We Beat the Devil out of California....

Rest assured, he's still there, but we managed to escape over the border even despite his best efforts. Reminds me of the Irish saying, "may you be in heaven a half hour before the Devil knows you're dead."

We got a late start this morning, compounded by a shopping mis-queue at Walmart. Yesterday they had the tent we wanted, this morning when we went to buy it at 6am it was completely sold out. Really, in southern California, the whole county decided overnight to go camping? We ended up buying a much larger tent that we had planned--still an "instant" but we'll see how cumbersome it turns out to be. We may or may not be returning it, the whole point after all, is not gigantic, but quick up and quick down.

We were about two hours out of Huntington Beach when my son (who was in the second car behind me) called to ask if I would step on the brakes. It turned out my brake lights had failed. Of course they did. So I pulled over, found a place at 8am who could look at it. Fortunately I asked "could it be a fuse?" and it turned out it was. A pretty fast fix and we were back on the road.

Shortly thereafter, the check engine light came back on. My mechanic has assured me (this is a repeating problem) that it's "just the EGR sensor and don't worry about it." And I did happen to see this last time around that the EGR sensor cord is very frayed, so I am hoping that this is all that it is. The car seems to be running fine otherwise, so we are continuing in faith to Texas.

While in Ludlow (about 90 minutes inside the California border) we realized we were well off track of our plan to be in Flagstaff tonight. I figured I better make a motel reservation sooner rather than later, so we stopped in Needles about 60 miles inside the California border. Why was I surprised to find EVERY hotel in Flagstaff sold out? Our choices were stay in Kingman (2 hours shy of Flagstaff) or Winslow (90 minutes past Flagstaff.) I knew our energy level wouldn't get us to Winslow, so here we are in air conditioned comfort in Kingman. 

This means it's unlikely we'll make it to Amarillo tomorrow as hoped, and likely stop for the day in Albuquerque New Mexico, nearly a 7 hour drive from Kingman. And that's if we get out of here by 5am as planned. We're not in a hurry to get to Texas (obviously), and I don't like crossing deserts in the heat of the day if I can avoid it. and we're passing through a lot of them: Mojave, Sonoran, Chihuahuan: three of the four American deserts in the United States. So we're taking it easy (oh, to be listening to the Eagles as we pass through Winslow Arizona, lol.)

Grateful to God we are not forced to travel on a shoestring, particularly with gas prices a whopping $5 a gallon out here. Grateful things are going smoothly. We didn't quite make it out of California before the Devil realized we were trying to escape, but we are well on our way to Heaven <grin.>