at all, but suddenly we came to a fork in the road and it wasn't quite clear what the right choice would be. My gut was telling me to take the road that was leading to the right. But to make sure we consulted the GPS and zoomed out and saw highway 319 and assumed that the road that was leading to the right would be the right one. So we took this one and a couple of miles later it we got reassured that it had been the right choice, by a sign telling us that highway 319 should be coming up in about 15 miles. Just for that one situation it would have been good to have an actual street map of Utah in the car, instead of solely relying in the GPS. Besides all that it was quite an really interesting part of the trip. Gave as a good idea how highways used to be 60 or 70 years ago. We also saw live stock and horses crossing the road. Was very interesting indeed... and it was the first time that we crossed a state line on a dirt road.

So we finally made it to highway 319 and followed it west to the junction with US Route 93. We followed the 93 south until we reached the I-15. In North Las Vegas we got off the I-15 to get gas and have lunch.

After lunch I took over as driver. Up to that point we haven't had any holiday traffic, so I expected everything to go smoothly. Everything went fine until we got out of Las Vegas, after that we hit the holiday traffic. The speed came down to a crawling 15 mph. It really took as 1 hour to drive 15 miles. I estimated that with that speed it would take us about 25 hours to get back home... and I was not amused about that. After Primm (NV) the speed picked up. Between Primm and the Agricultural Check Point we hit here and there pockets of very heavy traffic. Fortunately the speed kept picking up. The only good thing was that my truck was working perfectly fine and we had at least AC all the way, what made a bad situation way more tolerable. By 7.30 pm we finally had it made to Victorville(CA) and took the Pearblossom Highway and Highway 138 to the Highway 14 and at about 8.30 pm we finally had it made back home. The last leg of our vacation was about 500 miles long and it took us about 10 hours to get from St. George (UT) back home.

This leg of the trip has certainly taught me two lessons: Not everything what appears to be a highway on Google Maps is actually a paved highway. Just because something is actually a dirt road it still can be considered a highway.